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Who is Satoshi?

Leestijd: 4 min.

IFC +

2/23/2022

Satoshi's wallet

980,000BTC are still shining in Satoshi Nakamoto's wallet, For 11 years it has remained untouched. Converted to today's price of Feb. 2022, that's over $37 billion. You can begin to understand that there is tremendous speculation about who Satoshi really is. We list some of the theories.

Hal Finney

One name that gets called out here and there is Hal Finney. He was one of the core programmers of the Bitcoin project. We can't ask Hal himself anymore because the man passed away in 2014 due to a debilitating illness. For a long time this was also my prime suspect because besides being closely involved in this project, he was also the recipient of the very first Bitcoin transaction and the fact that the wallet remains untouched could well mean that Satoshi is no longer among us. Now the day after thorough research I can tell you that he probably wasn't. All correspondence between the early programmers can be found on the web. All e-mail conversations are open for reading ( https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/ ) . And if you look at this carefully you will see that Hal finney had a lot of questions about the Bitcoin project along the lines of, what about this, what about that. So the emails tell me that we need to look in a different direction.

Dorian Nakamoto

Probably one of the most notorious finger-pointing in the history of Bitcoin. In 2014, the weekly Newsweek released an article in which they claimed that Dorian was Satoshi Nakamoto. An American with Japanese roots. One of the arguments brought up separately from his last name was his education as an engineer. It took quite a while and caused quite a stir but Dorian kept denying that he had anything to do with it. And when the storm died down people finally realized it probably wasn't him after all but not before he received 100 Bitcoins from the community as a thank you shall we say.

Craig Faketoshi Wright

This person we can nominate for the biggest fuss in the recent years of Bitcoin. He was responsible for the Bitcoin Cash hard fork Bitcoin Satoshi's vision or BSV for short. Also this story started with an article this time in Wired magazine in 2015 where they profiled Craig and released that they had found the strongest evidence of Satoshi Nakamoto's identity. One of the pieces of evidence they presented mentioned that they found a paper on Craig's Blog about Cryptocurrency dated months before Satoshi released his White Paper. As well as correspondence between him and his lawyer where there is talk of a P2P distributed ledger. His response to this was that he tried to hide the fact that he was involved in Bitcoin from the beginning for a long time. After this, he went on to boast that he was the real Satoshi. It caused a lot of fuss and lawsuits and the Australian was never able to make his case. The general consensus in Cryptospace was that he was a Fraud. Hardly anyone is left who believes a word of what comes out of his mouth.

Nick Szabo

A computer engineer who released a paper on Smart Contracts back in 1996. In 1998 he released a precursor to Bitcoin, the decentralized Bit Gold. This came to nothing as he kept hitting the wall with the double spending problem. Nick was pointed out as Satoshi but he has always continued to deny this.

Cypherpunks

This group of Crypto anarchists finds its origins in the early 90's and is committed to privacy and government interference in the online world. It was a small group of genius computer scientists and programmers. It is said that they could well be behind the figure Satoshi Nakamoto because projects like Bitcoin is what these men were fighting for. A free internet where you can move and move anonymously and a digital currency that protects the identity of the issuer. The aforementioned Hal Finney and Nick Szabo were also part of this, by the way. So this theory assumes that it was a group of individuals hiding behind the figure of Satoshi.

Adam Back

British born cryptographer and also cypherpunk Adam Back was the inventor of Hashcash, technology that was also used in the Bitcoin protocol, if you also look at Satoshi's correspondence you will notice some British language here and there. Apart from all this he is also the co founder and CEO of Blockstream the biggest developers in the Bitcoin space, so in my opinion there is a real chance that Adam is Satoshi. We'll probably never know.

Who those 980,000btc belong to remains a big question mark and the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto continues and has grown into one of the biggest question marks in the digital world. Will there ever be movement in that wallet and will the world ever get to see the man or people behind Satoshi Nakamoto. Only time will tell.


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