Satoshi Nakamoto

Monument to the unknown Bitcoin founder in Budapest, Hungary

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Satoshi Nakamoto is the likely-pseudonymous name of the creator (or creators) of Bitcoin. Not much is known about Nakamoto, given that we don't actually know for sure who they are, or that they could be a group of people. As the inventor of Bitcoin, 'Satoshi' controls an estimated 5.4% of all the bitcoins that will ever exist, which is worth over 60 billion dollars at time of writing. Assuming Satoshi did not dispose or lose their Bitcoin, their net worth would be at least that of Charles Koch or John Mars. If Satoshi is a single person, they would be among the 30 wealthiest people on the planet as of writing.

It can be gathered from Satoshi's forum posts and other such examples of Satoshi's writing that they're a pretty big libertarian. They came into the picture in November 2008 when they posted the original Bitcoin whitepaper to the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com. They left in 2010, when they handed control over to Bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen. Their last forum post was on December 12^th, 2010. It's pretty much clear that they left because they were afraid of growing interest in the project from what they saw as the wrong kinds of people — namely, criminals the government. One of their last posts was about encouraging WikiLeaks to accept Bitcoin, and how "the heat [that] would bring would likely destroy us at this stage." Gavin Andresen says his last email with Nakamoto was about an upcoming meeting Andresen had with the CIA about Bitcoin.

Identity

Personal life

Not much is known about Satoshi's personal life. Due to the content of their code, Satoshi was likely a Windows user and leaked emails showed he sometimes spoke in ableist and juvenile language like using the word "retarded". Their code had an academic style and was more theoretically impressive to early reviewers than competently written, requiring a team of coders to secure Satoshi's system after creation, most or all of whom are already known and never hid their involvement in securing the alpha versions of Bitcoin. These are among a trail of coders, some of whom who may know Satoshi's identity.

Accused or self-promoted as Satoshi

You'd think that something whose little pet project has gotten as successful as Bitcoin has would show up to take credit for it. Moving a few coins around would be the best way to prove that someone was either Satoshi Nakamoto themself or knew who they were. That hasn't happened yet, but it hasn't stopped enterprising journalists from claiming they've found proof of the real Satoshi, and enterprising fraudsters (well, one in particular) from claiming that they're the person themself. In lieu of doing our own internet detective work, we're just going to summarize the candidates and the case for each.

Hal Finney

The late Hal Finney (1956–2014), computer programmer and prolific LessWrong user, is a popular candidate for Satoshihood. Here's the basic case:

• He knew how to do that computer.
• He created a "Reusable Proofs of Work" system that could be used in a form of electronic currency, or "e-money," as the kids call it.
• He was the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction (from Satoshi Nakamoto).
• He knows about cryptography.

Plus, he's dead. He mined many Bitcoins but cashed many of them to pay his medical bills before death.

Michael Clear

In a piece published in The New Yorker, Joshua Davis claimed that an Irish cryptography graduate student was the closest match. He'd worked with currency trading software, wrote stuff about peer-to-peer networks, and knew some things about cryptography.

When Davis met Clear, Clear said that "I'm not Satoshi, but even if I was I wouldn't tell you." He later clarified to the unfunny in the audience that this was a joke.

The Satoshi Three

Journalist Adam Penenberg, thinking he could one up Joshua Davis, wrote an article in Fast Company claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto was actually three programmers in a trenchcoat. According to Penenberg, Neal King, Vladimir Oksman, and Charles Bry are the real Satoshi. His reasoning? They published a paper about cryptography three days before the Bitcoin domain name was registered, and it included the phrase "computationally impractical to reverse," which is also in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Why two cryptographic papers would include that phrase, when modern cryptography is based on the assumption that certain cryptographic primitives are computationally impractical to reverse, defies explanation.

Nick Szabo

Not every candidate has reasoning as flimsy as that. In December 2013, a blogger named Skye Grey claimed that stylometric analysis (the analysis of writing styles) had shown that Nick Szabo was the most likely author of the whitepaper. Nick Szabo is a cryptographer known for his work on digital currency, which he called "bit gold". This system was to operate similar to the way Bitcoin does. He's also the one to thank for inventing the term "smart contracts".

There's also a bit more circumstantial evidence, such as a backdating of posts about bit gold to appear to have been written after the release of the original whitepaper, and that he had published an article about how he'd like to create an implementation of bit gold a few months before the whitepaper came out.

A research team led by Dr. Jack Grieve of Aston University checked out the writing of eleven possible Satoshis (including Michael Clear, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, and the Satoshi Three) and decided that Nick Szabo's matched the closest, so there's that.

Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto

Here's the one you probably heard of. For Newsweek's triumphant return to print in March 2014, they decided on a cover story about the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. According to Leah Goodman, the real Satoshi Nakamoto is — wait for it — Satoshi Nakamoto. Specifically, Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto. Sort of like how Batman's real name was Bruce Bat Man, right?

Other than the name, there wasn't much there. He worked in technology, and — like many tech people — he was a paranoid libertarian who didn't trust the government. Also, when Goodman asked if he had created Bitcoin, he said "I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it. It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection." Which isn't so much of a confession as it is what someone with English as a second language would say when a strange journalist is standing in their driveway asking them about something that sounds like the kind of government projects they used to work on and are prohibited from talking about. He said through his lawyer that he never worked on Bitcoin. This particular Satoshi changed his name to Dorian long before Bitcoin was released. It doesn't make sense that Dorian would use his defunct birth name for a controversial project such as Bitcoin and then try to stay anonymous immediately afterward.

Dorian lives just blocks from where Hal Finney lived. If Finney is Satoshi, that would explain why he chose the name. If Dorian is Satoshi, that would explain why Finney was the first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction.

Craig S. Wright

Craig S. Wright is a fraudster who would like us to think he's Satoshi Nakamoto. He's not Satoshi Nakamoto. He is currently under investigation for defrauding the Australian government out of millions of dollars in tax credits, but that's a bit off-topic.

Craig Steven Wright (1970–) has done his best to trick tech journalists into thinking he's the true creator of Bitcoin, and he's done it successfully twice. The man claims to have control of Satoshi's coins, but he hasn't done the simple proof of moving them around. One wonders why.

Wired was the first one to fall for his story, publishing in an article on 8 December 2015 presenting proof (fed to them by Wright) that Wright was Satoshi. It only took them three days to backpedal.

Here's what the first article thought was proof:

• A blogpost backdated to August 2008 where Craig S. Wright claims that he's working on "cryptocurrency paper," despite the term "cryptocurrency" having not yet been coined (perhaps he invented that too?)
• Another backdated blog post linking to a backdated PGP key tied to Satoshi's email address.
• Craig S. Wright claiming that he invested $30M of bitcoins in a trust he operated. Except when he invested them, he didn't actually transfer the bitcoins to the trust — he just "assigned the rights" to the trust. So he never proved he actually owned $30M of bitcoins. This invisible $30M was what he was using to scam tax credits from the Australian government.
• "Leaked details" from "anonymous sources" (who looked surprisingly like if Craig S. Wright had a mustache).

After everyone realized that Craig S. Wright was a hack fraud, he gave up his wicked ways and… just kidding. He tried the same thing six months later. This time, his proof was that he had the original private key! But he won't move any bitcoins around. He's going to sign a message with it! But he can't just email Wright a message and have him email back a signed version of it. No, that would be too hard to fake. Instead, he's going to invite Gavin Andresen to London, so he can sign a message with the private key. And then not release the signed message so everyone can check by themselves that Wright isn't lying.

So we have to take Gavin Andresen's word at face value, and assume that he wasn't bribed, blackmailed, deceived, or otherwise manipulated into claiming Wright is Satoshi. That's a tough sell. Luckily, Wright has a way to prove this to all of us: he'll sign a completely new message, from author Jean-Paul Sartre, and he'll put it on the internet with instructions for verifying it!

Except, hold on — if you follow the instructions in the article to verify that he truly holds the private key, you'll find that the verification fails. In fact, what he really signed was the transaction data of a block mined by Nakamoto — that is, it's data already signed that he just took and tried to pass off to terrible tech journalists as proof.

But hey, guys, he's going to do it! He's going to move coins around. It's really going to happen! Yep, right after the "proof" was released he claimed he's going to finally move some coins around. It's going to happen! For real this time!

