Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown person or people who designed Bitcoin and created its original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, they also devised the first blockchain database. In the process, they were the first to solve the double-spending problem for digital currency. They were active in the development of Bitcoin up until December 2010.^[1][2][3][4]

History

On his P2P Foundation profile, Nakamoto claimed to be a man living in Japan, born on April 5, 1975. However, speculation about the true identity of Nakamoto has mostly focused on the identities of several cryptography and computer science experts of non-Japanese accents, living in the United States and Europe. As of May 24, 2017, Nakamoto was believed to own up to roughly one million Bitcoins out of the total volume of 21 million Bitcoins in circulation, with a value estimated at approximately USD 9 billion as of November 2017. He also owned an estimated one million Bitcoin Cash coins as of the hard fork on August 1, 2017, and one million Bitcoin Gold coins as of the hard fork activated on October 24, 2017.^[5][6][7][8]

Bitcoin Development

In October 2008, Nakamoto published a paper on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com describing the Bitcoin digital currency. It was titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. In January 2009, Nakamoto released the first Bitcoin software that launched the network and the first units of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Satoshi Nakamoto released the Version 0.1 of Bitcoin software on Sourceforge on 9 January 9, 2009.^{[9][10][11][12]}

Nakamoto claimed that work on the writing of the code began in 2007. The inventor of Bitcoin knew that due to its nature, the core design would have to be able to support a broad range of transaction types. The implemented solution enabled specialized codes and data fields from the start through the use of a predictive script.

Nakamoto created a website with the domain name bitcoin.org and continued to collaborate with other developers on the Bitcoin software until mid-2010. Around this time, he handed over control of the source code repository and network alert key to Gavin Andresen, transferred several related domains to various prominent members of the Bitcoin community, and stopped his involvement in the project. Shortly before his absence and handover, Nakamoto made all modifications to the source code himself.^{[13][14][15][16]}

Gavin Andresen said of Nakamoto's code:

"He was a brilliant coder, but it was quirky".

The inventor left a text message in the first mined block which reads 'The Times 3 January 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks'. The text referred to a headline in The Times published on January 3, 2009. It was a strong indication that the first block was mined no earlier than this date. The genesis block has a timestamp of 18:15:05 GMT on January 3, 2009. This block was unlike all other blocks in that it didn't have a previous block to reference. This required the use of custom code to mine it. Timestamps for subsequent blocks indicate that Nakamoto did not try to mine all the early blocks solely for himself.

Satoshi himself was awarded Bitcoin at genesis and for 10 days afterwards. Except for test transactions, these have remained unspent since mid-January 2009. The public Bitcoin transaction log shows that Nakamoto's known addresses contain roughly one million bitcoins. As of November 15, 2017, this was worth over $7,239,000,000. Due to the hard fork in which Bitcoin Cash was made, creating one Bitcoin Cash for every Bitcoin in circulation, he also owned roughly one million Bitcoin Cash, worth about $1 billion.^{[17][18][19][20]}

In his book "Cloud Empires", Vili Lehdonvirta, an Oxford University social scientist, book author, and former software developer positioned Nakamoto in a line of digital age libertarians, beginning with John Barlow, the cyberlibertarian “who dreamed of a virtual society in which order emerged independently of the authority of territorial states.” Nakamoto was viewed through a political scientist’s lens. Lehdonvirta wrote:^[56]

“Nakamoto was not interested in making the institutions more democratic. Instead, he wanted to resuscitate the Barlowian dream of a digital social order that wouldn’t need such institutions in the first place — no bureaucrats, no politicians who inevitably betrayed their electorates’ trust, no elections rigged by corporations, no corporate overlords. Nakamoto still thought that such a social order could be created with technology — and in particular, with cryptographic technology.”

Characteristics and Identity

Nakamoto did not disclose any personal information when discussing technical matters. He provided some commentary on banking and fractional-reserve banking. On his P2P Foundation profile as of 2012, Nakamoto claimed to be a 37-year-old male who lived in Japan, but some speculated he was unlikely to be Japanese due to his use of perfect English and his Bitcoin software not being documented or labeled in Japanese.^{[21][22][23][24]}

Occasional British English spelling and terminology (such as the phrase "bloody hard") in both source code comments and forum postings led to speculation that Nakamoto or at least one individual in the consortium claiming to be him, was of Commonwealth origin.

Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and active community member, graphed the time stamps for each of Nakamoto's Bitcoin forum posts (more than 500); the resulting chart showed a steep decline to almost no posts between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Because this pattern held even on Saturdays and Sundays, it suggested that Nakamoto was asleep at this time. If Nakamoto was a single individual with conventional sleeping habits, it suggested he resided in a region using the UTC−05:00 or UTC−06:00 time offset. This includes the parts of North America that fall within the Eastern Time Zone and Central Time Zone, as well as parts of Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.

Nakamoto's initial email to Wei Dai was dated 22 August 2008; the metadata for this PDF () yields as the value - this implied 3 October 2008 or a bit over a month later, which was consistent with the local date mentioned in the Cypherpunk mailing list email. This was an earlier draft than the final draft, which was dated March 24, 2009; the time zone differs: -7 vs -6.^{[25][26][27][28]}

Possible Identities

There is still doubt about the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo is a computer engineer and legal scholar. He is credited with pioneering the concept of smart contracts in a 1996 paper. In 2008, he conceptualized a decentralized currency he called Bit Gold, a precursor to Bitcoin. He described Bit Gold as:

“a protocol whereby unforgeable costly bits could be created online with minimal dependence on trusted third parties.”

This is similar to the Bitcoin concept, whereby a series of bits created by a network of computers without a leader verifies and validates transactions.^[57]

In December 2013, a blogger named Skye Grey linked Nick Szabo to the Bitcoin whitepaper using a stylometric analysis. Szabo is a decentralized currency enthusiast and published a paper on "bit gold", which is considered a precursor to Bitcoin. He is known to have been interested in using pseudonyms in the 1990s. In a May 2011 article, Szabo stated about the bitcoin creator:

"Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea (or in Dai's case his related idea) enough to pursue it to any significant extent until Nakamoto (assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai)."

Detailed research by financial author Dominic Frisby provided much circumstantial evidence but, as he admitted, no proof that Satoshi was Szabo. Speaking on RT's The Keiser Report, he said:

"I've concluded there is only one person in the whole world that has the sheer breadth but also the specificity of knowledge and it is this chap...".

But Szabo denied being Satoshi. In a July 2014 email to Frisby, he said:

"Thanks for letting me know. I'm afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi, but I'm used to it'. Nathaniel Popper wrote in the New York Times that "the most convincing evidence pointed to a reclusive American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo".

Dorian Nakamoto

In a high-profile article in the magazine Newsweek on 6 March 2014, journalist Leah McGrath Goodman identified Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese American man living in California, whose birth name was Satoshi Nakamoto, as the Nakamoto in question. Besides his name, Goodman pointed out some facts that circumstantially suggested he was the Bitcoin inventor. Trained as a physicist at Cal Poly University in Pomona, Nakamoto worked as a systems engineer on classified defense projects and computer engineer for technology and financial information services companies. Nakamoto was laid off twice in the early 1990s and turned libertarian, according to his daughter, and encouraged her to start her own business "not under the government's thumb." In the article's seemingly biggest piece of evidence, Goodman wrote that when she asked him about Bitcoin during a brief in-person interview, Nakamoto seemed to confirm his identity as the Bitcoin founder by stating:

"I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it. It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."

The article's publication led to a flurry of media interest, including reporters camping out near Dorian Nakamoto's house and briefly chasing him by car when he drove to an interview. However, during the subsequent full-length interview, Dorian Nakamoto denied all connection to Bitcoin, saying he had never heard of the currency before, and that he had misinterpreted Goodman's question as being about his previous work for military contractors, much of which was classified. In a Reddit "ask-me-anything" interview, he claimed he had misinterpreted Goodman's question as being related to his work for Citibank. Later that day, the pseudonymous Nakamoto's P2P Foundation account posted its first message in five years, stating: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto." However, it was generally believed that Nakamoto's P2P Foundation account had been hacked, and the message was not sent by him.^{[29][30][31][32]}

Hal Finney

Hal Finney (4 May 1956 – 28 August 2014) was a pre-bitcoin cryptographic pioneer and the first person (other than Nakamoto himself) to use the software, file bug reports, and make improvements. He also lived a few blocks from Dorian Nakamoto's family home, according to Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg. Greenberg asked the writing analysis consultancy Juola & Associates to compare a sample of Finney's writing to Satoshi Nakamoto's, and they found that it was the closest resemblance they had yet come across (including the candidates suggested by Newsweek, Fast Company, The New Yorker, Ted Nelson and Skye Grey).

