Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi Nakamoto is a person famous as a founder of bitcoin and creator of unique bitcoin client.
Contents
Who created Bitcoin?
In his P2P Foundation profile he told that he was from Japan. Nothing else is known about him. He was working out his project since 2007 and in 2010 he finished his participation in bitcoin development. The Bitcoin founder is still unknown. Satoshi Nakamoto is the name, by which scientific work setting forward theoretical foundations about bitcoin is signed, so that it is unclear whether it is a pseudonym or not.
On a P2P Foundation profile, he claimed to be a man living in Japan, born on 5 April 1975.
Public activity of Satoshi Nakamoto
An article about new EZ Flash IV cryptocurrency has been published in 2008 and a year after it there has been published the first software, which has been launched in the network immediately. Nakamoto who was in the role of bitcoin developer continued his discussions on websites with specialists interested in further development of the system. But such a contact between him and his team was going to be weaker and in spring 2011 Satoshi announced his personal exit, as developer told: “In order to be engaged in more important tasks”.
Since then nobody heard about Nakamoto. This person disappeared as unexpected as appeared. The total control over the bitcoin.org domain has been handed to his colleagues including Gevin Anderson – one of the leader developers of the bitcoin.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
It is widely thought that there is no person with such a name. Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym which has been chosen for a certain person or a group of persons, first works setting forward basic crypto currency have been signed by this pseudonym.
This name became a kind of legend and mystery. It is known just that developer of the most popular cryptocurrency has chosen Japan male name, which can be translated as “a wise”. Society perceived his claim about Japan origin incredulously as neither software nor bitcoin customer in Japan exists.
Over a period of several years in mass media has been appeared information that behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto hides out a professor of economics and law, whose name is Nik Sabo, an owner of anonymous trading platform – Ross Ulbricht, Japanese mathematician – Motidzuki Siniti and many others. But all of them disproved their belonging to pseudonym and participation in bitcoin creation.
Possible identity
His identity and nationality are unknown. He is entirely unknown outside of bitcoin as far as anyone can tell, and his (never used) PGP key was created just months prior to the date of the genesis block. He seems to be very familiar with the cryptography mailing list, but there are no non-bitcoin posts from him on it.
He has used an email address from an anonymous mail hosting service (vistomail) as well as one from a free webmail account (gmx.com) and sends mail when connected via Tor. Some have speculated that his entire identity was created in advance in order to protect himself or the network. Perhaps he chose the name Satoshi because it can mean “wisdom” or “reason” and Nakamoto can mean “Central source”.
Ultimately the design of bitcoin and its use of cryptographic proof and fully open implementation is one that makes its creator, in a sense, irrelevant and only of interest for historical reasons.
Possible Motives
Satoshi left some clues about why he is doing this project with the inclusion of the following text in the Genesis block, “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of the second bailout for banks”.
Some interesting quotes:
- Yes, we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.
- Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled network like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own. Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:30:36 -0800
- It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though. Re: bitcoin P2P e-cash paper Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:29:22
Character research
Why should we know about his personality? Whoever Nakamoto appeared to be – real person, group of the persons or governmental body – it is very important information. It explains cryptocurrency origin and can confirm or disprove wide range of gossip and insinuations existing in BTC exchange. This mystery attracts researches. One of them Skye Grey made a huge work in this direction. He has published a very detailed analysis about text predispositions; this analysis is based on the search of key turn of bitcoin technical documentation, comparing it to works of the researcher of Jorge Washington University , whose name is Nick Szabo.
“Grey: I am not sure that it is Nick Szabo, but I have a lot of independent evidence denoting his side, each of evidence is very interesting”
According to text analysis, just 0.1% of all researches of cryptography were able to reproduce this way of writing. There is a fact that Nick was looking for technical employees for Bit Gold project featured cryptocurrency bitcoin, it has happened a few months before bitcoin announcement but after it, the project has been finished.
Satoshi did not cite Nick Szabo’s works while he was citing another cryptocurrency projects which were less connected with bitcoin.
There was an absence of reaction about bitcoin from the side of Nick Szabo while the decentralized currency topic was the main topic of his research for the last 10 years.
There was a fact that Nick antedated his articles about Bit Gold intentionally in order to look lagged. This began after bitcoin creation announcement.
In his researches, it is noticed that Nick during several years beginning from the 1998 was developing mechanism which allows decentralization of digital currency. In the long run, this mechanism changed to the system named “Bit Gold”, this system is the direct predecessor of bitcoin architecture.
According to widely acknowledged history of origin of bitcoin system Nakamoto was a highly skilled scientist (or group of scientists) who have found a Niko’s designing concerning Bit Gold and thought up an idea of its improvement, he has published technical description of bitcoin and decided to embody it by designing of unique bitcoin customer. Changing of date of publication of articles about BitGold: there are two basic articles in Niko’s blog, first one was originally published in December 2005, then the date of publication was made post factum in December 2008; the second article published in April 2008 has also been moved till December 2008.
It has been noticed because the date of recording in Blogger can be edited manually, but the original date will be seen in unedited URL. But this could happen because Nick could find deficits in the article and change or edit it till December.
On 6 of March 2014, the Newsweek Magazine has published an investigation of an experienced journalist whose name is Liya Gudman. An article was supposedly a kind of disclosure of Satoshi personality. During several months Liya Gudman was looking for bitcoin creature, as a result, she has found a man whose name was Dorian Prentis Satoshi Nakamoto. In the article, there was information that Dorian was the creator of bitcoin. But the day following it person who was supposed to be a creator of cryptocurrency bitcoin, made a denial in mass media. 64 years old American of Japan origin Dorian Nakamoto affirmed that three weeks ago he has heard about bitcoins for the first time. Nakamoto has noticed that a range of details in the article Newsweek is true – he was really working to a defense contractor in due time and the name he got at birth is really Satoshi. Nevertheless, he doesn’t refer to the legendary creator of bitcoin, who was hiding behind Satoshi Nakamoto’s pseudonym.
Assets in Bitcoins
Financial performance of Satoshi in the system is estimated at about 1 million of bitcoins, it is equal to 1.1 billion USA dollars. The search of mystery personality will undoubtedly continue because in hands of this person or even group of the persons are each 12th bitcoin, and Satoshi can easily destabilize the currency as fast as he placed it to the world market.
Satoshi used specific apparatus: while his like-minded persons who have been connected with bitcoin placed bitcoin-customer on simple apparatus, Satoshi used several tens of PCs at the same time or used FPGA-computer he has made by himself. Today we know it by his personal activity “script” in general list of transactions: Nakamato’s blocks can be easily seen on the graph (what one of researches has done; the result is on the picture).
Each dot on this graph is one block containing all transactions of the system for the last ten minutes. The time is LTR. Mining activity of Satoshi forms a visible rack.
Interesting facts
- The smallest part of bitcoin which can be sent is Satoshi (unit) in honor of its founder. 1 Satoshi is equal to 0.00000001 BTC.
- Journalist of Newsweek magazine Lia Gudman needed two months of investigations in order to make sure at last that Nakamoto is a real person. When Gudman knocked on the door of Nakamoto’s house, elderly Japanese has called the police.
- In LinkedIn you can even find some Nakamoto who names himself as a creator of bitcoin and lives in Japan.
- There are two books on Amazon by Satoshi Nakamoto: Wave and Ripple Design Book and The official Bitcoin Coloring Book.
Twitter
Telegram
