Bitcoin is now more than a decade old. For more than 11 years, the number one of all cryptocurrencies has fascinated people from all over the world with the idea of a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” However, one crucial question has remained unanswered for more than 4,000 days: Who is behind Satoshi Nakamoto’s pseudonym? A single person or a collective of programmers? Who is the inventor of Bitcoin?

The list of people identified as a potential Satoshi Nakamoto is long: from Hal Finney to Michael Clear and Nick Szabo to Craig Wright or Elon Musk. Other theories even see Satoshi Nakamoto as an invention of the CIA.

So you can already see: there is a lot to talk about, and we are now going to hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin inventor, together.

Jumping back 12 years to 2008, Satoshi published a paper in response to the financial crisis with the (now legendary) title “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” A few months later, and thus already in the following year, 2009, the Bitcoin software went live, the Genesis Block was mined, and the beginning of the Bitcoin community was created.

Until 2010, Nakamoto himself was active in the community; then, the US programmer Gavin Andresen took “control.” The following year, Satoshi took his final leave of the community, saying that he was now moving on to other things.

I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.

Even though we know very little about Satoshi himself, except that he claims to have been born in Japan, the media have repeatedly tried to attribute Satoshi to a particular person or group in recent years. Let’s start with a chronology or rather a hunt for Satoshi.

As early as 2011, the first journalists asked themselves, “Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?” with media attention. — The first three names that came up in the process were: Michael Clear, Hal Finney, and Dave Kleinman. Let’s start from the beginning and tell the story from The New Yorker journalist Joshua Davis’s perspective.

In the news magazine The New Yorker, Joshua Davis actually devoted himself to the question of who was behind the legendary pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2011. He took his job extremely seriously and took the trouble to analyze over 80,000 words written online by Nakamoto.

In doing so, he checked the content for potential characteristics, such as linguistic peculiarities, to draw any conclusions about Nakamoto’s origins.

Michael Clear under suspicion: British English as evidence?

One of Davis’s central characteristics is the British English used by Satoshi Nakamoto, as well as references to British newspaper articles. The most famous example is probably the following quote:

The Times 03/Jan/2009: Chancellor on brink of secound bailout for banks.

With this, Nakamoto gave (and still gives) free rein to speculation. We know that the title ‘Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks’ was the headline of the January 03, 2009 edition of the British daily newspaper ‘The Times.’

But let’s get back to the question of who Satoshi Nakamoto is. While researching the Crypto 2011 conference in Santa Barbara, California, Joshua Davis became aware of cryptography student Michael Clear. Clear was studying at Trinity College in Dublin at the time and caught Davis’ eye as the possible Satoshi Nakamoto for three reasons:

• Michael Clear was considered the top computer scientist at Trinity College in 2008. A year later, he started at Allied Irish Banks, where he worked on currency trading software.
• Second, Clear worked on academic publications on transferring data via peer-to-peer technology.
• Third, Davis saw linguistic similarities in Clear’s publications to the texts he had previously analyzed.

When Clear was confronted with the question of whether he was actually Satoshi Nakamoto, he denied this. He pointed out that even if he were Nakamoto, he would never admit it because Satoshi’s identity was irrelevant to the existence of Bitcoin.

Hal Finney and Dave Kleinman: Bitcoin enthusiasts since day 1.
In addition to Michael Clear, there were two other aspirants in the same year: David (Dave) Kleinman and Hal Finney. One of the other readers may know Dave Kleinman from the headlines of the current days.

Kleinman has unfortunately passed away in the meantime. However, a feud between the survivors and Craig Wright still rages over his legacy. A short version of this is now available:

So it was Kleinman and Wright who have been intensively dealing with Bitcoin since the early days. When Bitcoin mining could still be done with an ordinary computer, Kleinman and Wright began to mine BTC diligently. In the process, they accumulated an enormous sum over the years, which is what the current dispute is about.

Now we come to Hal Finney. His name has come up particularly because Finney is de facto one of the co-developers of the Bitcoin software. Moreover, Finney is the first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction.

So even if Finney is not Satoshi Nakamoto, we can assume that he knew him or had a close, friendly relationship with him.

We now know that Hal Finney received the first-ever Bitcoin transaction. Therefore, it is very likely that he received this BTC from a friend or someone close to him.

And if we take a closer look at Hal Finney’s friends’ list, one name stands out: Nick Szabo. We’ll now explain why Szabo is considered one of the hottest candidates to answer the question “Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?”.

Before Bitcoin even existed or its concept was voiced in Satoshi’s whitepaper, there was already a similar idea: Bit Gold. Many of the features that Bitcoin possesses today were already formulated in connection with Bit Gold back then. The inventor behind Bit Gold — that’s right, Nick Szabo.

Szabo first published his idea and thoughts on this form of digital money in a Cypherpunk forum on August 15, 1993. And now you can guess three times who commented positively on the idea on the same day? — That’s right, it was Hal Finney. The latter said:

“I have an even more urgent focus on Nick’s digital money proposal. We really need an implementation of digital money urgently.”

This circumstantial evidence is already pretty ‘hot.’ Add to that soft factors: given that you usually give your name in the order last name, the first name you get the initials SN (Szabo, Nick). And as luck would have it, these are exactly the initials of Satoshi Nakamoto.

For these reasons, Nick Szabo is referred to as Satoshi Nakamoto by many media portals and newspapers, including the New York Times. However, Szabo denies this to this day.

Three years ago began what is probably the most prominent and longest-running story: the Craig Wright Story. While all of the names and people just mentioned did not want to be associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, Wright was (and is) the only person to aggressively claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

That fact alone should give everyone pause for thought. After all, judging by the way Bitcoin was constructed, it’s hard to imagine a narcissist courting attention was behind it.

