Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin's creator, who vanished leaving a fortune untouched since 2010
Bitcoin's first block, mined on 9 January 2009, carries a hidden line of text: a front-page headline from The Times about a second bank bailout. Its author signed himself Satoshi Nakamoto, a name nobody has ever matched to a real person, and he walked away in 2011 with roughly a million coins still unspent.
By Nakamoto's own account, work on the code began around April to June 2007. He registered bitcoin.org on 18 August 2008, and on 31 October he posted a white paper called Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System to a cryptography mailing list. Version 0.1 of the software appeared on SourceForge the following January, along with the genesis block, which paid out 50 coins. As part of the design he invented the first blockchain database.
Until mid-2010 he made every change to the code himself. He then handed the repository and the network alert key to Gavin Andresen and passed various domains to other community figures. A 2011 email to fellow developer Mike Hearn said he was busy with other projects now, and after that he went silent for good. His wallet, dormant since 2010, is thought to hold about 1.1 million bitcoins, which at the November 2021 peak would have made him the 15th-richest person on Earth.
Clues point away from Japan despite the name. His English reads as native, the white paper was not first issued in Japanese, and he used British spellings such as colour and slang like bloody hard. Swiss engineer Stefan Thomas plotted the timestamps of more than 500 forum posts and saw them nearly vanish for six hours each day, from five to eleven in the morning Greenwich time, suggesting a sleeper in a western time zone. Even his claimed birth date, 5 April 1975, has been read as a nod to a 1933 US order banning private gold coins.
Guesses abound. Cryptographer Hal Finney, the first person besides Nakamoto to run the software, lived a few blocks from a Californian engineer born Satoshi Nakamoto. When Newsweek named that man in March 2014, the dormant Nakamoto forum account broke five years of silence to post one line: I am not Dorian Nakamoto.
Source: Satoshi Nakamoto
