The Secret Creator of Bitcoin
By Matthew Chiccino
There are many aspects of bitcoin that I find fascinating. One topic which I find particularly fascinating is its origin. Mostly because it is a perfect and beautiful mystery.
Why This Mystery Matters
What I’ll try to do in this section is provide enough understanding of bitcoin so that you can appreciate the anonymity of its creation. For those who already understand the basic concept of bitcoin, you can skip this section.
I'll start by detailing that bitcoin is an open source program. It's simply a publicly available code. There are no secrets of what it does. People across the world make up the bitcoin network by running an instance of this program. They are extrinsically motivated to do so by protecting and potentially earning bitcoin. This simple explanation should be convincing of the concept that no one person owns bitcoin, or can ever claim ownership of the technology itself. It's public and works together. It’s like a service, with its only purpose being to provide the most secure financial network in the world, without a single entity or owner. In other words, it was simply a gift from its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Satoshi Nakamoto is just a pseudonym for the creator, but nobody really knows who Satoshi is. And by the nature of how bitcoin works as a decentralized public service, it makes perfect sense to not credit a creator. Whoever Satoshi is, they are enforcing the idea that belongs to everybody and not one person, which to me, makes perfect sense.
The Birth of Bitcoin
In 2008 satoshi documented his creation with an official white paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Then in 2009 he mined the very first block. It was embedded with the now-famous message “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” At the time this block had no monetary value, it was simply an experiment in part of his early vision; the first step into what is now a multi-trillion dollar network.
Satoshi continued to contribute to bitcoin along with other early adopters for over a year. He did so entirely anonymously, through emails, forum posts, and code repositories, with pseudonymous handles. Then around 2011, he began pulling away from the project entirely, and eventually disappeared.
Theories and Speculation
As you would assume there's been lots of speculation who Satoshi could be. Is it a single person or a group? It seems to me that it would be much more difficult to execute secrecy and anonymity as a group. Many believe that Satoshi was either a "team of people" or a "genius".
Satoshi Nakamoto is a name of Japanese origin but his fluency in english raises questions if he is actually natively from Japan. He's been noticed for using British spelling and cadence, writing things like “colour” or “bloody”. He’s also referenced the economy of Great Britain and once cited the London Times.
Another metric people have meticulously analyzed is the times of his communication. There was confidence in finding a significant decline in activity between 12:00pm and 6:00am EST. This suggests an unlikely or unusual sleeping pattern for someone in either Japan or England.
Most Popular Suspects
Dorian Satoshi NakamotoThis is the first person that comes up when you google the name. He was accused in 2014 as the Satoshi Nakamoto, largely because he had the same name. He denied any connection to bitcoin. He seemed to be a very regular man, who happened to have the same name, and was subsequently involved in a large debacle. He sued a news outlet which conducted paparazzi style interviews on him in public. The bitcoin community felt pretty bad after the uproar on this seemingly random man, and created a donation fund for the troubles. Ironically, as a bitcoin wallet.
Nick SzaboNick is an American computer scientist and cryptographer, and known to be a proponent of digital currency long before bitcoin was created. He created Bit Gold, a predecessor to Bitcoin, and coined the term “smart property”. Many say his writing matches the cadence of Satoshi. He has lived a very private life, and of course denies that he is satoshi.
Hal FinneyHal was an American computer scientist and publicly motivated to use cryptography to protect privacy and challenge centralized control. He was also the very first recipient of a bitcoin, which came from Satoshi's wallet. He was a very early contributor and helped run the software on the first day of its inception in 2009. To add to his case, he also lived a few blocks away from Dorian Nakamoto in the same neighborhood. This raises more questions. Did he use his name as a decoy identity? Is Dorian the real Satoshi and they had worked together? To my knowledge there's no evidence that they knew each other. Hal of course denied being Satoshi. Hal was diagnosed with ALS and died at the same time Satoshi began permanently stepping away from his online presence. I like to believe Hal as the most probable candidate, because it would make the most poetic sense. If it were him, he had died quietly and gracefully without breaking character.
Craig WrightA theme you’ve noticed and hopefully understood from the first paragraphs is that the inventor of bitcoin is purposefully secret. Which makes Craig a noteworthy meme, as he is someone who claims to be satoshi. He even attempted legal action to assert the claim. Nobody has given him support, and he failed to show he has access to Satoshi's bitcoin wallet.
My Concluding Thoughts
I think Hal Finney is one of the most likely creators of bitcoin. I am skeptical that a single person could have build this world-changing invention. This leads me to believe that this super genius team of visionaries successfully built a world changing invention, refused praise and fame, and gave bitcoin as a gift to the world.
So whether Satoshi is one of the people mentioned, or a group of secret cyberpunks, or someone we’ve never heard of, I think a large part of their legacy is not only in their genius creation but in how they walked away. Their absence is what allowed bitcoin to grow beyond one person. Nobody will be held at the point of failure, a source of influence, or a bottleneck of the future. Satoshi understood and followed through with the philosophy that innovation is not a mark to the creator's identity, but about the impact of their vision. I find that to be incredibly honorable and fascinating.