Who Was Satoshi Nakamoto?

Satoshi Nakamoto 

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database. Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010. Many people have or have been claimed to be Nakamoto.

Development of bitcoin

Nakamoto stated that work on the writing of the code for bitcoin began in 2007. On 18 August 2008, he or a colleague registered the domain name bitcoin.org, and created a web site at that address. On 31 October, Nakamoto published a white paper on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com describing a digital cryptocurrency, titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

On 9 January 2009, Nakamoto released version 0.1 of the bitcoin software on SourceForge, and launched the network by defining the genesis block of bitcoin (block number 0), which had a reward of 50 bitcoins. Embedded in the coinbase transaction of this block is the text: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", citing a headline in the UK newspaper The Times published on that date. This note has been interpreted as both a timestamp and a derisive comment on the alleged instability caused by fractional-reserve banking.

Nakamoto continued to collaborate with other developers on the bitcoin software until mid-2010, making all modifications to the source code himself. He then gave control of the source code repository and network alert key to Gavin Andresen, transferred several related domains to various prominent members of the bitcoin community, and stopped his recognized involvement in the project.

On April 23, 2011, Nakamoto sent Bitcoin Core developer Mike Hearn a brief email.

"I've moved on to other things," he said, referring to the Bitcoin project. The future of Bitcoin, he wrote, was "in good hands.”

In his wake, Nakamoto left behind a vast collection of writings, a premise on the workings of Bitcoin, and the most influential cryptocurrency ever created.

Bitcoin runs through an autonomous software program that is 'mined' by people seeking bitcoin in a lottery-based system. Over the course of the next 20 years, a total of 21 million coins will be released.

To date, about 90% of Bitcoin or about 18.7 million have been mined.

Nakamoto owns between 750,000 and 1,100,000 bitcoin. As of November 2021, that puts his net worth at up to 73 billion US dollars, which would make him the 15th-richest person in the world.

Characteristics and identity

Nakamoto has never revealed personal information when discussing technical matters, though has at times provided commentary on banking and fractional-reserve banking. On his P2P Foundation profile as of 2012, Nakamoto claimed to be a 37-year-old male who lived in Japan; however, some speculated he was unlikely to be Japanese due to his native-level use of English.

Some have considered that Nakamoto might be a team of people: Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher who read the bitcoin code, said that Nakamoto could either be a "team of people" or a "genius"; Laszlo Hanyecz, a developer who had emailed Nakamoto, had the feeling the code was too well designed for one person; Gavin Andresen has said of Nakamoto's code: "He was a brilliant coder, but it was quirky."

The use of British English in both source code comments and forum postings, such as the expression "bloody hard", terms such as "flat" and "maths", and the spellings "grey" and "colour", led to speculation that Nakamoto, or at least one individual in a consortium claiming to be him, was of Commonwealth origin. The reference to London's Times newspaper in the first bitcoin block mined by Nakamoto suggested to some a particular interest in the British government.

Stefan Thomas, a Swiss software engineer and active community member, graphed the timestamps for each of Nakamoto's bitcoin forum posts (more than 500); the chart showed a steep decline to almost no posts between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. This was between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Japan Standard Time, suggesting an unusual sleep pattern for someone supposedly living in Japan. As this pattern held true even on Saturdays and Sundays, it suggested that Nakamoto consistently was asleep at this time.

In public messages, and even in private messages that were later released, Nakamoto never spoke about anything personal. Nothing biographical, or about the weather, or things happening locally. Everything was about bitcoin and its code.

Nakamoto used two email addresses and one website. The identity of the person who registered them is blocked.

There is no other public information. In an age in which it is hard to be anonymous, Nakamoto remains a ghost.

Possible identities

The identity of Nakamoto is unknown, but speculations have focussed on various cryptography and computer science experts, mostly of non-Japanese descent.

Hal Finney

Hal Finney (4 May 1956 – 28 August 2014) was a pre-bitcoin cryptographic pioneer and the first person (other than Nakamoto himself) to use the software, file bug reports, and make improvements. He also lived a few blocks from a man named 'Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto', according to Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg. Greenberg asked the writing analysis consultancy Juola & Associates to compare a sample of Finney's writing to Nakamoto's, and found it to be the closest resemblance they had yet come across, including when compared to candidates suggested by Newsweek, Fast Company, The New Yorker, Ted Nelson, and Skye Grey. Greenberg theorized that Finney may have been a ghostwriter on behalf of Nakamoto, or that he simply used his neighbor Dorian's identity as a "drop" or "patsy whose personal information is used to hide online exploits"; however, after meeting Finney, seeing the emails between him and Nakamoto and his bitcoin wallet's history (including the very first bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto to him, which he forgot to pay back) and hearing his denial, Greenberg concluded that Finney was telling the truth. Juola & Associates also found that Nakamoto's emails to Finney more closely resemble Nakamoto's other writings than Finney's do. Finney's fellow extropian and sometimes co-blogger Robin Hanson assigned a subjective probability of "at least" 15% that "Hal was more involved than he's said", before further evidence suggested that was not the case.

