The Inventor of Bitcoin has been a bigger mystery than the ruling digital coin itself. People have speculated about the identity of Nakamoto (Pseudonym used on Bitcoin’s white paper) ever since it was published in 2008. There has been an uptick in efforts recently to find to bring this person/secret organization/shadow government or whatever it is out in the open. I mean everybody must wonder like I do… why does it have to be a secret? Just a quick fact before we talk about some recent developments… Satoshi owns about 1 million bitcoins (worth about $6 billion currently) of the total 21 million that are going to be mined ever.
Not to say there have been multiple people who were either labelled or claimed to being the Crypto kingpin inventor with the likes of Nick Szabo (computer scientist & cryptographer), Ross Ulbricht (darknet market operator), Craig Wright (businessman & scientist) and more recently Gavin Andresen (software developer). However there is no solid proof or confirmation to say that one of them is actually Nakamoto.
The only person who has ever come close to knowing Satoshi Nakaomoto is Laszlo Hanyecz, a full-time developer, and more famously known as the guy who used 10,000 bitcoins to buy a couple pizzas in the first ever commercial transaction involving the Crypto. Laszlo was quoted as saying that he found Satoshi to be a weird character while working with him on the development process.
“He’d say, ‘Hey, the west side’s down,’ or ‘we have these bugs – we need to fix this.’ I’d be like, we? We’re not a team. I thought that it was approval from him, that maybe he accepted me as a member. But I didn’t want the responsibility. I didn’t really understand all of the forces that were going on at the time.”
More recently Daniel Oberhaus – a staff writer at Motherboard tried to dig in a little further by submitting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) form to the CIA to reveal the identity of Satoshi Namakmoto to which they got back to him with the famous “neither confirm nor deny” on the existence of documents related to the Bitcoin creator. This effort came on the heels of an investigation by a blogger Alexander Muse (in 2016) who claimed that NSA found out the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto by using a technique called stylometry – where your writing style is identified as a unique finger print to identify a person. This BTW is the same method being used by ZyCrypto to determine that Gavin Anderson is the actual Satoshi Nakamoto.
I wonder what would it take to determine the identity of the real inventor of Bitcoin or whether we will ever be able to solve this mystery. Just to make things interesting I conducted a little weekend poll on my Twitter handle to see what people actually think about who or what is behind Bitcoin creation – with the results above. Seems the opinion is pretty split… but interesting to see the winner being the “secret organization”. I wish I could add another choice to that poll… Aliens!
If the real Satoshi Nakamoto is out there I think now is the time to come to the rescue of Bitcoin as the its fortunes are dwindling fast with the recent & continuous price drops. Here’s another perspective on the lighter side of things.
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