It all started in 2015 with leaks picked up by the online magazine Wire and turned into a story in the form of an article. The bottom line was that Craig Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto.

What followed is rather ironic from today’s perspective because Wright, who obviously enjoys, seeks, and loves the attention around his own person, initially denied being Satoshi. Sometime later, however, he came forward to Wired and admitted that everything was correct.

However, Wired then investigated deeper and found out that some of Wright’s evidence was not true, and it was all just a big fiction.

Even today, Mr. Wright is still attracting some attention by repeatedly trying to provide supposed evidence that he is the real Satoshi Nakamoto — but most of them have been debunked as fakes.

In short, Craig Wright still owes us solid proof to this day. The prevailing opinion on this is that Wright is not Satoshi and is merely seeking the media stage to market his true idea of Bitcoin.

Two years ago, Sahil Gupta from HackerNoon.com then wrote a (more or less) serious Medium.com article, putting forward theses as to why Elon Musk is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Among other things, he mentioned Musk’s unbridled inventive spirit, his C++ programming skills, and other points as the basis for his argument. Musk denied this, of course, even though he sees cryptocurrencies as an innovative solution in principle and supports them. Thus, Musk repeatedly outed himself as a big fan of Dogecoin in the past.

The new decade is now in full swing. While the world is currently preoccupied with the aftermath of the Coronavirus, the question behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity remains unanswered. The mystery behind Satoshi is now 12 years old and will likely continue to occupy the crypto world for months, years, and perhaps decades to come.

On the other hand, I ask myself: is it imperative to know who created Bitcoin? Because Satoshi has shown us one thing with Bitcoin: a decentralized system that creates trust through cryptography and does not need a central authority does not need a god.

It works because we, the community, believe in it, and each individual does their part to support it. In this sense: Stack Sats!

I want to end this article with a short epilogue. It goes in the direction of ‘Aluhut’ and conspiracy theories. We dedicate ourselves to a thesis of the ‘somewhat different kind.’ Specifically, we ask ourselves whether the Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto can be an invention of the CIA?

In the epilogue to our article “Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?” you will find out what arguments there are for this.

https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/nexo-token-owners-receive-record-dividend-3bd0ea2fcf68

In February of this year, the world-renowned Washington Post published documents about the Swiss Crypto AG’s intelligence activities, the German Federal Intelligence Service, and the American CIA. The ‘top-secret’ report was about spying and eavesdropping on over 120 countries of the world for decades. In more than a proud way, the report said:

It was the intelligence coup of the 20th century.

It all started with a supposedly harmless company: the Swiss Crypto AG. In fact, this very company, founded after World War II, produced encryption devices for governments worldwide.

Governments use the devices to ensure ‘supposedly secure’ communication in military areas or communication between diplomats. The Swiss company’s clients have included Iran, India, Pakistan, the Vatican, and several Latin American countries.

Now we come to the political explosiveness of the topic: the CIA unofficially controlled crypto AG. In other words: the CIA owned the Swiss Crypto AG. It was the secret owner.

And exactly this ‘home advantage’ was used by the CIA to build secret backdoors into the encryption mechanisms and devices of Crypto AG. With the help of these backdoors, the Americans could eavesdrop on the entire communication of the affected countries for decades.

Let’s slowly approach the absolutely vague and highly speculative thesis: What if Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is just a CIA construct? — To do this, we must keep in mind that 120 countries have involuntarily and permanently given the most sensitive and important information to Americans since the mid-1970s.

In the context of the NSA disclosures by Edward Snowden, it also became clear that the U.S. is not exactly squeamish when it comes to siphoning off private data. Their strength is the operation in the dark and the camouflage of their own software.

And in parallel, Bitcoin has existed since 2009. A cryptocurrency that now has a market capitalization of nearly $200 billion. The network transfers millions to billions of dollars every day and is used worldwide.

Here, we use a currency and an underlying technology without knowing specifically who is behind this concept. Sure, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper on 10/31/2008. But who is Satoshi Nakamoto, after all?

It will certainly not be Craig Wright, so this question remains open. One could argue that the ‘beauty of Bitcoin is the trust in the technology and the algorithms.

This statement is also correct in the first place. However, the point that can be challenged is as follows: Bitcoin uses Secure Hash Algorithm 256, better known as SHA-256, for two essential functions of the network.

SHA-256, in turn, belongs to the family of SHA-2 hash functions. This family was invented as a standard by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in collaboration with the National Security Agency, better known as the NSA.

Because of the latest publications, each individual must now decide how realistic he considers such a ‘backdoor’ in SHA-256. The consequences would be immense: the hash function is used to create public and private keys and a hash function in the proof-of-work mining algorithm.

https://l-wiesflecker.medium.com/what-are-nodes-nodes-in-a-nutshell-f5d567bc9662

Besides the speculation just expressed around the connection between SHA-256 and possible backdoors, there is another aspect. Have you ever thought about whether Satoshi Nakamoto actually has any meaning? — Is there a translation of the name?

The answer is yes. There are several translations. If you lay the cards according to your own gusto to see a connection between CIA and Satoshi Nakamoto, the following happens:

The term Satoshi has many meanings. Among others, Satoshi means “enlightened,” “wise,” or even “intelligent.” And last but not least, Nakamoto means something like “middle,” “base,” “root,” or “central.” This would make Satoshi Nakamoto the “Central Intelligence.”

That brings us to the end of the epilogue. We have now worked through all the possible theories about the identity of the Bitcoin inventor.

We have come a little closer to the question “Who is Satoshi Nakamoto” — but there is no final answer. This probably leaves you enough room for speculation! Who could it be? Are we all Satoshi?

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Source: https://medium.com/coinmonks/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto-the-great-mystery-about-the-bitcoin-inventor-437eb22a18c5?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency