Satoshi Nakamoto
The Bitcoin white paper authored under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto was published on 31 October 2008. In it, Nakamoto described bitcoin as “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” He claimed that, unlike previous digital currencies such as e-gold, he had no intention of making money from bitcoin itself; rather, he viewed bitcoin as the currency that would enable financial transactions without the possibility of fraud or third party interference. Nakamoto did make one reference to himself in the document: “I am not active in this project I created this software.” This statement led many commentators to believe that Nakamoto was either male or female, though some suggested that it could refer to multiple programmers working together.
Nakamoto posted the original bitcoin whitepaper to a cryptography mailing list on 3 January 2009. A few days later, he sent out the first 50 bitcoins to randomly selected recipients. Nakamoto mined the genesis block of the blockchain on 30 January 2009. The block was discovered on 10 February 2009. On 18 August 2010, Nakamoto handed over the keys and passwords related to his wallet to Gavin Andresen, who took responsibility for the code repository.
Development of bitcoin
Nakamoto states that he came up with the idea for Bitcoin in 1998. He claims that it was originally called BitGold, though some sources claim that the original concept dates back to 1999 and even 1996. In 2005, Nakamoto published a paper describing Bitcoin. His identity remained secret for three years, however, because Nakamotos computer was anonymously hosted on servers based in Japan. In October 2008, Nakamoto revealed himself to be Satoshi Nakamoto, releasing a statement explaining his decision to remain anonymous.
On 18 August 2008, Nakamoto registered the domain namebitcoin.org, and later that month released version 0.1. On 9 January 2009, he released the open source bitcoin client named “Bitcoin”, which allowed people to send and receive bitcoin via email. Users could generate bitcoin addresses without access to internet-based transaction systems such as PayPal. As of May 2017, over 300,000 unique users used the bitcoin wallet service Blockchain.info.
In April 2010, Nakamoto announced that the release of version 0.3 would include changes to mining difficulty, reducing the maximum blocksize limit from 1 MB to 500 KB, and increasing the size of each block to 2 MB. This change was intended to reduce the impact of miners with specialized hardware. On 10 July 2010, the bitcoin network experienced congestion during peak hours associated with the release of the first ASIC-resistant block, Block 595144; Nakamoto temporarily halted releases while further research into scaling solutions was conducted.
In June 2011, Nakamoto publicly described how bitcoin works, publishing the first detailed explanation of the peer-to-peer payment system. At the University of Nicosia on 3 November 2012, Nakamoto demonstrated proof of concept of a fully working blockchain.
Satoshi Nakamoto mined approximately one million bitcoins prior to disappearing in late 2010. Researchers from Chainalysis determined that the location of this generation node was a pool of IP addresses located within the range of 72.52.128.0/11.
The earliest known reference to Satoshi Nakamoto is an entry in Dorian Prentice Lambsdons diary dated 14 February 2008, in which Nakamoto is referred to as a pseudonym. Nakamoto did not use his real name when creating the whitepaper.
Characteristics and identity
Nakamoto has never revealed personal data about himself, except for his birthdate, age, gender, nationality and place of residence. He has stated he does not like publicity and prefers to remain anonymous. However, some have speculated about his background based on pseudonyms used in online forums, including Satoshi Nakamoto, Nick Szabo, Eric Hughes, and Hal Finney. His real name has been suggested to be Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamota, named after Dorian Gray.
Possible identities
The Bitcoin whitepaper, written by Satoshi Nakamoto, described how it worked. In 2009, he published the paper under the pseudonym of “Satoshi Nakamoto.” Since then, many people have tried to find out his real name, but none of them succeeded. However, some researchers claim that there are several possible candidates. For example, Craig Wright, a British computer scientist, claims to be the inventor of Bitcoin. He argues that he invented the digital currency while working for IBM in 1999.
In April 2018, Newsweek reported that Newsweek had identified Nakamoto as Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese citizen born in 1955. They claimed that Nakamoto lived in California and Nevada. Furthermore, they stated that Nakamoto was married twice and divorced once. Moreover, he had three children, including one daughter named Grace.
