It would have 980,000 bitcoins, which is roughly $ 18 billion at the current rate of cryptocurrency, valued at more than $ 18,000 per unit this Saturday. Less than ten years after creating the most famous of the virtual currencies, Satoshi Nakamoto has become one of the richest beings in the world, and yet, no one (almost) knows his true identity.
"Bill Gates, first trillionaire in history? ", Headlined many media in early 2017, when the bitcoin was sailing under $ 1,000 worth to the unit. 11 months later, it is about Nakamoto that the press is now asking this question. 20 Minutes takes stock of the inventor of bitcoin.
Even at the House of Bitcoin, in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, at one of the weekly explanatory conferences on the currency, the director Manuel Valente had laughed at the question "who is really Satoshi Nakamoto? ". Everyone puts it down, nobody knows.
More tracks since 2010
Let's start with the certainties: Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym, and the person (s) hiding behind are probably not Japanese. On bitcointalk, a big forum dedicated to the cryptocurrency he had himself created, Nakamoto had explained that he was born on April 5, 1975, to be Japanese, to have started working on bitcoin in 2007, and to have created the first units of the currency. in 2009, being for a time the only "minor" on the blockchain (ie a creator of bitcoins on the secure network, to be simple).
It is during this period that he amasses a considerable amount of bitcoins, which allow him today to be a billionaire. He has not interacted on bitcointalk since December 2010 and said six months later "to have moved on". So much for the tricky tracks provided by the creator of bitcoin itself. There remains the hypotheses, which are increasing in recent years. Let's list the least wacky.
Nick Szabo
This is the most credible track, although many times denied by Szabo himself. The man is an American computer scientist, creator between 1998 and 2005 of a decentralized currency, the bit gold, kind of ancestor of bitcoin, since it worked on the same principle without having collected the same success at the time. Several inquiries by linguists have resulted in him being named the probable creator of bitcoin by comparing his writing to that of Nakamoto. He assured not to be in a blog post in 2011. A New York Times survey in 2015 raises the rumor: the journalist takes the tweezers, but writes that "most of the most convincing evidence leads to a US man recluse of Hungarian origin named Nick Szabo ". New denial: "All these speculations are flattering, but it's wrong, I'm not Satoshi."
Hal Finney
Another regularly evoked track leads to this dead cryptographer of Charcot's disease on August 28, 2014. He is the first beneficiary of a bitcoin transaction, in January 2009. A Forbes reporter had also used the linguistic comparison to conclude similarities between Nakamoto's and Finney's style. Nick Szabo also said in his blog post in 2011 that Nakamoto could just as well be Finney, who had also looked before everyone else on the system that will lead to bitcoin, in 2004.
Dorian Nakamoto
For Newsweek, it's him. Although there was denial again. Of Japanese origin, this Californian sexagenarian had assured in 2014 to the journalist author of the article never to have heard of bitcoin. Her libertarian profile (ideology in tune with the philosophy of cryptocurrency), the fact that Satoshi Nakamoto is her birth name and her former cryptographic activity had put the journalist on the track. Except, no, it seems. The day after the publication of this article, in 2014, a brief message was posted on bitcointalk, emanating from the official account of the creator, yet muted since December 2010: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto". But his identifier could have been hacked.
Elon Musk
There, it is already potentially more wacky. But this is also the latest rumor to date, and it concerns a famous figure, the founder of Space X, leader at Tesla and former PayPal. A former Space X trainee, Sahil Gupta, wrote on Medium on November 22, 2017 that "Elon Musk probably invented bitcoin". but his theory is unsupported: he would have noted tics of language similar to those of Nakamoto in writing, as well as the logic according to him that would have had Musk to create an alternative to the banking system at the time of the financial crisis of 2008. A little light, but enough to react to the inventor on Twitter, who had indicated nonchalantly that the rumor was "not true. A friend sent me a piece of bitcoin a few years ago but I do not know where he is. "
