The incomplete list of people speculated to be Satoshi Nakamoto

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Ten years ago, on January 3, 2009, the Bitcoin network (BTC) was created while Satoshi Nakamoto extracted the Genesis block, also known as number zero.

However, the identity behind the creator of Bitcoin has remained one of the greatest mysteries of the crypto community since the original white paper was published by Satoshi in October 2008.

Various journalistic investigations have attempted to unveil the person or group of individuals responsible for creating the best digital currency, but the true identity of Satoshi remains unknown to this day. On his P2P Foundation profile – which became inactive at the end of 2010 – Nakamoto identifies himself as a 43-year-old man who lives in Japan, but has hardly ever published on the Bitcoin forum during the local day. Other clues, like the English spelling of words like "color" and "optimization", suggest that it was of Commonwealth origin.

So far, the media and the community have produced numerous results on who could be the real Satoshi, none of which has been confirmed. On June 14, 2018, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States stated that it could not "confirm or deny the existence" of Nakamoto after a Motherboard journalist asked for information about her identity through the Freedom of Information Act ( FOIA).

Here is the (incomplete) list of potential candidates.

Vili Lehdonvirta

Vili Lehdonvirta

Suspicious credentials: a Finnish professor of 38 years at the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology

Source: Joshua Davis, The New Yorker

One of the first attempts to reveal Satoshi's identity dates back to October 2011, when journalist Joshua Davis wrote a piece for the New Yorker. During his search to identify the creator of Bitcoin, Davis found Michael Clear, a young graduate student in cryptography at Trinity College, Dublin, who had worked at Allied Irish Banks to improve his currency trading software and co-author of a academic article on peer-to-peer technology. Clear denied that he was Satoshi, but offered the journalist the name of "a solid companion of Nakamoto", a Finnish researcher of thirty-one years at the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology, Vili Lehdonvirta, who he was a videogame programmer and studied virtual currencies.

However, after being contacted by Davis, Lehdonvirta also stated that it was not Satoshi. "You must be an expert crypt to build something as sophisticated as bitcoin," he said. "There are not many of those people, and I'm definitely not one of them."

Shinichi Mochizuki

Shinichi Mochizuki

Suspicious credentials: a 49-year-old Japanese mathematician at the Kyoto University

Source: Ted Nelson

On May 17, 2013, Ted Nelson, an American pioneer and philosopher of the Institute, suggested that Nakamoto could be the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki from the Kyoto University, who worked mainly on number theory and geometry. Nelson's evidence was largely circumstantial, however, since it was mainly based on how Mochizuki published his solution to the ABC Conjecture, one of the biggest unresolved problems in mathematics.

A few days later, Nelson told Quartz that he would donate to charity if Mochizuki had denied being Satoshi Nakamoto:

"If that person denies being Satoshi, I will humbly give a bitcoin (at this moment worth about $ 123) to any charity he selects in. If he is Satoshi and denies it, at least he will feel guilty. case of denial – the bitcoins are going up.) "

In July 2013, The Age reported that Mochizuki denied Nelson's claims, but did not specify the source.

Dorian Nakamoto

Dorian Nakamoto

Suspicious Credentials: A 68-year-old Japanese American man who has done grading jobs for major corporations and the United States

Source: Leah McGrath Goodman, Newsweek

On March 6, 2014, Newsweek published a long article written by journalist Leah McGrath Goodman, who identified the Doric preamble Satoshi Nakamoto, an American Japanese male who lives in California as the original creator of Bitcoin.

Goodman learned that Nakamoto worked as a systems engineer in classified defense projects and an IT engineer for technology and financial information service companies. It is said that Nakamoto became a libertarian after being fired twice from his job in the early years & # 90;

There were other clues besides his birth name. Goodman claims that Nakamoto confirmed his identity as the founder of Bitcoin after he had asked for cryptocurrency during a face-to-face interview. "I am no longer involved in this and I can not discuss it", he replied, "it has been handed over to other people, who are now responsible for it, I no longer have any connection".

However, in a subsequent full interview with The Associated Press, Dorian Nakamoto denied any connection with Bitcoin. He said he had never heard of it before and thought that Goodman was asking about his previous job for military contractors, who was largely classified. Interestingly, in an interview with "Ask Me Everything" at Reddit, he claimed to have misinterpreted Goodman's question in relation to his work with Citibank. Later that day, the Nakamoto P2P Foundation account published its first message in several years, stating, "I am not Dorian Nakamoto".

Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo

Suspicious credentials: (presumably) a 55-year-old American man of Hungarian origin and creator of BitGold, a predecessor of Bitcoin

Sources: Skye Gray, researcher; Dominic Frisby, financial writer

In December 2013, researcher Skye Gray published the results of her stunt analysis, which indicated that the person behind Satoshi Nakamoto was a computer scientist and cryptographer named Nick Szabo.

