Satoshi Nakamoto is considered the inventor of Bitcoin and wrote the original cryptocurrency white paper in 2008.
Crypto fans celebrated Nakamoto’s 48th birthday this week. But nobody knows who is hiding behind the pseudonym.
Speculations range from well-known computer scientists from the scene to Tesla boss Elon Musk.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the name of the person or group credited with inventing Bitcoin, the world‘s largest cryptocurrency. His legend is shrouded in mystery. The identity of the inventor has never been confirmed and it is not clear if it is male, female or a group. According to a profile at the P2P Foundation, the alleged inventor celebrated his 48th birthday on April 5th.
This week, conspiracy theories have linked the character to the late Steve Jobs, the visionary Apple co-founder. It was previously revealed that since 2018, Apple has been shipping Mac computers with a copy of the original Bitcoin white paper.
“Today, while attempting to fix my printer, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper has apparently been shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018,” tech pundit Andy Baio wrote in a blog post from April 5th.
read too
Nakamoto’s article “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” was published in October 2008. The abstract reads: “A pure peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency today with a market cap of approximately $540 billion.
Someone is behind the name as they invented Bitcoin’s complex source code, wrote a white paper and interacted with users on web forums. Nakamoto’s profile on The P2P Foundation lists his location as Japan. However, Nakamoto has used British English spellings and expressions in the contributions, leading some to believe that he is in fact not Japanese, as the inventor claimed. Additionally, some have pointed to the timestamps in Nakamoto’s comments as reason for assuming he is not in Japan.
In 2011, a comment from that account said he had “moved on to other things.” The name is also associated with a number of crypto wallets believed to be owned by Nakamoto. Some estimate that these wallets contain more than 1.1 million bitcoin tokens. When Bitcoin peaked at $68,000 in November 2021, those holdings would have been worth around $73 billion, placing Nakamoto among the 15 richest people in the world at the time.
read too
Some have speculated that given the complexity of Bitcoin’s source code, the chances of Nakamoto being a person are slim. “Either there’s a team of people that worked on it, or this guy is a genius,” Dan Kaminsky, a leading cybersecurity researcher, told The New Yorker in 2011.
In his white paper, Nakamoto cited the work of Stuart Haber, a computer scientist credited with helping invent blockchain technology. Haber is also of the opinion that the inventor of Bitcoin must be highly intelligent if he developed the cryptocurrency on his own.
In 2013, Nick Szabo, a computer scientist who published research on “Bit Gold,” a precursor to Bitcoin, in 1998, suggested that he might be Nakamoto. “The most compelling evidence pointed to a reclusive American of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo,” wrote journalist Nathaniel Popper in the New York Times in 2015. But there is no evidence of this. Szabo later denied the claims
A 2014 Newsweek article states that Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a California-based Japanese-American man, was the elusive inventor of Bitcoin. According to the article, he was trained as a physicist and worked on secret defense projects, but he too denied the claims. After the article was published, Nakamoto’s online account was revived after a five-year hiatus and commented, “I’m not Dorian Nakamoto.”
read too
Then, in December 2015, Wired posited that Australian researcher Craig Steven Wright “either invented Bitcoin or is a brilliant con man dying to have us believe he did it.” On the same day, Gizmodo published a story stating that Wright and computer scientist Dave Kleiman co-invented Bitcoin. Then, in May 2016, Wright announced in a blog post that he had created Bitcoin. But nothing can be proven here either.
The list of other potential candidates includes Apple’s Jobs, the CIA, various other computer scientists, and even Elon Musk, who denied being Nakamoto in a 2017 tweet.
This article was translated from English by Klemens Handke. You can find the original here.