Greenberg theorized that Finney might have been a ghostwriter on behalf of Nakamoto, or that he simply used his neighbor Dorian's identity as a "drop" or "patsy whose personal information was used to hide online exploits". However, after meeting Finney, seeing the emails between him and Nakamoto, his Bitcoin wallet's history including the very first Bitcoin transaction (from Nakamoto to him, which he forgot to pay back), and hearing his denial, Greenberg concluded Finney was telling the truth. Juola & Associates also found that Nakamoto's emails to Finney more closely resemble Nakamoto's other writings than Finney's do. Finney's fellow extropian and sometimes co-blogger Robin Hanson assigned a subjective probability of "at least" 15% that "Hal was more involved than he’s said" before further evidence suggested that was not the case.^{[33][34][35][36][37]}

Craig Steven Wright

On December 9, 2015, Wired wrote that Craig Steven Wright, an Australian former academic, "either invented Bitcoin or is a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did". Craig Wright took down his Twitter account and neither he nor his ex-wife responded to press inquiries. The same day, Gizmodo published a story with evidence obtained by a hacker who supposedly broke into Wright's email accounts, claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto was a joint pseudonym for Craig Steven Wright and computer forensics analyst David Kleiman, who died in 2013. Several prominent Bitcoin promoters remained unconvinced by the reports. Subsequent reports also raised the possibility that the evidence provided was an elaborate hoax, which Wired acknowledged "cast doubt" on their suggestion that Wright was Nakamoto.^{[38][39][40][41]}

On December 9, only hours after Wired claimed Wright was Nakamoto, Wright's home in Gordon, New South Wales was raided by at least ten police officers. His business premises in Ryde, New South Wales were also searched by the police. The Australian Federal Police stated they conducted searches to assist the Australian Taxation Office and that "This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency bitcoin." According to a document released by Gizmodo alleged to be a transcript of a meeting between Wright and the ATO, he had been involved in a taxation dispute with them for several years.^{[42][43][44][45]}

On May 2, 2016, Craig Wright posted on his blog publicly claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto. In articles released on the same day, journalists from the BBC and The Economist stated that they saw Wright signing a message using the private key associated with the first Bitcoin transaction.  Wright's claim was supported by Jon Matonis (former director of the Bitcoin Foundation) and Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, both of whom met Wright and witnessed a similar signing demonstration.

However, bitcoin developer Peter Todd said that Wright's blog post, which appeared to contain cryptographic proof, actually contained nothing of the sort. The Bitcoin Core project released a statement on Twitter saying "There is currently no publicly available cryptographic proof that anyone in particular is Bitcoin's creator." Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik agreed that evidence publicly provided by Wright does not prove anything, and security researcher Dan Kaminsky concluded Wright's claim was "intentional scammery".^{[46][47][48][49]}

On May 4, 2016, Wright made another post on his blog promising to publish "a series of pieces that will lay the foundations for this extraordinary claim". But the following day, he deleted all his blog posts and replaced them with a notice entitled "I'm Sorry", which read in part:

I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me. But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot.

In June 2016, the London Review of Books published an article by Andrew O'Hagan about the events, based on discussions with Wright and many of the other people involved in claiming the identity of Satoshi. It also reveals that the Canadian company nTrust was behind Wright's claim made in May 2016.

Other Personalities

In a 2011 article in The New Yorker, Joshua Davis claimed to have narrowed down the identity of Nakamoto to several possible individuals, including the Finnish economic sociologist Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta and Irish student Michael Clear, then a graduate student in cryptography at Trinity College Dublin. Clear strongly denied he was Nakamoto, as did Lehdonvirta.

In October 2011, writing for Fast Company, investigative journalist Adam Penenberg cited circumstantial evidence suggesting Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry could be Nakamoto. They jointly filed a patent application that contained the phrase "computationally impractical to reverse" in 2008, which was also used in the Bitcoin white paper by Nakamoto. The domain name bitcoin.org was registered three days after the patent was filed. All three men denied being Nakamoto when contacted by Penenberg. ^[50][51][52]

In May 2013, Ted Nelson speculated that Nakamoto was Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki. Later, an article was published in The Age newspaper that claimed that Mochizuki denied these speculations, but without attributing a source for the denial.

A 2013 article, in Vice, listed Gavin Andresen, Jed McCaleb, or a government agency as possible candidates to be Nakamoto. Dustin D. Trammell, a Texas-based security researcher, was suggested as Nakamoto, but he publicly denied it.

