Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ is a pseudonym, a name intentionally designed to conceal an author’s identity. But in 2008 someone — or some group of people — used that name to publish a whitepaper titled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System‘.

On January 3rd, 2009, Satoshi mined the genesis block, a few days before releasing Bitcoin v0.1.0 to the world. Her reward was 50BTC, which was deposited to the first public address 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa. People continue to donate to this address. In fact, just two days ago (at the time of writing) someone sent ~0.5 BTC, about $4000US at the time.

Satoshi Nakamoto is widely credited as being the ‘inventor of Bitcoin’, and rightly so. Bitcoin was birthed from the software development based on the Bitcoin whitepaper. But who is Satoshi, really? We have never been able to trace the pseudonym to a real, flesh and blood person, or syndicate. It has been estimated that alongside the 60 odd bitcoins in the above address owned by Satoshi, there could be upwards of one million more in her possession. If this is true, then that alone is an enormous motivator for remaining anonymous.

Satoshi Nakamoto operated an account on the social network she founded named ‘Bitcointalk’. Her last contribution was posted at 6:22PM on December 12th, 2010. The title read: ‘Added some DoS limits, removed safe mode (0.3.19)’. It contained a mixed bag of technical adjustments and a link to the latest build of the Bitcoin protocol. Satoshi logged off for the final time at 4:45PM the following day.

She never returned.

Laced within Satoshi’s writings, both on the Bitcointalk forums and within email correspondence between herself and collaborators on the Bitcoin protocol are a series of identity claims — though they are dubious. For instance, her date of birth was listed as April 5th, 1975. Though, upon further exploration, this date is significant for a couple of reasons; reasons pertaining to gold. On April 5th, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt passed executive orders effectively stopping US citizens from being able to own gold. A decision that was reversed in 1975.

Satoshi also claimed to be Japanese, something betrayed by the choice of name. Though her command of the English language, and frequent use of colloquialisms like “bloody hard” throw this claim into considerable doubt.

Satoshi Nakamoto did, however, ever so fleetingly pop back into online existence on March 7, 2014, on a P2PFoundation forum thread started by Nakamoto herself five years previous. It read:

“I am not Dorian Nakamoto”

Wait… Who is Dorian Nakamoto?

Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto is a Japanese American who was falsely identified as being the true Satoshi Nakamoto by Newsweek in March 2014. Besides a flurry of hype and excitement, there was not much to this claim which was largely based on the striking similarity of his name ‘Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto’ and a somewhat cryptic initial exchange with reporters.

“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.”

That exchange turned out to be a misunderstanding as Dorian believed he was being questioned over previous classified work he had done for the military as a contractor.

Dorian Nakamoto is not the only person to have been thought to be the real Satoshi, some more convincing than others. Cryptographic pioneers like Hal Finney and Nick Szabo are perhaps the most intriguing, most notably for their proximity to the cypherpunk movement and wealth of knowledge and involvement in the area.

However, both have routinely denied being Satoshi.

While the vast majority of people go out of their way to deny being Satoshi, one man, in particular, has gone out of his way to do just the opposite.

Meet Craig Wright. An Australian computer scientist and businessman

“[This guy] either invented bitcoin or is a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.”

— Wired Magazine, 2015

To be honest, I don’t want to give Wright the time of day. There is much that could be said of his repeated claims, then withdrawals, then further claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto. However, suffice to say that Wright’s story is that he invented Bitcoin along with his now-deceased colleague, David Kleiman. The pair of them (though he seems to want to empahsise that he alone was the man behind the pseudonym) were Satoshi Nakamoto.

Multiple times Wright has promised to provide proof, before either refusing to do so or providing something substantially less than proof. One of his latest performances took place in May 2016 where he again promised undeniable proof that he was Satoshi Nakamoto. He would perform a transaction with the private keys that only the original Satoshi should own. This indeed would be as good an indication as any. That promise soon ended as he offered the below statement.

“I believed that I could do this. I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me. But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot…I can only say I’m sorry. And goodbye.”

Right.

Well, who else could the real Satoshi Nakamoto be? Speculations are as questionable as they are common, with one of the most recent — somewhat plausible — suggestions being Elon Musk.

However, he has pretty blunty denied it on his official Twitter page, even adding that he has lost some BTC that a friend had sent him!

Some others have speculated that Satoshi Nakamoto was a pseudonym used by ‘big government’. Perhaps the NSA in the States, or MI6 in the UK. But the major thorn in the side of these theories is that there is just no evidence to support them. There is a long and storied paper trail left by the cypherpunks while developing and musing over decentralised currencies. Not only this, but Bitcoin is a decentralised, limited supply currency. So governments cannot control the supply. It is also a global currency, not benefitting one particular nation-state at all. Its ethos is fundamentally anti-establishment, anti-nation-state.

All this is to say that the inventor of Bitcoin, the grandfather of what some are calling the ‘Truth Machine’ — the technology now called the ‘blockchain’ remains a mystery. Whether it is a single person or a group of cypherpunks, it is undeniable that not knowing the true identity of the figure who might well bring about the era of truth — in finance, politics and more — is equal parts ironic and poetic. There is something a little mystical, magical, about participating in a mythology that includes an unidentified, reified founder.

The ethos of decentralisation, though, lends itself to the idea that the story isn’t so much about these giant figures as it is about the people that continue to build them. Day by day, transaction by transaction.

Satoshi Nakamoto may not have a face, but she doesn’t need one.

Author: CRYPTO 101 Blog Writer Glen Veitch