One of the biggest mysteries and most well kept secrets of all time is the true identity
of the creator of Bitcoin.
With an alias of Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin was able to create an asset whose
market cap peaked at over $1 trillion.
If Bitcoin was a company, it’s market cap would have been the 6th largest in the world
at its peak.
Yet, somehow, the founder has been able to keep his identity anonymous.
But, if we look closer, we’ll see that Satoshi actually left quite a bit of bread crumbs
for us.
And, one guy even accidentally admitted for a brief second that he created bitcoin.
So, here are the top contenders for founder of bitcoin, and why the last contender may
even be Satoshi himself.
Before we get into the candidates, let’s first discuss why Satoshi has chosen to stay
anonymous.
We have seen theories that Satoshi is a private person who doesn’t like attention or that
Satoshi has a criminal background and doesn’t want to attract the attention of authorities.
But, in reality, none of these are likely the real reason.
If you take a look at the premise of Bitcoin and comments from Satoshi, the reason for
his anonymity is clear.
In 2011, Satoshi wrote quote “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust
that’s required to make it work.”
So, one of the primary reasons bitcoin was created was to prevent users from having to
trust a central authority or figure head.
If Satoshi’s identity was revealed, people would look to him for his thoughts on crypto
and they would look to him to fix any issues.
But this would be contradictory to the goal of Bitcoin.
In a decentralized system, one person should not be able to move the markets, and trust
has to come from the community, not the creator.
So, that’s why the creator of bitcoin avoids the spotlight.
With that being said though, amongst the crypto community, the real Satoshi is likely quite
well known already.
He or she is likely one the most respected voices in the community.
This is because Bitcoin was not some random basement success like many might think.
In the first few years after Bitcoin went live, Satoshi was actually extremely talkative.
In fact, he made 575 posts between November 2009 and December 2010.
These posts primarily discussed problems with bitcoin and troubleshooting of various issues
with the help of the community.
Satoshi didn’t leave the community until he felt that Bitcoin was ready stating quote
“I’ve moved on to other things.
It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
Considering Satoshi’s willingness to discuss Bitcoin with the community after the launch
of Bitcoin, it’s highly likely that Satoshi was discussing with the crypto community even
before he created his alias.
So, if his identity was revealed one day, the general public would probably have no
clue who it is, but the people super involved in the crypto space wouldn’t really be surprised.
With that being said, let’s jump into our first candidate which is of course Satoshi
Nakamoto himself.
The first instinct you have when trying to find the creator of bitcoin is to actually
find someone who’s name is actually Satoshi Nakamoto.
And sure enough, the media was able to find a man named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto.
But aside from having the same name and being an engineer, this guy basically has no connection
to the crypto space.
He told the Associated Press “I got nothing to do with it.”
And considering that it would be stupid to use your real name if you wanted to be anonymous,
I think we’d all agree that he’s telling the truth.
Moving on, we have Elon Musk.
Again, this one is an oddball.
Though Elon is extremely talented and has the background to create such a project, it’s
highly unlikely that it was Elon Musk.
During the creation of Bitcoin, Elon Musk had just burnt his entire Paypal fortune on
Tesla and SpaceX, and he was in debt just trying to get by.
So, I don’t think he was spending his free time, which he didn’t even have, coding
Bitcoin.
Next up, we have Craig Wright.
There’s also very little evidence suggesting that Craig Wright is indeed Satoshi other
than the fact that he himself keeps claiming that he is Satoshi.
Since 2016, Craig has been claiming that he was part of the main team who created Bitcoin.
Considering the philosophy of the real Satoshi, however, he would have likely never come forward
about being the founder of Bitcoin.
Along with Craig we also have Dave Kleiman.
Dave unfortunately died in 2013 and he never claimed to have created Bitcoin.
The only reason Dave is on this list is because Craig claims that Dave was part of the team,
but given that Craig has low credibility, no one really believes this story.
Dave was on Satoshi’s original mailing list, but it seems like Craig is just leveraging
this connection to push his own narrative.
Anyway, with all of those loose cannons out of the way, we can move onto strong candidates
starting with Bram Cohen.
Bram is one of the veterans of the peer to peer model having co-founded BitTorrent way
back in 2004.
He was a prolific blogger who posted about his thoughts on peer to peer networks, security
protocols, and decentralized systems.
Coincidently his blogging even slowed down during the launch of Bitcoin.
Bram was actually a super strong candidate for founding bitcoin, but one of his later
actions would disprove this theory.
Bram would eventually go on to make his own cryptocurrency called Chia, and Chia is supposed
to be the antithesis to Bicoin and the proof of work model used by bitcoin.
I think we’d agree that it’s highly unlikely that Satoshi would not only trash on bitcoin,
but also create a competing crypto.
Moving on, we have Gavin Anderson.
Gavin Anderson is a software developer who was very much involved in the early days of
bitcoin.
If you guys remember the last statement from Satoshi, he said that Bitcoin is in good hands
with Gavin and everyone else.
It’s possible that Satoshi was transferring the reins to himself.
A stylometry study even found that Satoshi’s writing was most similar to that of Gavin
Anderson.
An incident that raised some skepticism about this theory was in 2016 when Gavin believed
that Craig Wright was the creator of Bitcoin.
Though that seems a bit sketchy, maybe that was just a 200 iq play.