In 2013, two Israeli mathematicians, Dorit Ron, and Adi Shamir, published a paper claiming a link between Nakamoto and Ross William Ulbricht. The two based their suspicion on an analysis of the network of bitcoin transactions, but later retracted their claim.

Some considered Nakamoto might be a team of people; Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher who read the Bitcoin code, said that Nakamoto could either be a "team of people" or a "genius"; Laszlo Hanyecz, a former Bitcoin core developer who had emailed Nakamoto, had the feeling the code was too well designed for one person.

A 2017 article, published on the website CryptoCoinsNews espoused the possibility of SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk being the real Satoshi, as bitcoin was written by someone with a mastery of C++, a language heavily used at SpaceX. However, it also pointed to sometimes negative comments by Musk towards Bitcoin as well as personal struggles Musk was going through around the time Bitcoin emerged. ^[53][54]

At the end of August 2019, a marketing and public relations (PR) agency, Ivy McLemore & Associates, published a press release that featured a man from Pakistan named Bilal Khalid who claimed he invented Bitcoin. While the Pakistani Bilal Khalid who is also referred to as James Caan or James Bilal Caan provided no proof, the public relations agency’s founder Ivy Mclemore published a book called “Finding Satoshi: The Real Story Behind Mysterious Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto.” The book's description did not mention Khalid by name but stated:

"The book gives readers the unique opportunity to join a reporter on the search of a lifetime for the creator of the world’s best-performing investment. It looks at 40 candidates and leads to a little-known, under-the-radar suspect with stunning, previously untold secrets only Bitcoin’s creator could know."

Over the years, there have been many claimants that had said they were Satoshi Nakamoto but in more recent times claims like this had subsided. Before 2020, individuals like the Hawaiian Nakamoto, Phil Wilson ‘Scronty,’ Debo Jurgen Etienne Guido, and Jörg Molt had all claimed to be Bitcoin’s inventor. No one had heard from the Hawaiian Nakamoto, both Scronty and Debo continued to tweet about Bitcoin’s origins, and Jörg Molt was arrested for an alleged crypto pension fraud. Moreover, most of the crypto community forgot about Khalid’s story, after he was unable to provide any legitimate proof backing his claims.^[55]

HBO Documentary on Satoshi's Identity

On October 3, 2024, HBO released a trailer for its upcoming documentary called - "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery" which claimed to have cracked the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. ^[58]

The documentary is a work of Emmy-nominated Cullen Hoback, who received critical acclaim for his series "Q: Into the Storm," which exposed the creators of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The big reveal is scheduled to air on Tuesday, October 8, 2024. ^[59]

In his interview with Fast Company, Hoback shared his thoughts on why unveiling the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto was important;

"There’s real value in figuring this out. I think there’s a narrative that exists that Satoshi disappeared and was never heard from again. I think if Satoshi is actively involved in driving global Bitcoin adoption, rendering themselves the richest person on Earth? That’s a different story. You know how we used to rely on a gold standard? There’s a drive right now to rely on a Bitcoin standard, and it would be like one unknown person controlling one-twentieth of all the gold

Just having this massive stockpile, because Bitcoin is being baked into the backbone of countries now, it’s being used as legal tender in some places. It’s being used in 401(k)s. It’s now being traded on Wall Street. This question of whether or not there’s an anonymous figure out there who controls a giant share of Bitcoin becomes increasingly relevant. And I think this is very important, and this is one of the things I kept coming back to, is that Satoshi could have destroyed their stash in a public way for everyone to see. Assuming they were alive, this is something they could have done. This would have been good for, you know, sort of Satoshi’s security and for the security and longevity of Bitcoin. But Satoshi didn’t do that—which means that the possibility still exists.

So, trying to understand who is behind this, whether or not they would pull that lever, is very important."^[60]

Peter Todd Named

On October 9, 2024, HBO’s documentary 'Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery' identified Peter Todd as the pseudonymous creator. ^[61]

Peter Todd is an early contributor to the Bitcoin codebase, Todd is among a few individuals who communicated directly with Satoshi before their disappearance in 2011. He previously confirmed that he was in his early teens when he started communication with Hal Finney and Adam Back, two prominent Bitcoin pioneers. ^[62]

However, in response to a thread on X originally posted by BitMEX Research, Todd denies the claim saying; 

"I'm not Satoshi." ^[63]