Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Over the past years, people have compiled some candidates to find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is, the mastermind behind Bitcoin.

Satoshi Nakamoto is often the first keyword that beginners look for on Google when learning Bitcoin. It's quite normal if you are curious about who is behind the creator of the oldest and largest crypto coin in the world. Satoshi Nakamoto is the creator of Bitcoin, even if no one really knows who they really are. To this day, it is unclear whether Satoshi Nakamoto is a man, a woman, or a group of people as the name is only a pseudonym. What's true is the fact that Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper in 2008 that started the development of cryptocurrencies.

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto appeared to build the world's first cryptocurrency, then suddenly disappeared. Communication to and from Nakamoto was done electronically, so their detailed information including personality or background were unexposed. A few years later on April 26, 2011, Satoshi Nakamoto sent his final email to fellow developers explaining that they had "moved to another project" while handing over the cryptographic key used to send alerts across the network.

Besides, apart from their status as a founder, Satoshi Nakamoto is a key figure in the crypto community, because they are a kind of philosophical person whose supremacy cannot be separated from the evolution of the digital money.

Theories on Satoshi Nakamoto's Identity

The mystery of Bitcoin's founder prompted the disclosure of theories and speculations about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, especially after people flock to buy Bitcoin after it became popular.

As a matter of fact, numerous attempts have been made to reveal their identity, but these efforts have yet to yield results. Although none has yet been 100% proven, some individuals are suspected of being the real Satoshi, which you can see in the list below:

1. Dorian Nakamoto

Dorian Nakamoto is a California-based physicist and systems engineer with the birth name Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto.

Leah McGrath Goodman, author, and award-winning investigative journalist wrote that Dorian was the creator of Bitcoin in a Newsweek article in March 2014. She said, "The trail Newsweek is following leads to a 64-year-old Japanese-American man whose real name is Satoshi Nakamoto."

The publication caused quite a stir in the crypto community, as it was the first time a mainstream publication had exposed the identity of Bitcoin founder. Newsweek claims some similarities between Satoshi Nakamoto and Dorian Nakamoto, like the two are supposedly libertarians with Japanese connections.

Furthermore, Dorian is a Japanese-American who graduated from a physic major at the California Polytechnic and had worked on secret defense projects.

McGrath also added that Dorian said he was "no longer" involved with Bitcoin and had "handed over" it to someone else. Unfortunately, subsequent investigations ruled Nakamoto out of the candidacy. Dorian Nakamoto later refuted the quote and claimed that he misunderstood the question. He blatantly denied any connection to Bitcoin.

On the other hand, Newsweek's biggest mistake was publishing photos of Nakamoto's house. Image search can easily find his address. As a result of this publicity, whenever you browse Satoshi Nakamoto's keyword, Dorian's face will appear on the first page.

2. Craig Wright

Most of the suspected creators of Bitcoin would deny it, but Craig Wright, an Australian academic and businessman, boldly said he was the mastermind behind Bitcoin.

In December 2015, Wired Magazine wrote a profile about Wright, claiming to have obtained the strongest evidence yet of Satoshi Nakamoto's real identity.

Wired's evidence refers to the "cryptocurrency paper" on Wright's blog that was posted months before the Bitcoin white paper began circulating. In addition, there was a leak of email correspondence between Wright and his attorney that referred to a "P2P distributed ledger".

There is evidence of transcripts regarding a meeting with lawyers and tax officials quoting Wright saying, "I did my best to try and hide the fact that I've been running Bitcoin since 2009. By the end of this, I think half the world is going to bloody know."

The mentioned claims were questioned by people, so Wired rushed to follow up on their report because of some inconsistencies in Wright's story. For example, blog posts appear to be intentionally backdated. The public encryption key evidence associated with Satoshi Nakamoto also appears to be backdated. Even Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has publicly labeled Wright a fraud.

But Wright seems to have remained unfazed by public criticism and censure as he still claims to be the man behind Bitcoin.

3. Nick Szabo

Szabo was an early cypherpunk (an activist advocating the widespread use of cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change) and made friends with many people in that circle. He is also a computer scientist who blogs about a digital currency called "BitGold", the precursor to Bitcoin.

He described BitGold as a "protocol which expensive, non-falsifiable bits can be created online with minimal reliance on a third party." He too coined the term "smart contracts" a piece of code that is running on the second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum.

On that basis, author Dominic Frisby hypothesized that Nick Szabo was Satoshi Nakamoto in his book, "Bitcoin: The Future of Money?"

Frisby also consulted with a stylometric who concluded that Szabo's writing style was similar to Satoshi's famous writings. Plus, the fact that Szabo used to work at DigiCash, an early attempt to bring cryptography to digital payments, made Frisby even more convinced that Nick Szabo was Satoshi Nakamoto.

4. Hal Finney

Bitcoin is a product of the cypherpunk movement, and one of the pillars of that movement is Hal Finney.

As a cryptographer and software developer, Finney was the first recipient of Bitcoin. He used to regularly interact with Satoshi Nakamoto on the bitcointalk.org forum and was very active in the community before and after the launch of Bitcoin. Unfortunately, Finney passed away in 2014, which might explain why Satoshi's Bitcoin stockpile went untouched.

Another more surprising coincidence is that he lived only a few blocks from Dorian Nakamoto, so people speculate Finney might have used his neighbor's name as a pseudonym when he created Bitcoin.

5. Gavin Andresen

The creator of the first Bitcoin faucet, Andresen was the custodian that Satoshi Nakamoto entrusted with the Bitcoin source code. Graduated from Princeton with a computer science degree in 1988, he developed software for a number of companies before working full-time on the Bitcoin project with Satoshi Nakamoto in December 2010. Prior to this, he focused his career on 3D graphics and virtual reality modeling.

6. Adam Back

Adam Back is a cypherpunk and cryptographer, and one of the first recipients of emails from Satoshi Nakamoto. The Financial Times listed his name as a candidate for the person behind Satoshi in 2016.

Cardano founder and Ethereum co-founder, Charles Hoskinson, firmly believe that Satoshi Nakamoto's real identity is Adam Back. Hoskinson doesn't have any concrete evidence to prove his theory, but he thinks Back is the most likely candidate because he has all the characteristics that logically fit Nakamoto's profile.

Long before the birth of Bitcoin, Back developed Hashcash in 1997, which is a proof-of-work system aimed for reducing spam emails and increasing defense against cyber attacks. He wrote an official paper on Hashcash in 2002, whose system would later be integrated into the Bitcoin mining algorithm. Back vehemently denied that he was Nakamoto, so no one knew whether he was telling the truth or not.

7. Len Sassaman

Len Sassaman was a contributor to the cypherpunk mailing list where Satoshi first announced Bitcoin. He is an expert in public-key cryptography and often worked with Hal Finney. Sadly, Sassaman was later memorialized on the Bitcoin blockchain after his suicide in 2011.

8. Elon Musk

In 2017, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was mentioned as a Satoshi candidate after a former SpaceX employee named him the creator of Bitcoin. Musk strongly denied it via his Twitter account.

However, Musk's involvement with Bitcoin does not stop there. In a quite surprising maneuver, his company Tesla bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin as they plan to accept it as a payment method.

EndNote

Until now, efforts to uncover Satoshi Nakamoto are still continuing. On crypto forums, a lot of wild speculations continue to float around, suspecting them as a member of Yakuza, part of developers, money launderer, or maybe even a woman.

Needless to say, their role in the crypto world is enormous that the mystery surrounding their identity is too interesting to miss out on. As Bitcoin became one of the most significant discoveries in economic history, it is undeniable that Satoshi Nakamoto is among the most noteworthy icons of this century.

Regardless, after nearly a decade has passed without success, it seems impossible to reveal the person behind Satoshi unless they choose to open themselves to the public.

Just like its creator, Bitcoin is known for one of its qualities: anonymity. Unfortunately, rules and regulations sometimes diminish Bitcoin's anonymity. If f you want to go completely anonymous during Bitcoin transactions, you don't need to worry for there are some good solutions to consider here.