Satoshi Nakamoto [Chinese: 中本哲史, Japanese (Hiragana) 中本聪, (Katakana) サトシ・ナカモト] is the anonymous person or organization that created Bitcoin and open-source software (formerly named Bitcoin-Qt) for people to use Bitcoin.
The most mysterious character in the 21st century
Even though the true identity of him/her is a secret, everyone knows his achievements. Satoshi Nakamoto founded bitcoin protocol and published whitepaper through Cryptography Mailing List in November 2008.
Later, he proceeded to release the first version of the bitcoin software, joined other people in the project via a mailing list simultaneously. Finally, he gradually disappeared from the community around the year 2010.
Nakamoto collaborated with others on an open-source group but never disclosed any personal information when. And the last time the world heard of Bitcoin creator was in spring, 2011. He said he “moved on to other things.”
Is Satoshi Nakamoto Japanese?
Judging the book by its cover is not good at all. But in fact, we should do so in some cases. By linguistic analyzes, in Japanese, Satoshi means intelligence, quick and coherent thinking. Naka (中) means medium or central (the same meaning with China in Kanji (中国), Moto (本聪) means origin, foundation, base (the same meaning with Japan in Kanji (日本).
These qualities can be used to describe the person who created the revolution by designing a smart algorithm. Undoubtedly, the problem is that each word has more interpretable meanings. It’s unsure that if he is Japanese or not. We don’t have enough evidence to prove that he is male.
Maybe, could Satoshi Nakamoto be “Mrs”/”Miss,” or even “them”?
Does anyone know who Nakamoto is?
The answer is no. However, the way people use detective techniques to guess is more interesting than the answer. Joshua Clear (The New Yorker) believed that Satoshi Nakamoto was Michael Clear, a graduate cryptography student from Trinity University in Dublin. He came to that conclusion as he studied 80000 words in Nakamoto’s post and relied on linguistic prompts. He also suspected that Satoshi was a Finnish economist, formerly a game developer named Vili Lehdonvirta. But both of them denied being the creator of bitcoin. Michael Clear also denied publicly in Web Meeting, 2013.
Adam Penenberg from FastCompany claimed that Nakamoto was three people: Neal King, Vladimir Oskman, and Charles Bry. He concluded by typing unique phrases in bitcoin whitepapers that Nakamoto once wrote on Google to see if anyone had used such phrases before.
One of the phrases is “computationally impractical to reverse,” which appeared in the patent application of these three people as they updated and distributed encryption keys. The bitcoin.org domain had been initially used by Satoshi to post articles registered three days before the patent application was saved.
The bitcoin.org source name is registered in Finland. And one of the patent holders had come here six months before the domain name was registered. But none of them confirmed this.
But, when bitcoin.org was registered on August 18, 2008, the member used an anonymous Japanese registration service and hosted the site via Japanese ISP. Site registration was subsequently moved to Finland on May 18, 2011, which means that Finnish theory seems to be not very accurate.
It was thought that he was Martii Malmi, a developer living in Finland, who had been with the development of bitcoin since the beginning. He also developed its user interface. There was an opinion that he was Jeb McCaleb, who loves Japanese culture and lives in Japan. He is also the one who created bitcoin exchange with more problems like Mt. Gox and is the co-founder of distributed payment systems like Ripple and later Stellar.
Another theory was that computer scientists Donal O’Mahony and Michael Peirce were Satoshi, based on the article they wrote about digital payment, along with Hitesh Tewari, based on the book they published. O’Mahony and Tewari both studied at Trinity University, where Michael Clear attended.
Irac scholars Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir of the Weizmann Research Institute thought that there was a connection between Satoshi and Silk Road (the FBI removed Silk Road – the black trading website in October 2013). They believed that there was a link between the recognized address of Satoshi and this website. Security researcher Dustin D. Trammell later informed that he was the owner of this address and denied that he was Satoshi.
In May 2013, Internet pioneer Ted Nelson declared: Japanese mathematician Professor Shinichi Mochizuki is Satoshi. He acknowledged in detail.
In February 2014, Leah McGrath Goodman from Newsweek announced that he had found the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Dorian S Nakamoto later denied that he knew nothing about bitcoin, even hired a lawyer, and made an official statement.
Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto
No, Satoshi is not a 64-year-old Japanese man living in California, it’s maybe possible… But in online media and discussions, Hal Finney, Michael Weber, Wei Dai and other developers who were considered to be likely Satoshi. An Aston University linguistic team believed that the person who created bitcoin was Nick Szabo, based on Bitcoin White Paper analysis.
Dominic Frisby, the comedian, and writer, also suggested that BitGold founder named Szabo is very likely Satoshi in his book “Bitcoin: The Future of Money.” He carefully analyzed the words used in Satoshi’s writing, assessed the C ++ programming level, and even guessed the birthday of Satoshi. In Nathaniel Popper’s “Digital Gold,” published in 2015, Popper revealed that during a rare encounter at the event, Szabo once again denied he was not Satoshi.
Then in early December 2015, Wired and Gizmodo ardently announced that they had identified the real Nakamoto – the Australian businessman named Craig S Wright. WIRED cites the “anonymous source close to Wright” – the provider of caches for emails, transcripts, and other documents led to Wright’s role in creating bitcoin. Gizdomo said that he had caches of documents because of the one who claimed to have hacked Wright’s business email account. This idea sounds like a trick, but the evidence presented is likely to make people suspect.
After all, no one mentioned confirmed that they were Nakamoto.
What can we know well about Satoshi?
There is one thing for sure. Based on interviews with people involved in his early stages of bitcoin development, he saw through the system in a clear, transparent way.
According to core developer Jeff Garzik, the way he encodes is unusual. He did not set out to test strickly like other software programmers.
How rich is Satoshi Nakamoto?
According to Sergio Lerner Research, due to his rights with bitcoin and cryptography, Satoshi is likely to have created a lot of blocks in the bitcoin network. And they predict that at present, he has about 1 million available bitcoins. In January 2018, that amount of bitcoins could cost $ 15 billion; in January 2019, his amount would be around $ 4 billion. He ranks in the top 400 world’s wealthiest people of Forbes. With the crazily rising price of Bitcoin, it is expected he will become the wealthiest billionaire in the world soon.
What is he doing now?
No one knows what Satoshi is aiming for, but in the last emails he sent back to the software developer on April 23, 2011, he said, “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
Does he work for the government?
Of course, there are such rumors. People deduce his name that “central intelligence,” but people choose what they want to see. This is just a conspiracy theory. The obvious question is why the government must create a digital currency that can be used to trade anonymously, make government officials and the FBI worried about the risk of terrorism and crimes breaking out?
Perhaps that is not important. ACore developer named Jeff Garzik summed it up. “Satoshi created an open-source system, and you don’t need to know why he did it, just believed in him, or cared about his knowledge. Open-source does not allow secrets to be hidden”. “The source code itself says all.”
Moreover, he supposed it would be better to sign up anonymously. Because in that way people will pay attention to this new technology rather than who created it. Anyway, up to this point, bitcoin has become much better and more popular than the name Satoshi Nakamoto.
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