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The mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto BITCOIN
Alex Hamilton investigates the shadowy figure behind the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.
in Bitcoin folklore. He or she published a paper in November 2008 entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” on the Cryptography Mailing List, before releasing a software client in 2009 and disappearing entirely from the Bitcoin community the following year as the system was just beginning to build momentum.
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Nakamoto didn’t reveal anything about themselves. A (perhaps fittingly) cryptic message left in 2011 noted that they had “moved on to other things”. It left many perplexed. It’s unknown if Satoshi Nakamoto is even their real name. Some have suggested that it’s in fact a clever portmanteau of Japanese words: “Satoshi” means “wise” or “quick witted” while Naka can mean “relationship” and “Moto” mean “origin” or “foundation”. Placed together, Nakamoto can also mean “central source”.
Nakamoto claimed to be a 37-year old Japanese male on his P2P Foundation profile, yet this has been concluded as unlikely due to their use of perfect English and none of the Bitcoin software being labelled or documented in Japanese. The use of colloquialisms like “bloody hard” and other turns of phrase led some to believe that they are from the UK, New Zealand, Australia or South Africa. There’s little else to go on.
Many people have had to openly state that they are not Nakamoto, as in the case of Michael Clear, a graduate cryptography student at Dublin’s Trinity College and Vili Lehdonvirta, a former games developer from Finland.
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atoshi Nakamoto is a name etched
Claims were even made that it was a group of people working in tandem. In 2011, Adam Penenberg at FastCompany typed unique phrases from Nakamoto’s initial paper on Bitcoin into Google to find instances where they had been used before. One particular phrase appeared in a patent application made by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry. The patent concerned distributing encryption keys and the original
bitcoin.org domain name was registered just three days after it had been filed. All three men denied that they were Nakamoto and it was later discovered that bitcoin. org was registered using a Japanese registration service and hosted on a Japanese ISP.
Nick Szabo is a name that was prominently linked with Nakamoto in 2013 and 2014. Skye Grey, a blogger, connected Szabo to Bitcoin’s founder by using content analysis. Szabo, a supporter of decentralised currency who had published a paper on “bit gold” prior to the explosion of Bitcoin, seemed like a perfect fit. Szabo had also kept up a number of pseudonyms in the 90s. In
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