Who invented Bitcoin?

Decentralization is no longer a pipe-dream.

On Halloween of October 2008, a paper titled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ was posted to an online cryptography mailing list under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The paper described plans for a decentralized digital currency which would allow people to send transactions to one another from anywhere in the world, in real time, without having to go through a third-party, such as PayPal or VISA.

Bitcoin is the first currency to not be attached to a state or government — a currency without a central issuing authority or regulatory body. Its price would be determined by the demand for it, by the value people saw in it, by the trust they had in the open-source code it was built on.

Notwithstanding its somewhat fairytale-like proposition, Bitcoin took a while to gain traction. It wasn’t until 2011 that it got its first taste of substantial public recognition, when TIME and Forbes published articles on the digital currency. Nevertheless, this media coverage along with news of a New York senate hearing on the currency, faded into the shadows for years to come. 2013 then saw a spike in attention as Bitcoin passed the 1000$ mark for the first time. This would later seem like a drop in the ocean as things finally took off four years downstream.

In 2017, Bitcoin passed the $5000, $10,000 and $15,000 marks, and got desperately close to the $20,000 mark, with the total crypto market capitalization surging past $800 billion. It had finally reached the so-called ‘tipping-point’, the point where even your grandmother and grocer are up for a crypto-debate (no offence to grocers or grandmothers, keep debating).

And yet, after a decade long rollercoaster ride, resulting in some of the most influential organizations and people on earth discussing the subject — we are still nowhere closer to answering the question, ‘Who invented Bitcoin?’.

That may bring some people to the conclusion that this article may be a complete waste of four minutes — but there’s a lot more to the notion of us not knowing who Bitcoin’s creator is than one may think.

Here’s what we do know:

Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used by the person who created the Bitcoin white paper.
He claimed to be Japanese, born on the 5th of April, 1975. (‘Satoshi’ is commonly used as a man’s name in Japan, although this does not rule out the possibility of him being a woman or a group of people.)
In creating Bitcoin, Satoshi also created Blockchain (although he never actually coined the term).
Nakamoto also created the bitcointalk forum. He was an active member on the forum during Bitcoin’s early days (2009 and 2010), posting under the name ‘satoshi’.
He used perfect English, often with British English spelling, despite claiming to be Japanese and did not code with any resemblance to Japanese practices.
Satoshi was almost never active between 5AM and 11AM GMT, suggesting he slept at this time.
In the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi referenced Wei Dei’s b-money, and Adam Back’s Hashcash. He also sent the first Bitcoin transaction to Hal Finney. This suggests he was at least well aware of the Cyperpunk movement.
Nakamoto added Gavin Andresen’s email to the bitcoin.org website (after asking Gavin’s permission) and deleted his own, shortly before disappearing.
Nakamoto’s last known messages were to Martti Malmi and Gavin Andresen, where he never stated he’d be leaving the project indefinitely, all he said was he’d be ‘moving on to other things’.

Speculation as to who Satoshi Nakamoto is rife all over the internet. Many believe hyper-secretive crypto expert, Nick Szabo to be the enigmatic Nakamoto. A team of linguistic researchers even went as far as to compare Szabo and Satoshi’s writings, reporting several similarities. Yet it remains a claim Szabo denies in its entirety.

Other theories suggest the pseudonym might represent a group of people instead of a single individual. This argument points toward three individuals, Charles Bay, Neal King and Vladimir Oksman, given that they had filed for a patent relating to secure communication barely two months before the Bitcoin.org domain was anonymously purchased. They too deny the claims.

In 2015, Craig Wright, an Australian entrepreneur laid claims to being the mysterious Nakamoto, a claim he later withdrew after providing much disputed code as proof.

Make what you will of what we do know, the bottom line remains the same, we have no conclusive evidence as to who Satoshi Nakamoto is.

What we do know, however, is that in removing himself from the fold, Satoshi Nakamoto proved the most important element of what he likely set out to achieve in the first place. Bitcoin does not require a founder, a leader or a central authority to function. Decentralization is no longer a pipe-dream, it’s a real thing.

nakamo.to is an Advanced Blockchain AG project focusing on research and education in the field of Distributed Ledger Technology.