15 Years Later: Satoshi Nakamoto Remains a Mystery
The Bitcoin white paper was released 15 years ago. The network now processes billions of dollars worth of transfers in a day and nobody knows who started it all.
Yesterday marked 15 years since “bitcoin” entered the public lexicon. On October 31st, 2008, the Bitcoin (BTC-USD) white paper was born courtesy of Satoshi Nakamoto. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto exactly? Nobody knows for sure. Whoever is behind the moniker is credited with writing the paper, registering the domain, and briefly collaborating with numerous other developers who eventually joined the project.
What We Know
After releasing the white paper, Satoshi was a regular poster on the BitcoinTalk forum up until December 2010 when he/she abruptly left the community. Satoshi was apparently unsettled following Wikileaks turning to Bitcoin for donations after being frozen out of the traditional banking system.
Satoshi mined the first Bitcoin block and some estimates have the creator in control of between 600k and 1.1 million bitcoins through various wallet addresses. The value of those coins could be worth as much as $38 billion based on today’s coin prices and, remarkably, the known Satoshi supply has remained largely unmoved - though it’s possible some Satoshi coins could be unaccounted for. This, of course, leads to even more questions pertaining to who Satoshi is and what kind of person could be capable of leaving so much wealth on the table.
It’s possible the person behind Satoshi is actually deceased. It’s possible Satoshi is a group of people. It’s possible Satoshi is indeed a single person who has succeeded in keeping this a secret. In any case, whoever created the Satoshi moniker has ceased using the pseudonym. For all intents and purposes, Satoshi is dead. The question now is will we ever find out who is behind the name? Here is what we know about Satoshi Nakamoto:
Satoshi embedded the headline from the January 3rd, 2009 front page of The Times “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” in the first block and apparently had a disdain for fiat systems and central banking
Satoshi wrote with British English dialect in both code and forum posts
Satoshi coded in C++
Satoshi claimed to be in his 30’s and living in Japan, though timing of forum posts may not be consistent with that
Satoshi Nakamoto privately solicited feedback from cypherpunks Hal Finney and Wei Dai on early versions of the white paper and mentioned Adam Back in one of his first interactions
Satoshi Possibilities
Back in 2014, a California man named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto was accused of being the same Satoshi Nakamoto who released the bitcoin white paper. This was vehemently denied by Dorian and it is generally accepted within crypto circles that Dorian is not Satoshi. With that out of the way, let’s assess some of the other possibilities in no particular order:
Nick Szabo
A computer scientist who did early work on Bitcoin with Hal Finney, Wei Dai and Nakamoto, Nick Szabo has been credited with coining the term “smart contracts.” While smart contracts are more associated with the Ethereum blockchain network, Szabo started researching and designing “bit gold” as far back as 1998 - bit gold is structurally very similar to bitcoin and was never launched. However, Szabo wrote about bit gold on his blogger website several years before the bitcoin white paper was released:
Interestingly, Szabo apparently tried to change the public time stamp of a blog post he wrote called “Bit gold.” The post was originally published in 2005, or nearly four years before the Bitcoin white paper was released. Szabo’s time stamp change appears to be an attempt at making it look like it was released after the white paper. Odd to say the least.
Hal Finney
Hal Finney was a cypherpunk cryptographer who unfortunately passed away in 2014 from ALS after being diagnosed in 2009. Finney worked on developing Bitcoin from the very beginning. He was the first counterparty to receive a BTC transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto. He was also one of the first developers to run the initial client. And he was apparently in contact with Nakamoto before the white paper was officially shared. Incomprehensibly, Finney lived just a few blocks away from Dorian Nakamoto.
Adam Back
In an interview with Lex Fridman, the case for Adam Back as told by Cardano (ADA-USD) founder Charles Hoskinson is quite interesting:
He’s the Occam’s razor candidate. Mostly because he’s the right place, right time, right age, right skillset.
Hoskinson also noted almost no overlap between Satoshi and Back in the early years on the forum but Satoshi referenced Adam Back early on and essentially used Adam Back’s “HashCash” in bitcoin mining. Unlike every other early developer, Back and Satoshi never publicly engaged with one another on the forums. Back is also the only person on this list who is still publicly speaking about Bitcoin.
Adam Back is co-founder and CEO of Blockstream which is currently one of the largest bitcoin developers. Back is also British and fits the dialect clue. However, Blockstream is somewhat contentious in certain crypto circles because the company financially benefits from keeping Bitcoin less scalable. Bitcoin’s scalability problem ultimately resulted in the Bitcoin Cash (BCH-USD) hard fork.
Len Sassaman
Yet another cypherpunk with ties to both Hal Finney and Adam Back, Len Sassaman tragically took his own life in 2011 shortly after Satoshi posted his goodbye to the community. Sassaman studied under DigiCash founder David Chaum, wrote in British English, and even lived with peer to peer BitTorrent protocol writer Bram Cohen in San Francisco. After Sassaman’s passing, he was immortalized in code on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Paul Le Roux
There’s another possible explanation regarding Satoshi’s disappearance. It’s possible Satoshi has been silent and coins haven’t moved - not because Satoshi is dead - but rather because Satoshi is behind bars. In one of the more off the wall theories, crime lord Paul Le Roux has been thrown out as a possible true identity of Satoshi due to his experience with encryption, software coding, his antigovernmental views, and his Wikipedia page showing up as a footnote in an otherwise heavily-redacted discovery document from the Kleiman v. Wright lawsuit. Speaking of which…
Craig Wright
Of course, I have to mention Craig Wright as a possibility. Wright is the creator of the Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV-USD) hard fork and has openly stated that he is the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. This is widely disbelieved by most people in the crypto community and Ethereum (ETH-USD) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has publicly stated BSV is a “total scam.” Interestingly, former Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen stated several years ago that he believed Wright was Satoshi though he has since walked that back more recently. There is some belief that Andresen gave credence to the Craig Wright theory to throw people off the correct path.
My Personal Take
Spoiler: I have no idea. I’ve gone back and forth on this several times and I can’t even confidently say Satoshi is one person. If we find out years from now that Szabo, Finney, and Back all played roles simultaneously I’d completely believe it. If we find out years from now that it was indeed one person all along, I’d believe that too.
Youtuber Barely Sociable laid out a really strong case for Adam Back as the sole operator of Satoshi a couple years ago. It’s probably not a surprise that Back denied this claim. With the exception of Craig Wright, all of these guys have denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.
I will make one claim though; I believe there are several people who do know who Satoshi actually is. But we’ll probably never know for sure. In any case, it’s a secret that has been held for 15 years and I think it will remain one of the great mysteries of our time.