summary: Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown person or people who designed bitcoin...
content: Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown person or people who designed bitcoin and created its original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, they also devised the first blockchain database. In the process they were the first to solve the double-spending problem for digital currency. He (They) was active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010. History On his P2P Foundation profile, Nakamoto claimed to be a man living in Japan, born on 5 April 1975. However, speculation about the true identity of Nakamoto has mostly focused on a number of cryptography and computer science experts of non-Japanese accent, living in the United States and Europe. As of 24 May 2017, Nakamoto was believed to own up to roughly one million bitcoins out of the total volume of 21 million Bitcoin in circulation, with a value estimated at approximately $9 billion USD as of November 2017. He also owned an estimated one million Bitcoin Cash coins as of the hard fork on 1 August 2017 and one million Bitcoin Gold coins as of the hard fork activated 24 October 2017. Development of bitcoin In October 2008, Nakamoto published a paper on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com describing the bitcoin digital currency. It was titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. In January 2009, Nakamoto released the first bitcoin software that launched the network and the first units of the bitcoin cryptocurrency, called bitcoins. Satoshi Nakamoto released the Version 0.1 of Bitcoin software on Sourceforge on 9 January 2009. Nakamoto claimed that work on the writing of the code began in 2007. The inventor of bitcoin knew that due to its nature the core design would have to be able to support a broad range of transaction types. The implemented solution enabled specialized codes and data fields from the start through the use of a predicative script. Nakamoto created a website with the domain name bitcoin.org and continued to collaborate with other developers on the bitcoin software until mid-2010. Around this time, he handed over control of the source code repository and network alert key to Gavin Andresen, transferred several related domains to various prominent members of the bitcoin community, and stopped his involvement in the project. Until shortly before his absence and handover, Nakamoto made all modifications to the source code himself. Gavin Andresen said of Nakamoto's code: "He was a brilliant coder, but it was quirky". The inventor left a text message in the first mined block which reads 'The Times 3 January 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks'. The text referred to a headline in The Times published on 3 January 2009. It was a strong indication that the first block was mined no earlier than this date. The genesis block has a timestamp of 18:15:05 GMT on 3 January 2009. This block was unlike all other blocks in that it didn't have a previous block to reference. This required the use of custom code to mine it. Timestamps for subsequent blocks indicate that Nakamoto did not try to mine all the early blocks solely for himself. As the sole, predominant early miner the inventor was awarded bitcoin at genesis and for 10 days afterwards. Except for test transactions these remain unspent since mid-January 2009. The public bitcoin transaction log shows that Nakamoto's known addresses contain roughly one million bitcoins. As of 15 November 2017, this was worth over $7,239,000,000. Due to the hardnfork in which Bitcoin Cash was made, creating one Bitcoin Cash for every bitcoin in circulation, he also owned roughly one million Bitcoin Cash, worth about $1 billion. In his new book "Cloud Empires", Vili Lehdonvirta, an Oxford University social scientist, book author and former software developer positioned Nakamoto in a line of digital age libertarians, beginning with John Barlow, the cyberlibertarian “who dreamed of a virtual society in which order emerged independently of the authority of territorial states.” Nakamoto here was viewed through a political scientist’s lens. Lehdonvirta wrote: “Nakamoto was not interested in making the institutions more democratic. Instead, he wanted to resuscitate the Barlowian dream of a digital social order that wouldn’t need such institutions in the first place — no bureaucrats, no politicians who inevitably betrayed their electorates’ trust, no elections rigged by corporations, no corporate overlords. Nakamoto still thought that such a social order could be created with technology — and in particular, with cryptographic technology.” Characteristics and identity Nakamoto did not disclose any personal information when discussing technical matters. He provided some commentary on banking and fractional-reserve banking. On his P2P Foundation profile as of 2012, Nakamoto claimed to be a 37-year-old male who lived in Japan, but some speculated he was unlikely to be Japanese due to his use of perfect English and his bitcoin software not being documented or labelled in Japanese. Occasional British English spelling and terminology (such as the phrase "bloody hard") in both source code comments and forum postings led to speculation that Nakamoto, or at least one individual in the consortium claiming to be him, was of Commonwealth origin. Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and active community member, graphed the time stamps for each of Nakamoto's bitcoin forum posts (more than 500); the resulting chart showed a steep decline to almost no posts between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Because this pattern held true even on Saturdays and Sundays, it suggested that Nakamoto was asleep at this time. If Nakamoto was a single individual with conventional sleeping habits, it suggested he resided in a region using the UTC−05:00 or UTC−06:00 time offset. This includes the parts of North America that fall within the Eastern Time Zone and Central Time Zone, as well as parts of Central America, the Caribbean and South America. Nakamoto's initial email to Wei Dai was dated 22 August 2008; the metadata for this PDF () yields as the value - this implied 3 October 2008 or a bit over a month later, which was consistent with the local date mentioned in the Cypherpunk mailing list email. This was an earlier draft than the final draft on, which was dated 24 March 2009; the time zone differs: -7 vs -6. Possible identities There is still doubt about the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Nick Szabo In December 2013, a blogger named Skye Grey linked Nick Szabo to the Bitcoin whitepaper using a stylometric analysis. Szabo is a decentralized currency enthusiast and published a paper on "bit gold", which is considered a precursor to bitcoin. He is known to have been interested in using pseudonyms in the 1990s. In a May 2011 article, Szabo stated about the bitcoin creator: "Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea (or in Dai's case his related idea) enough to pursue it to any significant extent until Nakamoto (assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai)." Detailed research by financial author Dominic Frisby provided much circumstantial evidence but, as he admitted, no proof that Satoshi was Szabo. Speaking on RT's The Keiser Report, he said: "I've concluded there is only one person in the whole world that has the sheer breadth but also the specificity of knowledge and it is this chap...". But Szabo denied being Satoshi. In a July 2014 email to Frisby, he said: "Thanks for letting me know. I'm afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi, but I'm used to it'. Nathaniel Popper wrote in the New York Times that "the most convincing evidence pointed to a reclusive American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo". Dorian Nakamoto In a high-profile article in the magazine Newsweek on 6 March 2014, journalist Leah McGrath Goodman identified Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese American man living in California, whose birth name was Satoshi Nakamoto, as the Nakamoto in question. Besides his name, Goodman pointed out a number of facts that circumstantially suggested he was the bitcoin inventor. Trained as a physicist at Cal Poly University in Pomona, Nakamoto worked as a systems engineer on classified defense projects and computer engineer for technology and financial information services companies. Nakamoto was laid off twice in the early 1990s and turned libertarian, according to his daughter, and encouraged her to start her own business "not under the government's thumb." In the article's seemingly biggest piece of evidence, Goodman wrote that when she asked him about bitcoin during a brief in-person interview, Nakamoto seemed to confirm his identity as the bitcoin founder by stating: "I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it. It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection." The article's publication led to a flurry of media interest, including reporters camping out near Dorian Nakamoto's house and briefly chasing him by car when he drove to an interview. However, during the subsequent full-length interview, Dorian Nakamoto denied all connection to bitcoin, saying he had never heard of the currency before, and that he had misinterpreted Goodman's question as being about his previous work for military contractors, much of which was classified. In a reddit "ask-me-anything" interview, he claimed he had misinterpreted Goodman's question as being related to his work for Citibank. Later that day, the pseudonymous Nakamoto's P2P Foundation account posted its first message in five years, stating: "I am not Do