Who is Satoshi Nakamoto really? Clues, candidates and curiosities
March 22, 2023
10 min

The identity of Bitcoin‘s creator is a mystery: we know their pseudonym, but no one has ever managed to find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is. On the Internet we can find a few clues, emails and posts in old forums, we know that they have been nominated for a Nobel Prize and we can perhaps estimate their net worth, but they seem destined for eternal anonymity in any case.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
We don’t know their real name, but they are absurdly the most renowned person in the crypto world: who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, and what is their net worth? On 31 October 2008, on the crypto enthusiast website metzdowd.com, they shared the whitepaper of their cryptocurrency: ‘A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’. This paper presents the philosophy and functioning of a decentralised digital currency, exchanged without the need for intermediaries (Peer-to-Peer), whose transactions are stored in a shared ledger (the blockchain), so as to prove the ownership of the coins and prevent attempts at ‘double spending’.
On 3 January 2009, the project came to fruition: Satoshi Nakamoto themselves created the genesis block of Bitcoin, inserting a message as a warning.
“The Times 3 January 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”
This Times headline is iconic for the crisis years that motivated Bitcoin’s creator. In a nutshell, Satoshi reflected on the fragility of the traditional financial system, dependent on trust in centralised authorities, and proposed an alternative based on cryptography.
This project perfectly represents who Satoshi Nakamoto is: a revolutionary who, having solved the problem of money, chose anonymity to give up control and return power to individuals. Bitcoin, in fact, does not need its creator to function, because its decentralised system is managed by a network of equal nodes, which follow the rules of an impartial algorithm.
The creator of Bitcoin: from forums to the Nobel Prize
Their willingness to remain anonymous has not stopped the curious people who, for years now, have been wondering who Satoshi Nakamoto is and trying to find out as many details about them as possible, such as their net worth. There is an entire archive of emails, forum posts and even quotes from the Bitcoin creator: a sort of ‘digital identity’, but one that describes a character in search of an author. We can appreciate their discussions on BitcoinTalk, the online space they founded. Here we find, for instance, exchanges of banter with Hal Finney, the cryptographer who defined the risk of double spending for Bitcoin.
Satoshi’s last post in this forum, dated 12 December 2010, emphasised the need to improve Bitcoin’s protocol, but this is not their final message to the world. In fact, they later wrote other e-mails to two collaborators of the project: some to Mike Hearn, on 23 April 2011, after they gave the Bitcoin source code to Gavin Andresen:
“I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
The second to Gavin himself, a few days later, saying not to speak of them as a ‘mysterious figure‘, because it would have given Bitcoin the reputation of a ‘pirate currency‘, but rather to emphasise the project being open-source. We do not know what Satoshi Nakamoto’s new interests are, but they probably withdrew from the scene to prevent their words from affecting the value of their creation. In any case, they were taken literally, because many still contribute freely to the development of Bitcoin’s algorithm today.
The profile on the P2P Foundation forum, on the other hand, gives us perhaps the best clues: male, Japanese, 47 years old; probably fictitious data, but it has sparked speculation. So much so that, in 2014, an article was published in the online publication Newsweek recognising the creator of Bitcoin in Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a 64-year-old Japanese programmer from California.
If we search online for ‘who is Satoshi Nakamoto’ we find the face of Dorian, but he himself has denied being the creator of the cryptocurrency. To confirm this, the real one broke his silence on the P2P forum: ‘I am not Dorian Nakamoto‘. By contrast, in 2016 the Bitcoin creator did not comment on their nomination for the Nobel Prize in Economics, proposed by Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor at California University. In the end, Satoshi did not win the Nobel, but even today the crypto community on Twitter is convinced they deserved it.
Who is behind Satoshi Nakamoto: possible identities
The enigma concealing the name of Bitcoin’s creator is more complex than mining calculations. However, crypto-enthusiasts never give up: searching for who Satoshi Nakamoto is, they have formulated several hypotheses.
We already know Hal Finney, the first person to receive a transaction in Bitcoin from Nakamoto in January 2009. Finney also helped overhaul BTC’s software before it was launched. Unfortunately, in August 2014, he lost his battle against ALS, but decided to hibernate to see the future. For many, this sad event would explain the Bitcoin creator’s silence since the Dorian affair.
We can still name Gavin Andresen among the candidates: in addition to receiving the source code, he was the creator of the first Bitcoin faucet, a site to distribute BTC via a sort of airdrop. If he were Satoshi Nakamoto, that would be a great way to redistribute his net worth!
Other clues lead to Adam Back, identified as a possible Satoshi Nakamoto by the Financial Times in 2016. He is the cypherpunk and cryptographer who created the HashCash: Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm, which is fundamental to recording transactions and producing blocks. Nakamoto also sent a preview of Bitcoin’s whitepaper to him and Wei Dai, the engineer who created b money, one of the first digital currency projects.
Nick Szabo is another name that could explain who Satoshi Nakamoto is: the American computer scientist who created the Bit Gold currency (before Bitcoin) and coined the term ‘smart contract