Oh, wait, no. He doesn't have the courage. But he's still Satoshi, trust him!

In 2024, Wright was sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence in Australia for several counts of contempt of court for persisting in making false claims and forgeries related to be Nakamoto.

Adam Back

The British cryptographer Adam Back (1970–) was the creator of Hashcash, which is one of the key components of Bitcoin as a whole. He also was reportedly the first person Satoshi Nakamoto was in correspondence with about the implementation of Bitcoin.

For the longest time, there was no evidence whether the correspondence existed, as no proof of it had been put forward, despite Nakamoto's correspondence with other figures being well documented. This finally changed in early 2024, when it was used in a UK court case concerning Wright. Back had also previously had the balls to say Wright was a fraud, which caused Wright to file a defamation lawsuit against him that he later dropped.

There is still some other evidence in favour of Back, including the use of British English in Nakamoto's writing, as well as double spaces after periods, which Back has also been recorded using. Back was also conspicuously absent from the technology patent scene during the development of Bitcoin, despite having previously filed numerous patents. He later began filing them again after Bitcoin had been implemented.

Martti Malmi

A 20-year-old Finnish university of applied sciences student in 2009 with a deep distrust of the traditional financial system, Malmi volunteered to help Nakamoto and participated in its first two years. He ran many bits of the early Bitcoin peripheral stuff and wrote some documentation. He was apparently also the person who set up the bitcoin.com website, as it was registered using a provider based in Helsinki, Finland.

Malmi has unsuprisingly been suspected of actually being Nakamoto himself. The case for him probably was never particularly strong, particularly as he is not a native speaker of English, which would certainly have been evident in Nakamoto's writings.

The case was pretty much cleared in early 2024, when Malmi's e-mail correspondence with Nakamoto was presented as evidence in a court case in the UK. No one in their right mind would have conversed with themselves for two years, especially during a period when the success of Bitcoin was still in no way certain, and when the effort of faking a person might easily have been completely wasted.

Peter Todd

In October 2024, an HBO special claimed that Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd was Satoshi Nakamoto. In the documentary, Todd sarcastically said he was Satoshi (among others who sarcastically claimed to be Satoshi). The documentary claims that since Todd publicly finished a thought on the BitcoinTalk forums under a post that Satoshi's account had made, it raised suspicions that Todd was abusing multiple accounts as both Satoshi and Todd. Additionally, after this interaction, this Satoshi account had allegedly gone defunct and Todd left the forum for an extended period of time. Also, the documentarians accuse Todd of sock-puppeting as a user offering himself $500 to implement a fee system on Bitcoin, which Todd subsequently implemented. The documentarians also claimed to have obtained chat logs showing Todd claiming to have manually burned Bitcoin in a unique way by hand, insinuating it was possibly related to a coin disposal Satoshi would want to carry out. They interview another prominent Bitcoin proponent who accuses Todd of being associated with a government agency determined to cripple Bitcoin's ability to handle large transaction volumes. Throughout the documentary, Todd is civil with the documentarians and appeared amused at the allegations that were thrown at him. Todd eventually called the overall story about him "creative" and "ludicrous" near the end of the documentary when the documentarians film themselves telling their full allegations against him in a bizarre castle setting in the Czech Republic (Todd is Canadian). Adam Back is also in the castle setting, grinning while listening to the allegations against Todd, but the documentarians dropped Back as a suspect earlier in the documentary, his denials always more weary and forceful than Todd's during the documentary.

The documentary as whole takes it as almost a given that those who are willing to appear on camera deserve the most scrutiny, later criticized by media as prioritizing opportunity and story over truth finding. After the documentary was released, Todd denied that he was Satoshi, criticized the documentarians for allegedly putting his life in danger, and pointed to evidence that contradicted the documentary's storyline. Specifically, Todd claimed that the account he used which appeared to finish Satoshi's thought was initially named "retep", and that he switched the username of this account to his own name afterward, suggesting that if he was embarrassed about the post he wouldn't have renamed the account to his real name. The documentary and its claims about Satoshi's identity were criticized as flimsy and likely incorrect and for not spending enough time investigating Nick Szabo. Other commentary suggested that the documentary raised plausible possibility that Todd was at least somewhat involved in Bitcoin's creation.