Who is Satoshi Nakamoto

Simply, no one really knows who the creator of Bitcoin is. Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym for the person who authored the bitcoin white-paper and wrote and uploaded the first version of the software. Satoshi could be a man, woman or group of people. The fact is, Satoshi was so good at hiding his identity, even those that worked with him in creating bitcoin had no idea who he actually was. So speculating on his true identity based on what we know in the public domain is totally fruitless.

The very first bitcoin block, otherwise known as the genesis block was mined on the 3rd of January 2009, and marked the beginning of Bitcoin. The year previous to the genesis block, Satoshi registered a domain name –bitcoin.org, and published the whitepaper on the site (allegedly paying in cash to protect his identity). The year following, he stopped collaborating and announced he was stepping away from bitcoin. He was barely heard from since.

“One of the greatest things that Satoshi did was disappear.”

Jimmy Song

The story of a mysterious entity releasing its creation upon the world and then vanishing without a trace sounds like the stuff of fantasy literature. Biblical even. To the uninformed observer, maybe some kind of publicity stunt for bitcoin? playing into the rebellious nature of the cypherpunk culture that led to it’s creation. But really the disappearing act was entirely necessary. Satoshi kept himself anonymous, and then disappeared because he recognised that a known entity central to bitcoin would present a single point of failure, a target who could be coerced, censored, litigated against or corrupted.

The fate of previous attempts at digital currencies like Digicash and E-gold who’s failures cannot be attributed to the shortcomings of the technology, but the centralised nature of the entities running them — helps us understand that bitcoin, a new monetary network that poses an existential threat to the powerful global fiat financial construct, must be leaderless. The only authorities are the node operators on the network. As a result, Bitcoin is decentralised and trustless. The disappearance of Satoshi was instrumental to achieve what many describe as the Immaculate Conception of bitcoin.