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Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the real creator of Bitcoin?
Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym name for the creator of Bitcoin; on January 3rd, 2009, he mined the very first bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym name for the creator of Bitcoin; on January 3rd, 2009, he mined the very first bitcoin. Which was fitting, given that Satoshi is to Bitcoin as Alexander Graham Bell was to the telephone.
According to Coinbase, Satoshi Nakamoto revealed the creation to a tiny online community of cryptography-obsessed computer scientists and hackers two months earlier. In that scene, Satoshi was already a familiar name — if not a real one.
Years before the world heard a peep about Bitcoin, someone using the Satoshi pseudonym had been posting to message boards and emailing fellow developers, never identifying a location, a nationality, or even a real name.
Meanwhile, Satoshi released Bitcoin and saw it begin to catch on, and then — in April 2011 — sent an email to a developer friend saying, “I’ve moved on to other things.”
After that? Satoshi disappeared into thin air.
What Satoshi said about Bitcoin
No doubt, the question of the real identity of Bitcoin’s creator is one of the greatest modern mysteries.
Who was Satoshi Nakamoto? Why that name? And where did Satoshi go?
Beyond having invented an entirely new kind of money that has gone on to achieve a market cap of more than $1 trillion, Satoshi is widely believed to hold more than a million bitcoin, which would be worth tens of billions of dollars in March 2021.
Furthermore, in some of the early-Bitcoin history portions of this story, Satoshi was referred to as “he” or “him” because the people Satoshi was communicating with at the time presumed Bitcoin’s creator to be a young man.
But of course, Satoshi’s gender is one of the unknowns. Another is whether Bitcoin’s inventor worked alone; some experts suspect that Satoshi is actually a group of developers.)
If Satoshi left clues, they can be found in the code and messages the crypto inventor wrote between 2008 to 2011.
Throughout the history of Bitcoin, efforts to unveil Nakamoto have continued unabated. Gossips in cryptocurrency forums have engaged in wild speculation: Nakamoto is a member of the Yakuza, part of a cabal of developers, a money-launderer or maybe even a woman.
Individuals Claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto
More so, several debates ensued when Australian Craig Wright claimed to be Nakamoto in 2016, and Bitcoin developer Andresen corroborated the statement, saying he was “98 per cent sure” that Wright was the elusive Satoshi.
The cryptocurrency community wasn’t having it, and Wright backed away from the claim.
Further suspicion also fell upon Nick Szabo, a secretive crypto expert who contributed significantly to the development of Bitcoin. Linguistic researchers analyzed Szabo’s writing as well as writing from other suspected Satoshis.
The linguists claimed that there were definitive similarities between Szabo’s writings and Satoshi Nakamoto’s. The New York Times even went so far as to pin Szabo as the shadowy Nakamoto, but Szabo strenuously denied the claims.
However, the upshot is that Satoshi Nakamoto remains anonymous, a mythical creature with a Bitcoin stash of epic proportions. He has strong incentives to remain anonymous. Owning a $60 billion fortune makes personal security a compelling concern.
Given Bitcoin’s potential to challenge sovereign fiat currencies, Nakomoto could fear potential legal actions by governments—if not other forms of government sanction.
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