Dorian Nakamoto

In a high-profile 6 March 2014 article in the magazine Newsweek, journalist Leah McGrath Goodman identified Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese American man living in California, whose birth name is Satoshi Nakamoto, as the Nakamoto in question. Besides his name, Goodman pointed to a number of facts that circumstantially suggested he was the bitcoin inventor.Trained as a physicist at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, Nakamoto worked as a systems engineer on classified defense projects and computer engineer for technology and financial information services companies. Nakamoto was laid off twice in the early 1990s and turned libertarian according to his daughter, and encouraged her to start her own business "not under the government's thumb." In the article's seemingly biggest piece of evidence, Goodman wrote that when she asked him about bitcoin during a brief in-person interview, Nakamoto seemed to confirm his identity as the bitcoin founder by stating: "I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it. It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."

The article's publication led to a flurry of media interest, including reporters camping out near Dorian Nakamoto's house and subtly chasing him by car when he drove to do an interview. Later that day, the pseudonymous Nakamoto's P2P Foundation account posted its first message in five years, stating: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

During the subsequent full-length interview, Dorian Nakamoto denied all connection to bitcoin, saying he had never heard of the currency before, and that he had misinterpreted

Goodman's question as being about his previous work for military contractors, much of which was classified. In a Reddit "ask-me-anything" interview, he claimed he had misinterpreted Goodman's question as being related to his work for Citibank. In September, the P2P Foundation account posted another message saying it had been hacked, raising questions over the authenticity of the message six months earlier.

Nick Szabo

In December 2013, blogger Skye Grey linked Nick Szabo to the bitcoin white paper using an approach he described as stylometric analysis. Szabo is a decentralized currency enthusiast, and had published a paper on "bit gold", one of the precursors of bitcoin. He is known to have been interested in using pseudonyms in the 1990s. In a May 2011 article, Szabo stated about the bitcoin creator: "Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea (or in Dai's case his related idea) enough to pursue it to any significant extent until Nakamoto (assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai)."

Financial author Dominic Frisby provides much circumstantial evidence but, as he admits, no proof that Nakamoto is Szabo. Szabo has denied being Nakamoto. In a July 2014 email to Frisby, he said: "Thanks for letting me know. I'm afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi, but I'm used to it." Nathaniel Popper wrote in The New York Times that "the most convincing evidence pointed to a reclusive American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo."

Craig Wright

On 8 December 2015, Wired wrote that Craig Steven Wright, an Australian academic, "either invented bitcoin or is a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did”. Craig Wright took down his Twitter account and neither he nor his ex-wife responded to press inquiries. The same day, Gizmodo published a story with evidence supposedly obtained by a hacker who broke into Wright's email accounts, claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto was a joint pseudonym for Craig Steven Wright and computer forensics analyst David Kleiman, who died in 2013. Wright's claim was supported by Jon Matonis (former director of the Bitcoin Foundation) and bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen.

A number of prominent bitcoin promoters remained unconvinced by the reports.Subsequent reports also raised the possibility that the evidence provided was an elaborate hoax, which Wired acknowledged "cast doubt" on their suggestion that Wright was Nakamoto. Bitcoin developer Peter Todd said that Wright's blog post, which appeared to contain cryptographic proof, actually contained nothing of the sort. Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik agreed that evidence publicly provided by Wright does not prove anything, and security researcher Dan Kaminsky concluded Wright's claim was "intentional scammery".

In May 2019, Wright started using English libel law to sue people who denied he was the inventor of bitcoin, and who called him a fraud. In 2019 Wright registered US copyright for the bitcoin white paper and the code for Bitcoin 0.1. Wright's team claimed this was "government agency recognition of Craig Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto"; the United States Copyright Office issued a press release clarifying that this was not the case (as they primarily determine whether a work is eligible for copyright, and do not investigate legal ownership, which, if disputed, is determined by the courts).

He pledged to prove he was Nakamoto by moving some of those early bitcoins. To this date, he hasn’t done so.

In recent years, Mr. Wright has tried to litigate his claim. He has filed for patents on bitcoin’s software, even though it was released as an open-source project, and sued a podcast host who publicly ridiculed his claim for defamation.

Mr. Wright himself was sued by the family of a deceased colleague named Dave Kleiman. The suit claimed that Messrs. Wright and Kleiman developed bitcoin together as part of a business partnership and that Mr. Wright owed Mr. Kleiman’s family half of those one million bitcoins.

The jury however found no evidence that the two created bitcoin together. If they had, Mr. Wright could have been legally compelled to sell some of those bitcoins to help pay any monetary awards. So while there won’t be any legal pressure, unless Mr. Wright proves ownership of the Nakamoto bitcoins, most people in the bitcoin world will continue to dismiss his claims.

And until somebody moves those bitcoins, it isn’t likely that anybody will be accepted as bitcoin’s true creator.

