Satoshi Nakamoto

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation.

As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database.

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 a man named 'Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto', according to Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg.

Greenberg asked the writing analysis consultancy Juola & Associates to compare a sample of Finney's writing to Nakamoto's, and found it to be the closest resemblance they had yet come across, including when compared to candidates suggested by Newsweek, Fast Company, The New Yorker, Ted Nelson, and Skye Grey.

Greenberg theorized that Finney may 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 is used to hide online exploits"; however, after meeting Finney, seeing the emails between him and Nakamoto and 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 that 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.

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 subsequently chasing him by car when he drove to do an interview.

Later that day, the pseudonymous Nakamoto's P2P Foundation account posted its first message in five years, stating: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto."

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.

Nakamoto stated that work on the writing of the code for Bitcoin began in the second quarter of 2007.

On 18 August 2008, he or a colleague registered the domain name bitcoin.org, and created a web site at that address.

On 31 October, Nakamoto published a white paper on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com describing a digital cryptocurrency, titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

On 9 January 2009, Nakamoto released version 0.1 of the Bitcoin software on SourceForge and launched the network by defining the genesis block of bitcoin (block number 0), which had a reward of 50 bitcoins.

Embedded in the coinbase transaction of this block is the text: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", citing a headline in the UK newspaper The Times published on that date.

This note has been interpreted as both a timestamp and a derisive comment on the alleged instability caused by fractional-reserve banking.

Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010.

There has been widespread speculation about Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity, with various people posited as the person or persons behind the name.

Nakamoto continued to collaborate with other developers on the Bitcoin software until mid-2010, making all modifications to the source code himself.

He then gave 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 recognized involvement in the project.

Nakamoto owns between 750,000 and 1,100,000 bitcoin.

In November 2021, when Bitcoin reached a value of over US$68,000, his net worth would have been up to US$73 billion, making him the 15th-richest person in the world at the time.

Nakamoto has never revealed personal information when discussing technical matters, though has at times provided commentary on banking and fractional-reserve banking.

Though Nakamoto's name is Japanese, and he stated in 2012 that he was a man living in Japan, most of the speculation has involved software and cryptography experts in the United States or Europe.

On his P2P Foundation profile as of 2012, Nakamoto claimed to be a 37-year-old male who lived in Japan; however, some speculated he was unlikely to be Japanese due to his native-level use of English.

Some have considered that 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 developer who had emailed Nakamoto, had the feeling the code was too well designed for one person; Gavin Andresen has said of Nakamoto's code: "He was a brilliant coder, but it was quirky."

The use of British English in both source code comments and forum postings, such as the expression "bloody hard", terms such as "flat" and "maths", and the spellings "grey" and "colour", led to speculation that Nakamoto, or at least one individual in a consortium claiming to be him, was of Commonwealth origin.

The reference to London's Times newspaper in the first bitcoin block mined by Nakamoto suggested to some a particular interest in the British government.

Stefan Thomas, a Swiss software engineer and active community member, graphed the timestamps for each of Nakamoto's bitcoin forum posts (more than 500); the chart showed a steep decline to almost no posts between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time (or midnight to 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time).

This was between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Japan Standard Time, suggesting an unusual sleep pattern for someone supposedly living in Japan.

As this pattern held even on Saturdays and Sundays, it suggested that Nakamoto was consistently asleep at this time.

The identity of Nakamoto is unknown, but speculations have focussed on various cryptography and computer science experts, most of non-Japanese descent.

In a high-profile 6 March 2014 article in the magazine Newsweek, journalist Leah McGrath Goodman identified Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese American man living in California, whose birth name is Satoshi Nakamoto, as the Nakamoto in question.

Besides his name, Goodman pointed to a number of facts that circumstantially suggested he was the Bitcoin inventor.

Trained as a physicist at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, Nakamoto worked as a systems engineer on classified defense projects and computer engineer for technology and financial information services companies.