Satoshi Nakamoto - Who is the creator of bitcoin

Cryptocurrency Guide » Creator of Bitcoin

Who invented Bitcoin

Bitcoin was the first "cryptocurrency". However, this concept is not new. This system was described in a chain of emails known as "cypherpunks" in 1998.

In it, someone nicknamed Wei Dai proposed a new form of money that would use cryptography for its creation and processing transactions, and that would be independent of a centralized authority.

It wasn't until November 2008, the date of Bitcoin's creation, that this idea became a reality. In response to the same mailing list, and under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the first specification of the Bitcoin protocol was published, in other words, the first white paper for a cryptocurrency.

In 2009, the software that supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core, was released and the first units of this cryptocurrency were put into circulation.

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency. It was also the first protocol to use blockchain technology. Therefore, the author of Bitcoin is also credited with being the creator of cryptocurrencies and the creator of blockchain.

Nakamoto was involved in the project until the end of 2010 when he dropped out, without providing much information about himself.

Satoshi handed over the project to a software developer named Gavin Andresen (who is currently not involved in the project either) and entrusted him with control of the source code. In addition, he transferred domains linked to prominent members of the Bitcoin community.

Since then, and although the responsible individuals have continued to change, the community of developers behind Bitcoin has never stopped growing.

But...

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

The identity of Nakamoto was never revealed. Experts attribute the code behind bitcoin to a genius or a group of people, given its complexity. That is, everything indicates that it is a nickname.

The name seems to be of Japanese origin. In this language, Satoshi can mean "clear thinking, ingenious, wise". Naka can refer to "middle, relationship". Moto can mean "origin or creation".

There are even conspiracy theories that suggest that the pseudonym is an acronym for Samsung, Toshiba, Nakamichi, and Motorola, something very unlikely.

Nakamoto himself described himself in his P2P Foundation profile as a 37-year-old man of Japanese origin. However, it is impossible to affirm that the inventor of Bitcoin is of Japanese or Asian origin.

In fact, people who have studied Satoshi Nakamoto highlight his perfect command of English in his writings, as well as the absence of Japanese in the documentation and labeling of the Bitcoin Core.

Theories about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto

Over the years, numerous assumptions about the identity of the person who created Bitcoin have emerged. Below, we detail some of them.

One of the first guesses, developed by Joshua Davis for the New Yorker in 2010, pointed to Michael Clear, an Irish cryptography student, as the creator of the cryptocurrency. Davis analyzed Nakamoto's writings grammatically and found similarities with the student's. However, Clear denied it shortly after.

In 2014, Newsweek magazine pointed to Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, with the coincidence of the name as the only evidence. This California resident vehemently denied it through his lawyer.

Bitcoin, who created it?

Later, in 2016, the magazines Wired and Gizmodo began a joint investigation. The result pointed out that an Australian named Craig Steven Wright was the one who invented bitcoin. In addition, this former academic confirmed the theory.

However, many researchers studied the case and presented numerous evidence that contradicted it. After another investigation, Money, the finance specialized medium of Time magazine, concluded that Craig Wright was not the creator of bitcoin.

Perhaps, one of the most developed theories emerged in 2011. Adam Penenberg, through the American medium Fast Company, alluded to Neal King, Vladimir Oksman, and Charles Bry as the creators of Bitcoin.

Penenberg found through Google that "computationally impractical to reverse," one of the expressions that Nakamoto used in his articles, was registered as a patent application by these three individuals. Additionally, he linked one of them traveling to Finland with the transfer of the official bitcoin.org website registration to the same country.

However, all three individuals have also denied their involvement in the creation of Bitcoin.

Although there have been many theories, none has been consistent enough. To this day, we still don't know the real identity of Nakamoto.

The fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto

When Bitcoin was born, its initial value was 0.000764 dollars. That is, it was not even worth a cent. Not even a tenth of this.

In addition, due to its limited adoption, the competition in mining was practically null. According to a study, from the genesis block (the first mined block) to block 36,288, there was only one significant miner, who never mined again after that.

This mining, logically, is attributed to the creator of Bitcoin: Satoshi Nakamoto. It would correspond to a total of 1,148,000 mined coins. When this article was written in December 2018 (a bad time for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general), the price of Bitcoin was around $3,200.

Therefore, if the creator of Bitcoin sells his coins, Satoshi Nakamoto's fortune would amount to over $3.5 billion.

Fascinating facts about the inventor of Bitcoin

• In 2015, the prestigious economic newspaper The Economist awarded the Innovation Prize to Satoshi Nakamoto for proposing a system that could completely alter the current financial system.
• In 2016, the mysterious founder of Bitcoin was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics. However, his candidacy was rejected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences because it did not meet the requirements of the prize, as he is an anonymous or deceased individual.

Is it important to know who the creator of Bitcoin is?

The importance of knowing who created Bitcoin may lie in the intention with which it was created. However, Bitcoin is created in open source code and anyone can participate in the project to improve its technology. There have been so many programmers involved that the protocol has changed a lot since the origin of Bitcoin and Nakamoto's influence has been diluted.

For example, the official Bitcoin website states that "knowing the identity of the inventor of Bitcoin is as important as knowing who invented paper".