New research suggests that Satoshi Nakamoto lived in London creating Bitcoin

The hunt for the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, continues today, as new data-driven research was recently implemented to understand the location of the creator while working on the network. The researchers analyzed Satoshi’s 539 Bitcointalk posts, 34 emails, 169 code commits, metadata of all versions of bitcoin he worked on, genesis block data, and data stored by the Wayback Machine.

The report suggests that Satoshi Nakamoto lived in London during the creation of Bitcoin

To this day, the world is still in the dark about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the first Bitcoin cryptocurrency network. Just recently, research from The Chain Bulletin published an editorial that attempts to delve into Satoshi Nakamoto’s position when creating the world’s first blockchain.

On November 23, 2020, author Doncho Karaivanov explains that the researchers scoured “Satoshi’s Bitcointalk posts, Sourceforge commits, and emails, along with other available data.” According to the research, the data points to “the most likely place for the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin to call home: London.”

Karaivanov says the research is data-driven and based on timestamps covering approximately “742 instances of activity over 206 days (non-consecutive)”. Documentation with the timestamp began on Halloween on October 31, 2008, and statistics end on December 13, 2010, which was the last time the community heard from Satoshi. The researchers compiled scatter charts based on suspicious time zones to see when the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin was awake and active.

“Common suspect locations are the UK (GMT), US East (EST), US Pacific (PST), Japan (JST), and Australia (AEST),” the details of Karaivanov’s study. “The last two were easy to debunk, but the first three prospects needed further scrutiny.”

In the course of Satoshi’s online activity, the researchers also note that Nakamoto posted a total of 539 times on the bitcointalk.org website forum. “By looking at this data alone, we cannot determine, beyond a reasonable doubt, which time zone Satoshi lived in,” Karaivanov’s report points out.

On Sourceforge, a code repository web portal where Bitcoin code was once stored, Satoshi implemented 169 commits during that time period. Once again the researchers used scatter charts based on specific time zones to analyze the commit activity of Satoshi, which has test timestamps in UTC.

Likewise, the commit charts, just like Bitcointalk’s post charts, are consistent, and Karaivanov notes that they don’t leave a smoking gun in any of the plausible regions. Then the researchers traced most of Satoshi’s email activity which alone left no hard evidence. However, by merging all the data from Bitcointalk’s posts, commits, and emails, the data begins to infer that Satoshi’s home location was not in Japan or Australia.

Bitcoin’s Genesis Block: “Chancellor on the verge of second bailout for banks”

The biggest clue pointing to Satoshi from London lay in the initial message of the genesis block from The Times (Times of London) on January 3, 2009.

The researchers deduce that Nakamoto could not have seen the Times of London headline if the inventor was in the United States. “This exact number of the Times was not circulating in the United States,” Karaivanov wrote.

Karaivanov says it would be “extremely unlikely” for the front page of the US edition to be formatted in the same way, as it would be completely different from the title of the Times of London in the UK. Also, the newspaper had an online version of the story, but the headline was written in a completely different way. That specific article online read: “Chancellor Alistair Darling on the verge of a second bailout for the banks.”

The genesis block data puts the scales “strongly in favor of the GMT time zone,” the author insists. “This is without mentioning all the clues that Satoshi is British, such as his spelling of the endings with -ise instead of -ize and -our instead of -o, for example, analyze, arrange, close, color, etc.” Karaivanov’s study concludes. “Then there is his use of the word bloody. More specifically, we not only think he is British, but he also lived in London while working on Bitcoin. “

Karaivanov also admits that it is impossible to say with “absolute certainty” that London was the precise location. “However, we can say, with reasonable confidence, that he was in London,” the researcher added.

Satoshi Time Zone Studies of 2011 and 2018

Karaivanov’s research isn’t the first time Satoshi’s clues have been uncovered by researching specific time zones relative to Nakamoto’s well-known online activity. In February 2018, another data-driven research study called “The Time Zones of Satoshi Nakamoto” also attempted to uncover Nakamoto’s whereabouts while creating Bitcoin.

For example, the report highlights a first draft of the Bitcoin document and the document’s online metadata. In addition to this, they looked at the metadata related to bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf also created by Nakamoto. The combination of the two timestamp values ​​indicates that the computer Satoshi used to perform these online operations was set to “Mountain Time Zone” in the United States.

But Satoshi’s 2018 time zone document is a little more inconclusive, as there are multiple timestamps showing Satoshi may have been located in a myriad of regions. For example, the 2018 study also states that Satoshi’s commits indicate that his computer was using “British Summer Time” timestamps.

The review “The Time Zones of Satoshi Nakamoto” also highlights an analysis of Nakamoto’s hourly activity that was published in 2011. That specific research from 2011 concludes that Satoshi must have lived in an EST time zone in the United States. of 2018 alludes to circumstantial evidence that Satoshi was a “night owl” and routinely pulled whole nights online. Most of Nakamoto’s nocturnal periods took place “in the summer of 2010 and in February”.

Satoshi’s All Nighters and Cramming to Get Bitcoin Complete

One of the most compelling research findings from 2018 suggests that Satoshi rushed towards the end of his assignment, after taking a short hiatus from the Bitcoin project. The results show that Nakamoto had little or no activity in anything related to Bitcoin during the months of March, April and May 2010. Then, suddenly, in the summer of 2010, there was a huge explosion of activity. online from the creator of Bitcoin.

“This is the behavior of those who at the end of February found themselves with a devouring task to be completed by the end of May and then had practically unlimited free time, including the latitude to work until the wee hours of the night, up to the following October, “the armchair detective nicknamed” In Search Of Satoshi “concluded on February 13, 2018.

The latest research from 2020 suggesting that Satoshi lived in London and research from 2018 shows that evidence weighs more towards a UK-based home. According to Karaivanov and his team’s research, London certainly has the highest probability.

“Taken together, his writing style, his pattern of activity and the message of the Genesis block clearly point to the capital of England as the most likely candidate,” Karaivanov’s results deduce.

Meanwhile, numerous cryptocurrency advocates have debated Karaivanov’s time zone study and questioned the reliability of his findings. For example, Jorge Stolfi, a computer science professor, commented on the theory after the study was posted on the Reddit r / btc forum.

Stolfi said that “the ‘London’ hypothesis implies that he worked on bitcoin directly from 5pm to 3am without dinner. The “US / East” hypothesis would imply that he started work there at noon and had dinner after around 10pm. The “US / Western” assumption would imply that he worked all day from 8:00 to about 8:00 pm and hardly worked after dinner. “

Stolfi added:

While all of this is possible, if anything this data would confirm that it was in the United States, probably in the western part during that time, in agreement with PDF metadata.

What do you think about the studio that assumes Satoshi lived in London during the creation of Bitcoin? Let us know what you think of this cryptic topic in the comments section below.

Image credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, The Chain Bulletin Satoshi studio, “The Time Zones of Satoshi Nakamoto” studio,