While we may not know who he (or she) was, we know what he did. Satoshi
Nakamoto was the inventor of the bitcoin protocol, publishing a paper via the Cryptography Mailing List in
November 2008.
He then released the
first version of the bitcoin software client in 2009, and participated with
others on the project via mailing lists, until he finally began to fade from
the community toward the end of 2010.
Nakamoto worked with
people on the open-source team, but took care never to reveal anything personal
about himself, and the last anyone heard from him was in the spring of 2011,
when he said that he had “moved on to other things”.
But he was Japanese, right?
Best not to judge a
book by its cover. Or in fact, maybe we should.
“Satoshi” means
"clear thinking, quick witted; wise". “Naka” can mean “medium,
inside, or relationship”. “Moto” can mean “origin”, or “foundation”.
Those things would all
apply to the person who founded a movement by designing a clever algorithm. The
problem, of course, is that each word has multiple possible meanings.
We can’t know for sure
whether he was Japanese or not. In fact, it’s rather presumptuous to assume
that he was actually a ‘he’.
We’re just using that
as a figure of speech, but allowing for the fact that this could have been a
pseudonym, ‘he’ could have been a ‘she’, or even a ‘they’.
Does anyone know who Nakamoto was?
No, but the detective techniques that people use when guessing are
sometimes even more intriguing than the answer. The New Yorker’s
Joshua Davis believed that
Satoshi Nakamoto was Michael Clear, a graduate cryptography
student at Dublin's Trinity College.
He arrived at this
conclusion by analyzing 80,000 words of Nakamoto’s online writings, and
searching for linguistic clues. He also suspected Finnish economic sociologist
and former games developer Vili Lehdonvirta.
Both have denied being
bitcoin’s inventor. Michael Clear publicly denied being Satoshi at the
2013 Web Summit.
Adam Penenberg at FastCompany disputed that claim, arguing instead that
Nakamoto may actually have been three people: Neal King, Vladimir
Oksman, and Charles Bry. He figured this out by typing unique
phrases from Nakamoto’s bitcoin paper into Google, to see if they were used
anywhere else.
One of them, "computationally impractical to reverse," turned up
in a patent application made by these three for updating and distributing
encryption keys. The bitcoin.org domain name originally used by
Satoshi to publish the paper had been registered three days after the patent
application was filed.
It was registered in
Finland, and one of the patent authors had traveled there six months before the
domain was registered. All of them deny it. Michael Clear also publicly denied
being Satoshi at the 2013 Web Summit.
In any case, when bitcoin.org was registered on August 18th 2008,
the registrant actually used a Japanese anonymous registration service, and
hosted it using a Japanese ISP. The registration for the site was only
transferred to Finland on May 18th 2011, which weakens the Finland theory
somewhat.
Others think that it was Martii
Malmi, a developer living in Finland who has been involved with bitcoin
since the beginning, and developed its user interface.
A finger has also been pointed at Jed McCaleb, a lover of
Japanese culture and resident of Japan, who created troubled bitcoin exchange
Mt. Gox and co-founded decentralized payment systems Ripple and later Stellar.
Another theory suggests that computer scientists Donal O'Mahony and Michael
Peirceare Satoshi, based on a paper that they authored concerning digital payments,
along with Hitesh Tewari, based on a book that they published together.
O’Mahony and Tewari also studied at Trinity College, where Michael Clear was a
student.
Israeli scholars Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir of
the Weizmann Institute retracted allegations made in a paper
suggesting a link between Satoshi and Silk Road, the black market web site that
was taken down by the FBI in October 2013. They had suggested a link between an
address allegedly owned by Satoshi, and the site. Security researcher Dustin
D. Trammell owned the address, and disputed claims that he was Satoshi.
In May 2013, Internet pioneer Ted Nelson threw another hat into
the ring: Japanese mathematician Professor Shinichi Mochizuki, although
he admits that the evidence is circumstantial at best.
In February 2014, Newsweek’s Leah McGrath Goodman claimed to
have tracked down the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Dorian
S Nakamoto has since denied he knows anything about bitcoin,
eventually hiring a lawyer and releasing an official statement to
that effect.
No, Satoshi
Nakamoto is not a 64-year-old Japanese man living in California, probably...
Hal Finney, Michael Weber, Wei
Dai and several other developers were among those who are periodically
named in media reports and online discussions as potential Satoshis. A
group of forensic linguistics experts from Aston University believe the
real creator of bitcoin is Nick Szabo, based upon analysis of the Bitcoin White Paper.
Dominic Frisby, a
comedian and a writer, also suggests that BitGold creator Szabo was
the most likely candidate to be Satoshi in his book, “Bitcoin: The
Future of Money”. His detailed analysis involved
the linguistics of Satoshi's writing, judging the level of technical skill
in C++ and even Satoshi's
likely birthday.
In Nathaniel Popper's book, 'Digitial Gold', released in May 2015, Popper
reveals that in a rare encounter at an event Szabo again denied that he was Satoshi.
Then in early December 2015, reports by Wired and Gizmodo tentatively claimed
to have identified Nakamoto as Australian entrepreneur Craig S Wright. WIRED cited "an anonymous source close to
Wright" who provided a cache of emails, transcripts and other documents
that point to Wright's role in the creation of bitcoin. Gizmodo cited a cache of documents sourced from
someone claiming to have hacked Wright’s business email account, as well as
efforts to interview individuals close to him. The idea that the
Wright-Satoshi connection is nothing but a hoax has been floated by observers, though the
compelling nature of the evidence published will no doubt fuel speculation for
some time to come.
For the most part, all
of these potential Satoshi's have insisted they are not Nakamoto.
So what do we know about him?
One thing we know, based on interviews with people that were involved
with him at an early stage in the development of bitcoin, is that he thought
the system out very thoroughly.
His coding wasn’t conventional, according to core developer Jeff
Garzik, in that he didn’t apply the same rigorous testing that you would
expect from a classic software engineer.
How rich is he?
An analysis by Sergio
Lerner, an authority on bitcoin and cryptography, suggests that Satoshi mined
many of the early blocks in the bitcoin network, and that he had built up a
fortune of around 1 million unspent bitcoins. That hoard would be worth $1bn at
November 2013’s exchange rate of $1,000.
What is he doing now?
No one knows what
Satoshi is up to, but one of the last emails he sent to a software developer,
dated April 23 2011, said “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands
with Gavin and everyone.”
Did he work for the government?
There are rumors, of
course. People have interpreted his name as meaning “central intelligence”, but
people will see whatever they want to see. Such is the nature of conspiracy
theories.
The obvious question
would be why one of the three-letter agencies would be interested in creating a
cryptocurrency that would subsequently be used as an anonymous trading
mechanism, causing senators and the FBI alike to wring their hands about
potential terrorism and other criminal endeavours. No doubt conspiracy
theorists will have their views on that, too.
Perhaps it doesn’t
matter. Core developer Jeff Garzik puts it succinctly. “Satoshi published an
open-source system for the purpose that you didn’t have to know who he was, and
trust who he was, or care about his knowledge,” he points out. Open-source code
makes it impossible to hide secrets. “The source code spoke for itself.”
Moreover, it was smart to use a pseudonym, he argues, because it forced
people to focus on the technology itself rather than on the personality behind
it. At the end of the day, bitcoin is now far bigger than Satoshi
Nakamoto.
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