Here is a post made on May 2011 announcing some of greaters that had been first involved to crypto markets by the first bitcoin forum created one years left;
The post was created by Mike Hearn one of the first subscribers of the bitcointalk forum who mentioned his parteners as publicly shown in the internet.
“ After reading Gavins thread on public relations, I wanted to find an easy way to make Bitcoin come across as a more professional, trustworthy project. I don’t need to explain why that’s an important image to establish.
So I changed my forum display name from [mike] to my real name, which was easily available from the BitCoinJ project anyway. Quite a few important players in the Bitcoin community aren’t actually anonymous even though they use nicks on this forum. When people evaluate Bitcoins potential, one question they ask is, who are these people? Is anyone seriously standing behind this project? Just using our real names when posting is a simple step that will re-assure people who are deciding whether it’s worth their time. So I encourage you to do the same — it’s easy to do by going into the profile tab and clicking “Account Settings”.
Here’s a quick reference guide to some of the communities top contributors, based on publicly available information:
Gavin Andresen, no need to introduce the project maintainer. He previously worked at Silicon Graphics and now runs his own company.
MagicalTux — Mark Karpeles, owner of MtGox and Kalyhost
Vladimir Marchenko, runs Marchenko Ltd which sells mining contracts, previously developed the figator.org search engine.
xf2_org — Jeff Garzik, who does kernel development at Red Hat
BlueMatt — Matt Corallo, core developer
sipa — Pieter Wuille, core developer and maintainer of the network graphs
justmoon — Stefan Thomas, creator of the WeUseCoins.com site/video and WebCoin.
Hal — Hal Finney, one of the creators of PGP
mndrix — Michael Hendrix, creator of the (sadly defunct) CoinPal and CoinCard services
theymos — Michael Marquardt, creator of the widely used blockexplorer.com site
genjix — Amir Taaki, creator of the Britcoin exchange
Mike Hearn — Google engineer who works on Gmail and developed BitCoinJ
There are a few others I know based on private information. If you’re OK with appearing here (or not appearing here) let me know.
BTW I know plenty of people posting in these forums prefer to be totally anonymous, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Here is the link to the post source of this post dated to 19–05–2011