SATOSHI NAKAMOTO

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown person or people who designed bitcoin and created its original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, they also devised the first blockchain database.In the process they were the first to solve the double-spending problem for digital currency. They were active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010.

HISTORY

On a P2P Foundation profile, Nakamoto claimed to be a man living in Japan, born on 5 April 1975. Speculation about the true identity of Nakamoto has mostly focused on a number of cryptography and computer science experts of non-Japanese descent, living in the United States and Europe.

DEVELOPMENT OF BITCOIN

In October 2008, Nakamoto published a paper on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com describing the bitcoin digital currency. It was titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". In January 2009, Nakamoto released the first bitcoin software that launched the network and the first units of the bitcoin cryptocurrency, called bitcoins. Satoshi Nakamoto released the Version 0.1 of bitcoin software on Sourceforge on 9 January 2009.

Nakamoto claimed that work on the writing of the code began in 2007. The inventor of Bitcoin knew that due to its nature, the core design would have to be able to support a broad range of transaction types. The implemented solution enabled specialized codes and data fields from the start through the use of a predicative script.

Nakamoto created a website with the domain name bitcoin.org and continued to collaborate with other developers on the bitcoin software until mid-2010. Around this time, he handed over 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 involvement in the project. Until shortly before his absence and handover, Nakamoto made all modifications to the source code himself.

The inventor left a text message in the first mined block which reads 'The Times 3 January 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks'. The text refers to a headline in The Times published on 3 January 2009. It is a strong indication that the first block was mined no earlier than this date.The genesis block has a timestamp of 18:15:05 GMT on 3 January 2009. This block is unlike all other blocks in that it doesn't have a previous block to reference. This required the use of custom code to mine it. Timestamps for subsequent blocks indicate that Nakamoto did not try to mine all the early blocks solely for himself.

As the sole, predominant early miner, the inventor was awarded bitcoin at genesis and for 10 days afterwards. Except for test transactions these remain unspent since mid January 2009. The public bitcoin transaction log shows that Nakamoto's known addresses contain roughly one million bitcoins. As of 17 December 2017, this is worth over 19 billion USD. This makes him the 44th richest person on earth.

CHARACTERISTICS AND IDENTITY

Nakamoto has not disclosed any personal information when discussing technical matters.He provided some 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,but some speculated he was unlikely to be Japanese due to his use of perfect English and his bitcoin software not being documented or labelled in Japanese.

Occasional British English spelling and terminology (such as the phrase "bloody hard”, in Australia “bloody hard” is a common phrase in use, Australia also uses British English) in both source code comments and forum postings led to speculation that Nakamoto, or at least one individual in the consortium claiming to be him, was of Commonwealth origin.

Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and active community member, graphed the time stamps for each of Nakamoto's bitcoin forum posts (more than 500); the resulting chart showed a steep decline to almost no posts between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Because this pattern held true even on Saturdays and Sundays, it suggested that Nakamoto was asleep at this time.If Nakamoto is a single individual with conventional sleeping habits, it suggests he resided in a region using the UTC−05:00 or UTC−06:00 time offset. This includes the parts of North America that fall within the Eastern Time Zone and Central Time Zone, as well as parts of Central America, the Caribbean and South America.

Nakamoto's initial email to Dai is dated 22 August 2008; the metadata for this PDF (pdftk bitcoin.pdf dump_data) yields as the CreationDate the value 20081003134958-07'00' – this implies 3 October 2008 or a bit over a month later, which is consistent with the local date mentioned in the Cypherpunk mailing list email. This is an earlier draft than the final draft on bitcoin.org, which is dated 20090324113315-06'00' or 24 March 2009; the timezone differs: −7 vs −6.

Gavin Andresen has said of Nakamoto's code: "He was a brilliant coder, but it was quirky".