It’s possible that he saw Craig take credit for founding Bitcoin and he went along with
the story to shift attention away from himself.
There isn't really any glaring evidence that Gavin isn’t Satoshi.
The only reason I don’t think it’s Gavin is because the last two people on this list
are even more convincing candidates starting with Hal Finney.
Hal Finney graduated with a computer science degree from CalTech in 1979.
While completing his bachelors, he often took graduate level classes which really showcases
his high intelligence.
Hal Finney was also the first person to respond to Satoshi's original email about Bitcoin,
and Hal Finney would become the first person to connect to Satoshi’s network and the
first to receive Bitcoin.
Whenever you create a YouTube channel, you’re often your first subscriber.
And whenever you create a business, you’re often your first customer.
So, it could make sense that Hal Finney was the first to test the network and receive
bitcoin.
Aside from having the brains to create such a project, Hal Finney has a rather direct
connection to the name Satoshi Nakamoto.
Remember the first guy that we discussed whose name was Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto?
Well, he definitely wasn’t the creator, but he may have very well been the face of
Bitcoin.
You see, Dorian lived just two blocks away from Hal Finney.
Maybe, Hal Finney used the name of his neighbor to cover up his real identity.
Something else that fits the story is that Hal Finney was diagnosed with ALS in 2009
and unfortunately died in 2014.
This may be the reason that Satoshi Nakamoto stopped posting in 2011 and why we haven’t
heard from him since.
The only problem in this story is that I’m not sure Satoshi would have made himself so
obvious.
Would he have really made himself the first recipient of bitcoin and was he really emailing
himself?
I’m not sure.
A lot of the crypto community actually thinks that Hal Finney is indeed the creator of bitcoin,
and I wouldn’t be surprised if it really was him.
But I do think one man is an even likelier candidate, and that’s of course Nick Szabo.
Most of you guys likely aren’t familiar with Nick Szabo, but he was one of the first
people in the crypto space if not the first.
Nick proposed the idea of a digital currency way back in 1998 with the name Bit Gold.
The idea for Bit Gold was basically identical to Bitcoin.
Bit Gold relied on a network of decentralized miners to verify transactions and keep the
system secure.
Nick Szabo never ended up launching Bit Gold because he wasn’t able to work through a
handful of security risks.
But that doesn’t mean that he ever stopped trying.
In a 2005 blog post, Nick actually outlines how an unforgeable chain or the blockchain
was the solution to his problems with Bit Gold.
In this post, Nick also explains how the entirety of the Bit gold system would work from mining
to transactions to the blockchain.
What’s extremely surprising is that despite spending 7 years figuring all of this out,
Nick didn’t end up launching Bit Gold.
What’s even more fishy is that he tried to make it seem like he made this blog post
after Bitcoin was revealed.
If you take a look at the publication date of this blog post, it says December 27, 2008
at the top.
But if we use the wayback machine, we can see that a snapshot of the website was taken
in 2006 which showcases that the original date of publication was December 29, 2005.
Internet detectives also confirmed that there was actually no change to the post itself
except for the displayed date of publication.
Aside from outlining the entirety of bitcoin before it actually came out, Nick Szabo was
the only crypto enthusiast who never communicated with Satoshi Nakamoto.
As we previously discussed, Satoshi Nakamoto had communicated with Gavin Anderson and Hal
Finney, but he never communicated with Nick Szabo despite Nick being one of the veterans
of the space.
The initials of Satoshi Nakamoto are also the same as Nick Szabo.
In Japan, when you write initials, you write the last name first, meaning that Satoshi’s
initials are NS not SN. Satoshi even commented on how his bitcoin address started with his
initials, and sure enough, his bitcoin address starts with NS not SN.
Around the time Bitcoin came out, Nick’s blogging also fell off a cliff.
Between 2005 and 2008, he was averaging 40 posts every single month.
Since 2009, however, his posting has dwindled to 30 to 40 posts per year.
Something else to consider is that Nick even had a copyright on the idea for Bit Gold.
Yet, despite Bitcoin being basically a ripoff of Bit Gold, Nick never took any legal action
against Bitcoin.
I think it’s safe to assume that if you spent 10 years developing Bit gold and some
Japanese dude with no posting history in the community comes along and rips off your work,
you would almost definitely pursue legal action.
Satoshi even admitted that Bitcoin is an implementation of Wei Dai’s b-money proposal and Nick Szabo’s
Bitgold proposal.
I mean, this seems like the perfect opportunity to sue.
Another coincidence is that Nick’s birthday and Satoshi’s birthday are both April 6.
But, by far the strongest piece of evidence is a potential Freudian slip from Nick.
A Freudian slip is an unintentional error that reveals a person’s subconscious thoughts.
These are especially common when a person is trying to suppress a thought.
For instance, if I told you not to think about dolphins, the first thing you’ll think about
is dolphins.
Every time you try to not think about dolphins, you’ll end up thinking about dolphins.
The same idea applies here with Nick Szabo.
In an interview with Tim Feriss in 2017, Nick accidently says that he designed bitcoin and
then quickly corrects himself.
Evidently, Nick may very well be the Satoshi Nakamoto.
Even if he isn’t though, he’s still no doubt the father of bitcoin as he developed
Bitgold years before Bitcoin ever saw the light of day.
Do you guys think Nick Szabo is the creator of Bitcoin?
Comment that down below.
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