On February 28, 2019, Wired magazine reported that Newsweek had retracted its story about identifying Satoshi Nakamoto.
Hal Finney
Finney was born in New York City, New York, United States. He attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he earned his B.A. degree in mathematics in 1978. In 1982, he moved to San Francisco, California, to work for Sun Microsystems. While working there, he became interested in cryptography.
In 1983, he met David Chaum, whose ideas about anonymous electronic cash led him to develop what would become DigiCash. By 1985, he had left Sun Microsystems to start another company called Secure Computing Systems, Inc. (SCSI). SCSI developed hardware and software to protect financial transactions over public networks such as the Internet.
In 1988, he joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation as director of research. There, he worked on privacy issues related to computer networking including digital signatures, secure email and encryption.
He became involved in bitcoin around 2010. On 4 May 2013, it was reported that Finney had died. At the time of his death, he was living in Berkeley, California. His family confirmed the news to the press.
Dorian Nakamoto
The following morning, Satoshi Nakamoto published a blog post detailing his creation of Bitcoin.
Nakamoto wrote that he had been working on the idea since 2008, and that he wanted to make it possible to transfer value online without relying on intermediaries such as banks. He went on to say that he did not want to take credit for the work of others, and that he hoped people would use the technology to “make a better world.”
In response to the announcement,
the price of bitcoin shot up from $0.10 per coin to over $1,000.
Nick Szabo
The story behind the name “Satoshi Nakamoto” — the pseudonym used by the person or people who invented Bitcoin — is one of the most intriguing aspects of the cryptocurrency project. While there are many theories about who Satoshi could be, none of them have been confirmed. However, some believe that the true identity of the mysterious figure might be known to someone close to him.
In December 2013, blogger Skyy Grey linked Nick Szabo to the original Bitcoin whitepaper using an approach he described in his blog post as “stylometric analysis.” Szabo is a computer scientist who has worked at Bell Labs, AT&T, and the United States National Security Agency (NSA). He has written extensively about cryptography, distributed systems, and information security.
Frisby, who wrote a book called “Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Technologies,” believes that he knows who Satoshi Nakamoto really is. He says that he has seen documents that prove that Satoshi is Nick Szabo. Frisby claims that he has found emails where Satoshi talks directly to Nick Szabo.
In addition, Frisby has discovered several clues pointing to Nick Szabo. One such clue is that Nick Szabo had a habit of signing his emails with a string of numbers, followed by a colon, and then another set of numbers. This pattern is similar to how Satoshi signed his emails.
Another clue is that Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin Whitepaper on April 8, 2008, exactly six months after Nick Szabo posted his blog post entitled “On Proof of Work Systems.” Additionally, Satoshi Nakamoto sent a tweet on October 31, 2008, just three days after Nick Szabo tweeted about the same topic.
Finally, the domain names satoshinakamoto.com and nakamotoswift.org both refer to Nick Szabo. When looking at the WhoIs records for those domains, we see that they were registered on September 18, 2008, less than a week before the publication date of the Bitcoin Whitepaper.
Frisby argues that Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto. His theory is based on the fact that Nick Szabo’s work helped develop the concept of digital money, and that he is very well-versed in cryptography. Moreover, he points out that Satoshi Nakamoto is a common Japanese nickname.
Craig Wright
In 2009, a mysterious figure named Craig S. Wright published a document claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin. He claimed to be the original inventor of Bitcoin, and offered $10 million to anyone who could prove he wasn’t true.
Wright has since changed his story several times. At one point, he told reporters he had been working on the project off and on for ten years. Then he said it was five years. Now he says it began in 2008.
He has also changed his name multiple times. His birth certificate lists his name as Charles Edward Wright Jr., while his passport identifies him as Charles Edward Wright.
Wright claims to have worked for IBM during the 1990s. But according to former colleagues, he left IBM in 2000.
In 2013, Wright sued David Kleiman, saying he owed him money from a failed startup venture. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2016.
A few months later, Wright announced that he’d found emails proving Kleiman had agreed to pay him half of the bitcoins he mined. Kleiman died in August 2017.
Wright now lives in Australia.
