On October 31st, 2008, a user of a cryptography mailing list published this message online. The list was on a service hosted by metzdown.com and run by cypherpunks, an organized group of digital privacy activists. It was 2:10 pm on the east coast of the United States when members of the mailing received the message that contained the Bitcoin paper. Satoshi Nakamoto was the name of author and the paper detailed a new peer-to-peer electronic cash system, with no trusted third party. Three days later he was mailed to the list again. And again two days later.
On January 3rd, 2009, he released the first version of the Bitcoin software on its domain. To register Bitcoin.org he used Tor, an online track-covering tool. Nakamoto himself mined the first 50 bitcoins on the same day. Between 2009 and 2010, he wrote hundreds of posts on the forum, mainly talking with other users about how to improve the code of the software. He never shared any personal details. And then, in April 2011, he sent the last note, saying he had to move on to other things. He never communicated with the members of the mailing list again. To this day, he has yet to be identified and his true name remains unknown.
What Nakamoto created was not a new idea. The same Cypherpunks that were part of the mailing list had been working on creating virtual cash since the 90s. Every effort had so far failed. But this time was going to be different. The main challenge of a digital currency was the so-called double-spending problem. Translated into layman's terms, it means: if the currency is just online information, not physical like paper and metal coins, nothing prevents people from copying and pasting a code and spending as much as they want. The system Nakamoto created had a solution for that. And that was one of the reasons why it was such a game-changer. Nakamoto's disappearance was followed by a lot of conspiracy theories.
Before the launch of bitcoin, there was no record of any coder with that name. By the time he went AWOL, he had an online profile that said he lived in Japan. But his email address was from a free German service. Meanwhile, Google searches for his name turned up no relevant information. For fans, he was quickly elevated to genius status, changing the world forever. There were t-shirts with his name, mangás, and a base of loyalists. For the critics, his mysterious disappearance cast a veil of suspicion over what he created [10]. Some even questioned if it was all a big pyramid scheme that rewards early adopters. Is Sakamoto now sitting at the top of all his early mined tokens and laughing at us all? Since his disappearance, his real identity has been an object of speculation and investigation.
Article after article, book after book, all suspects fell one by one. Some began to suspect that he was working for the CIA. Others believe that he disappeared due to safety concerns. An Argentinian researcher calculated that Nakamoto probably collected one million bitcoin during the first year. This could explain his disappearance as it would make him a billionaire and a target. There are even websites calculating when Satoshi will become the richest person in the world. If he exists and is just one person, of course. Conspiracies aside, some facts surround the mystic figure. The Bitcoin system is so complex that some believe it could not have been developed by only one person, making it probable that it was a group of people. A coder has compiled all Nakamoto's messages on the mailing group and found that he always wrote between 5 am and 11 am GMT. This is the equivalent of midnight to 6 am on the US east coast.
Assuming that he sleeps on a normal pattern, it would make sense that he is or was in the United States. Other clues suggest that he was British. His forum posts and his comments always used spelling like optimize with S and color with OU. The media has extensively investigated who is behind the name. So far, unsuccessfully. Nathaniel Popper, New York Times journalist, investigated who was behind the name. Although not able to find the real Nakamoto, he collected evidence that points to an American of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo. The man denied the information, but the investigation showed that he was involved in a previous cryptocurrency project called bit gold. He was also active among the cypherpunks.
In 2014, researchers of Aston University in England found uncanny similarities between his writings and the text of Nakamoto. Another suspect was Hal Finney, who died in 2014 and was the recipient of the first-ever conducted transaction. Nakamoto was the sender. Finney was an expert in cryptography, an experienced programmer, and also part of the cypherpunks. After his death, his body was not buried or cremated. He was cryogenically frozen at a facility in Arizona in the hopes of someday being resuscitated. He also denied being Nakamoto in the past. One person came forward, publicly claiming to be Nakamoto.
Craig Wright, an Australian Computer scientist, invited the press to witness him using cryptographic keys that belonged to Nakamoto. He did not convince anyone that he was whom he was claiming to be and later denied the whole story after an online article suggested he might face arrest for enabling terrorism if true. There are different theories about why Sakamoto disappeared. Safety concerns and risk of arrest aside, some believe that it was a matter of principle, to make the point of a decentralized currency clear.
For Bitcoin enthusiasts, publicly known or not, he is still the hero of our time. The man who created the revolutionary tool that will reshape countries, governments, and our lives. And although Nakamoto’s ideas were groundbreaking, the system developed by him doesn’t exist anymore. The current version of bitcoin has been improved and changed many times by a group of publicly known tech developers with nothing to hide. The truth is, right now, finding his identity seems irrelevant and will have no impact on the cryptocurrency’s future.