Other candidates

In a 2011 article in The New Yorker, Joshua Davis claimed to have narrowed down the identity of Nakamoto to a number of possible individuals, including the Finnish economic sociologist Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta and Irish student Michael Clear, who was in 2008 an undergraduate student in cryptography at Trinity College Dublin. Clear strongly denied he was Nakamoto, as did Lehdonvirta.

In October 2011, writing for Fast Company, investigative journalist Adam Penenberg cited circumstantial evidence suggesting Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry could be Nakamoto. They jointly filed a patent application that contained the phrase "computationally impractical to reverse" in 2008, which was also used in the bitcoin white paper by Nakamoto.The domain name bitcoin.org was registered three days after the patent was filed. All three men denied being Nakamoto when contacted by Penenberg.

In May 2013, Ted Nelson speculated that Nakamoto was Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki. Later, an article was published in The Age newspaper that claimed that Mochizuki denied these speculations, but without attributing a source for the denial.

A 2013 article in Vice listed Gavin Andresen, Jed McCaleb, or a government agency as possible candidates to be Nakamoto.

In 2013, two Israeli mathematicians, Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir, published a paper claiming a link between Nakamoto and Ross Ulbricht. The two based their suspicion on an analysis of the network of bitcoin transactions, but later retracted their claim.

In 2016, the Financial Times said that Nakamoto might have been a group of people, mentioning Hal Finney, Nick Szabo and Adam Back as potential members. In 2020, the YouTube channel Barely Sociable claimed that Adam Back, inventor of bitcoin predecessor Hashcash, is Nakamoto. Back subsequently denied this.

Elon Musk denied he was Nakamoto in a tweet on 28 November 2017, responding to speculation the previous week in a medium.com post by a former SpaceX intern.

In 2019, journalist Evan Ratliff claimed drug dealer Paul Le Roux could be Nakamoto.

In 2021 developer Evan Hatch proposed cypherpunk Len Sassaman of COSIC as a possible candidate.

So why did Satoshi Nakatomo decide to remain anonymous well

As it turns out, experimenting in new forms of currency is not without its consequences.

In 1998, Hawaiian resident Bernard von NotHaus dabbled in a fledgling form of currency called "Liberty Dollars" to disastrous results: He was charged with violating federal law and sentenced to six months of house arrest, along with a three-year probation.

In 2007, one of the first digital currencies, E-Gold, was shut down amid contentious circumstances by the government on grounds of money laundering.

In January, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen suggested steps that could be taken to "curtail" Bitcoin.

If the inventor of Bitcoin wants to remain anonymous, it's for good reason: by maintaining anonymity, they've avoided adverse legal consequences, making their anonymity at least partially responsible for the currency's success.

Besides, one of the founding principles of Bitcoin is that it's a decentralized currency, untethered to conspicuous institutions or individuals. In his original proposition on Bitcoin, Nakamoto wrote, "What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.”

According to a public filing from top US digital currency trading platform, Coinbase, if Nakamoto chose to come forward it could cause bitcoin's value to plummet.

Much of the mystery surrounding Nakamoto involves his motivations. Why would someone go to the trouble of creating a detailed and brilliant decentralized currency, only to later completely disappear from the public view?

A closer look at one of Nakamoto's original postings on the proposal of Bitcoin sheds some light on his possible motivations.

In February 2009, Nakamoto wrote, "The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.”

In Bitcoin forums, it's been speculated that Nakamoto might be "a libertarian and hates the corrupt rich people and politicians." Other Bitcoin enthusiasts suggest the timing of Bitcoin's emergence is a clear indication of its raison d'être: The currency, which was created in the years following the housing bubble burst in 2007, might have been invented as a means of disrupting the corrupted banking system.

Here’s the known facts about Satoshi Nakatomo:

They're a genius

In a New Yorker article from 2011, a top internet security researcher describes Bitcoin code as an inscrutable execution that nears perfection: "Only the most paranoid, painstaking coder in the world could avoid making mistakes.”

They speak fluent English

Nakamoto has written extensively about Bitcoin, authoring close to 80,000 words on the subject in the course of two years. His work reads like that of a native English speaker.

They might be British

Judging by their spelling, and their use of British colloquialisms (they refer to their apartment as a "flat" and call the subject math "maths"), it's thought they might hail from the UK.

The timing of his posts seem to indicate this fact as well: It's been pointed out that Nakamoto posted during UK daylight hours.

They might be more than one person

The foolproof brilliance of Bitcoin's code have left many wondering if it isn't the work of a team of developers. Bitcoin security researcher Dan Kaminsky says Nakamoto "could be either a team of people or a genius.”

To this day the true identity of Satoshi Nakatomo remains unknown.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/11/satoshi-nakamoto-craig-wright-and-a-bitcoin-mystery-in-america

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-history-cryptocurrency-satoshi-nakamoto-2017-12#why-would-the-inventor-of-the-worlds-most-important-cryptocurrency-choose-to-remain-anonymous-12

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-is-bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-what-we-knowand-dont-know-11638020231