Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? The genius behind Bitcoin's creation, and now one the richest people on earth, has never reveled themselves.
Satoshi first penned the white paper describing bitcoin as a crypto currency in 2008 and with the help of the cyberpunk movement fully programmed the technology by 2009. Satoshi never met anyone and never revealed themselves, communicating only through email and instant chat. The Bitcoin white paper said the mysterious Satoshi was born in 1975 and lived in Japan.
But as soon as another key Bitcoin developer casually mentioned he would be giving a talk to the CIA in 2011, Satoshi disappeared and never wrote another email to the bitcoin development team. Where did Satoshi come from, and where did Satoshi go?
The mystery of Satoshi has been obsessed over by reporters and Bitcoin fanatics alike. The first major widely purported Satoshi suspect was an older Japanese computer programmer called Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto who lived in LA. Dorian immediately denied he was the infamous Satoshi, even claiming that he had never heard of bitcoin, as the world's media descended upon him and his family home. It turns out his writing doesn't match that of the Bitcoin Satoshi and its unclear if he even had an internet connection at the time the Bitcoin Satoshi was writing his emails. With absolutely no proof that Dorian was the famous Bitcoin founder, attention moved on.
It was discovered that computer scientist and committed encryption enthusiast Hal Finney lived in the same area of LA as Dorian, temple-city, and he was the first person to ever receive a bitcoin payment, from the famous Satoshi. Hal suffered from the terminal disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which rendered the Bitcoin enthusiast "locked" into his body and unable to speak or move most of his muscles, by the time reporters came to interview him in 2014.
Hal was very much a part of the Bitcoin development team, finding errors in the code and emailing them to Satoshi, while also writing key parts of the code in C. Satoshi wrote his code in C, which according to Hal he wrote with a brilliance and subtly that only a younger programmer could do, someone who learned C in their late teens or twenties.
Hal knew the decentralised currency enthusiast Nick Szabo who wrote a white paper on 'bitgold' in 1998. They had contacted each other about various cryto projects in the 1990s and 2000s. According to Szabo, only he, Hal or Wei Dai (creator of Bitcoin precursor B-Money) could have been the famous Satoshi. It has been suggested that Szabo may be Satoshi, but he firmly denies this.
Hal, who passed away in 2014, denied he was Satoshi and his family are sure he was not the Bitcoin creator. He wrote many emails back and forth between himself and Satoshi, and both had different writing styles. Hal originally only mined 1000 bitcoins and the family had to sell them off at 100$ per bitcoin to pay for his medical care. His son says that Hal would have been proud to create Bitcoin and would have not hid it from the world.
An Australian computer scientist and business man called Craig Wright claimed to be Satoshi in 2016, but he has failed to show adequate proof of this, and he is considered a Pretender to the Throne by the Bitcoin community, and he no longer defends his claim to be Satoshi.
So the identity of Satoshi is still a mystery. I believe that Satoshi must be a very wealthy individual, a wealthy company/entity or a national government. Otherwise Satoshi must have been tempted to cash in some of the 980,000 bitcoin that they own. Not a single one of these bitcoins has ever been traded!? These bitcoins are valued at more than 20 billion in today's prices (January 2018).
Why is Satoshi holding onto these bitcoins, are they waiting for the right time to sell, have they lost the privacy key, are they so committed to bitcoin that they will never cash out their bitcoins into fiat currency?
I believe that some one like Bill Gates might be the creator of Bitcoin, and that they don't need the money and will trade their bitcoins some time in the far future when Bitcoin prices is stable and it is widely accepted as a currency. Bill Gates is currently funding his charity donations through the sale of Microsoft shares, when they are all sold, will he start using Bitcoins to pay for his charity work?
Or is a National Leader like Putin behind the creation of bitcoin, and they plan to use the 980K bitcoins to fund their government in the future. Who knows? Or could the advanced warfare department of America, called DARPA, be behind the creation of Bitcoin? We live in exciting times.
Please leave your comments below on who you think might be the enigmatic and brilliant Satoshi.