Even if we do not know who she or who he is, we know what he has created: Satoshi Nakamoto is the inventor of the Bitcoin protocol, which he published in a whitepaper in November 2008 via an encrypted e-mail address.
In 2009, he published the first Bitcoin client and communicated with the Bitcoin community by the end of 2010. Then he disappeared without a trace.
He initially worked with an open source team on the project and always put great value on not disclosing any personal data. In the spring of 2011 he heard about him when he said, “I will devote myself to other things.”
Was he Japanese?
You should not judge a book by its title, or do you?
“Satoshi” means “clear-minded”; “Naka” could mean “inside or relationship”; “Moto” means “origin or foundation”.
All these things fit the person who created a movement and created an ingenious algorithm. The problem is that each single word can have several meanings.
So we can not say for sure whether Satoshi Nakamoto is a Japanese. It only suggests that Satoshi is a “he”.
For the sake of simplicity, we will call Satoshi Nakamoto as “him,” even though he may have been one, one or more persons.
Does anyone know who Satoshi Nakamoto was?
No, but the criminal techniques people use these days often raise more questions than answers. The New Yorker Joshua Davis believes Satoshi Nakamoto is a cryptography student of Dublin Trinity College, named Michael Clear.
To his conclusion he came by an analysis of all Nakamoto letters containing more than 80,000 words. Here he searched for linguistic references. He also suspected the Finnish economic sociologist and former game developer Vili Lehdonvirta.
Both said they were not the inventors of Bitcoin. In a Web Summit in 2013, Michael Clear even reported publicly that he was not Satoshi Nakamoto.
Adam Penenberg of FastCompany denied the assumption and said that Satoshi Nakamoto is a group of three people: Neal King, Vladimir Oksman, and Charles Bry. He found out about this by stating different phrases from the published Whitepaper at Google to see if these word phrases had been found somewhere before.
It turned out later that one of the three was mentioned in a patent application for the update and distribution of cryptic keys. The Bitcoin.org domain that Satoshi Nakamoto used to publish the Whitepapers was registered and secured only 3 days after the patent application.
The domain was registered in Finland and one of the patent applicants traveled to the country 6 months earlier. All three suspects deny Satoshi Nakamoto.
In any case, the Bitcoin.org domain was registered on August 18, 2008 by an anonymous Japanese service provider and a Japanese ISP. After that, the domain has only been transferred to Finland. This weakened the theory of Finland a little.
Again, other tongues claim that the inventor of Bitcoin could also be Martii Malmi. Martii lives in Finland and has been involved in the development since the birth of Bitcoin.
Jed McCaleb also belongs to the circle of the elect. He is a lover of Japanese culture and lives in Japan. He is the founder of the controversial Bitcoin stock exchange, Mt. Gox, and co-founder of the decentralized payment systems Ripple and Stellar.
There are a variety of other potential Satoshi Nakamotos, including Donal O’Mahony, Michael Peirce, Professor Shinichi Mochizuki and Dorian S Nakamoto. All of them dispute the inventors of an ingenious invention. In the Bitcoin community there is still great uncertainty about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. In the Bitcoin trading community there is still great uncertainty about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.
What do we know about Satoshi Nakamoto?
One thing we know: Based on interviews with fellow travelers of Satoshi Nakamoto in the early hours of birth of Bitcoin, he is supposed to have meticulously thought through the system.
According to Jeff Garzik, his encodings did not carry the handwriting of a conventional software engineer.
How rich is he?
According to an analysis by the bitcoiner Sergio Lerner, Satoshi Nakamoto is said to have scavenged many of the first blocks in the Bitcoin network: about 1 million bitscoins. At the then rate in November 2013, more than USD 1 billion.
What is Satoshi Nakamoto doing now?
Nobody knows. But from his last email of April 23, 2011, it is clear:
“I will now devote myself to other things. It’s all in good hands at Gavin & Co. ”
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