The Curious Case Of Satoshi Nakamoto

By Author: George Philip
Total Articles: 5
Comment this article

At the peak of the financial crisis of 2008, murmur began in tiny online communities of cryptography enthusiasts, computer scientists and hackers. A white paper styled research paper titled “Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” was broadcasted on a cryptography mailing list of the community. The author? Satoshi Nakamoto.

Satoshi wasn’t an unheard name within the communities. Years before the world heard of him, someone using the Satoshi pseudonym had been posting to forums and emailing fellow developers, never confirming a location, gender, nationality or even a real name.

The first mention

The real identity of the creator of Bitcoin is one of the most gripping modern-day mysteries. Especially since April of 2011, when Satoshi left a final message with a fellow developer “I’ve moved onto other things.” And just like that, he disappeared.

Satoshi was the pioneer of an entirely new kind of money that has taken the world by storm and has gone on to achieve a market cap of more than $1Trillion. Yet, the creator remains anonymous.

In 2007, Satoshi began coding the first version ...
... of Bitcoin in the C++ programming language. Before sharing it widely on the cryptography mailing list, Satoshi shared his ideas with the founders of proto-cryptocurrencies Hashcash and b-money. The idea was met with scepticism by the community that was used to going through revolutionary ideas that did not see the light of the day.

Satoshi’s legacy

The appeal in his paper however, was the idea of building a cash system completely independent from the existing financial system. Satoshi’s answer to the issue of digital currency duplication, which he referred to as “the double-spending problem”, was to use a peer-to-peer network. This system would eliminate the need for any central authority to validate transactions. To his admission, prior attempts to digital currencies failed because of their centrally controlled nature.

Traditional transactions are made based on trust. Intermediaries such as banks or internet commerce platforms are trusted to complete transactions as they fall under a centralised authority. Satoshi’s proposed decentralised system did not work based on trust. Instead, this trust-less system was the basis of Blockchain. A Blockchain is a publicly shared ledger that can document all transactions.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Satoshi left the text “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” of the Genesis block, the first block to be mined on the Bitcoins blockchain. It was considered a potential easter egg. The text was from a headline on that day’s Times of London. Additionally, his liberal use of British phrases has led people to believe that Satoshi must hail from the United Kingdom. However, Satoshi once described himself as a 37-year-old man living in Japan.

Theories have also been devised that Satoshi Nakamoto is a cohort and not an individual. If not, he is a highly intelligent developer with a multifaceted understanding of Economics, Cryptography and Peer-to-peer networking and amongst other things.

Another favourite suspect for theorists to zero down on as Satoshi has been Hal Finney. Finney was the first cryptographer to receive Bitcoin when Nakamoto finished the first-ever transaction on Bitcoins blockchain. Even on his deathbed, Finney denied these claims.

Len Sassaman is considered another possible suspect. Sassaman killed himself after battling depression in 2011. Coincidentally, in Satoshi’s last few communications, he sent a cryptic email to a fellow developer that he “probably won’t be around in the future.”

Questions around Satoshi’s identity remain unanswered and may remain so. Satoshi might want to stay anonymous for legal reasons. It is widely believed that Satoshi holds more than a million bitcoin, which would amount to tens of billions of US dollars. Whether he lives to witness this growth is unknown. This mystery might forever remain unsolved.