In essence, Gray sought unusual turns of phrases and vocabulary patterns "in particular places that one would expect a cryptographic researcher to contribute", and then "evaluated the suitability of each match found by performing textual similarity metrics on different pages of your writing. "

Szabo is a passionate of decentralized currency who developed the concept of "BitGold", a pre-Bitcoin digital currency focused on privacy, in 1998. In his May 2011 article on Bitcoin, Szabo wrote:

"I, Wei Dai and Hal Finney were the only people I know who liked the idea (or in the case of Dai, his related idea) enough to pursue it to Nakamoto (assuming that Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai ). "

Further research carried out by the financial author Dominic Frisby, who describes in his 2014 book entitled "Bitcoin: The Future of Money?" He also suggests that Nick Szabo is the real Satoshi. In an interview with Russia Today, Frisby said: "I have concluded that there is only one person in the world who has the sheer breadth but also the specificity of knowledge and it is this guy [Nick Szabo]".

However, Szabo denied being Satoshi. In an e-mail of July 2014 in Frisby, he stated:

"Thank you for letting me know, I'm afraid you made a mistake in doubling me as Satoshi, but I'm used to it."

Hal Finney

Hal Finney

Suspicious credentials: a pioneer of American cryptography who died in 2014 at the age of 58

Source: Andy Greenberg, Forbes (who eventually denied his hypothesis)

On March 25, 2014, Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg published an article about the alleged neighbor of Dorian Nakamoto, a pre-Bitcoin crypto pioneer named Hal Finney, who received the first BTC transaction from Nakamoto.

Interestingly, Greenberg contacted the consulting firm Juola & Associates asking them to compare a sample of Finney's writing with that of Satoshi Nakamoto. Reportedly, they found that it was the closest similarity they had ever met – including the other candidates suggested by Newsweek, Fast Company and New Yorker journalists, along with Ted Nelson and Skye Gray. However, the company has established that Nakamoto's e-mails to Finney more closely resemble the style in which the original white paper was written compared to Finney's e-mails.

Greenberg suggested that Finney may have been a ghostwriter for Nakamoto, or that he used the identity of his neighbor Dorian as a cover. Finney denied being Satoshi. Greenberg, after meeting Finney in person, seeing the exchange of emails between him and Nakamoto and the history of his Bitcoin wallet, concluded that Finney was telling the truth.

On August 28, 2014, Hal Finney died in his Phoenix home at the age of 58 after five years of struggle against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Craig Wright

Craig Wright

Suspicious credentials: a 48-year-old Australian scientist and business man

Sources: Andy Greenberg, Gwern Branwen, Wired; Craig Wright (himself)

On December 8, 2015, Wired published an article written by Andy Greenberg and Gwern Branwen that an Australian academic named Craig Steven Wright "invented the bitcoin or is a brilliant prankster who really wants us to believe he has done it."

On the same day, Gizmodo published a story that contained documents allegedly obtained by a hacker who broke into Wright's accounts, claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto was a common pseudonym of Craig Steven Wright and his friend, a legal computer expert and expert on computer security David Kleiman, who died in 2013.

Wright promptly dumped his online accounts and disappeared for several months until May 2, 2016, when he has publicly stated that he is the creator of Bitcoin. Later in the same month, Wright issued an apology along with his refusal to publish proof of access to one of the first Bitcoin keys. Cointelegraph has published several articles on why Wright is most likely not Satoshi. However, Wright continues to claim to be Satoshi until today.

In February 2018, Dave Kleiman's estate filed a lawsuit against Wright for BTC's $ 5 billion rights, claiming that Wright has cheated Kleiman of virtual currency and intellectual property rights.

Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry

Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry

Suspect credentials: residents in the United States and Germany, employment and unknown ages

Source: Adam Penenberg, Fast Company

In October 2013, journalist Adam Penenberg wrote an article for Fast Company, in which he cited circumstantial evidence suggesting that Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry could be Nakamoto. Reportedly, King and Bry live in Germany while Oksman was claimed to be resident in the United States.

Penenberg's theory revolves around the statement that King, Oksman and Bry jointly submitted a patent application that contained the phrase "computationally impractical to reverse" in August 2008, which was also used in the white paper published by Nakamoto in October of the same year. In addition, the domain name bitcoin.org was registered three days after the patent was presented.

All three men denied being Nakamoto when contacted by Penenberg.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk

Suspicious credentials: a 47-year-old American technology entrepreneur

Source: Sahil Gupta, SpaceX intern

In what seems to be one of the most absurd theories of Nakamoto to date, Sahil Gupta, who claims to be a former trainee at SpaceX, wrote a post by Hacker Noon speculating that Elon Musk was probably Satoshi Nakamoto. Gupta emphasized Elon Musk's background in economics, production-level software experience and the history of innovation to hypothesize that Musk could have invented Bitcoin.

The post was published in November 2017 and was soon denied by Musk himself, who tweeted that Gupta's suggestion "is not true".

Satoshi Nakamoto

Government agency

Although there is no concrete evidence that Nakamoto is a government agency, it constitutes a great conspiracy theory that contains a great many reasons why the United States (or any other state) would like to create Bitcoins. For example, a 2013 Motherboard article theorized: "Bitcoin could be used as a weapon against the US dollar and could be used to finance blackout operations."

He then suggested a theory that "Bitcoin is actually an Orwellian vehicle that would allow governments to monitor all financial transactions."

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