Who Really Is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Table of Contents
- Who the Most Likely “Candidates” are…
- Dorian Nakamoto
- Adam Back
- Hal Finney
- Nick Szabo
The Honest Answer Is...We Really Don’t Know For Sure, But We Do Have Clues
I’ll show you the best guesses we have, along with the case for and against the person being Satoshi.
Who the Most Likely "Candidates" are...
Remember, this list is of people we actually know of in the cypherpunk community, it is entirely possible Satoshi is one of the many unknown members from the early cypherpunks.
– Adam Back
– The late Hal Finney
– Nick Szabo
– Group of 2-4 people
– Not really: Dorian Nakamoto
Im going to write out Nick Szabo’s case here, but refer to the document to see the full post with all of the explanations for all of the candidates.
Dorian Nakamoto:
Let’s get the least likely candidate out of the way first. The person that was suspected because of his name being Dorian Nakamoto.
Reasons to believe he is:
– His name is Dorian Nakamoto
– Lived across street from Hal Finney
Reasons to believe he is not:
– He’s an engineer, he’s not a cryptographer
– Has no knowledge about any of the subjects required
– There is no way someone trying to stay anonymous would use their own last name
Adam Back:
Reasons to believe he is:
-He appears very soon after Satoshi disappears
-He’s from the U.K. (assuming you believe Satoshi is actually from there)
Jumps into a lot of conversations that have to do with Satoshi’s identity and Bitcoin wallet with an aggressive tone
-He created Hashcash
Founder of Blockstream
Reasons to believe he is not:
-The reason’s people give to Satoshi being British is far from rock solid, most people in the world that speak English other than in the US learn British English
-He’s arguably too good at C++ to have written the apparently “sloppy” original Bitcoin code
Everybody that spreads this theory seems to want to increase the block size of Bitcoin, so they’re extremely biased
-His view on protecting Satoshi’s privacy isn’t exactly uncommon in the Bitcoin community if not the majority opinion
Hal Finney:
Reasons to believe he is:
-The first ever Bitcoin transaction was between Hal Finney and Satoshi which were near each other, so it could have easily been sent to himself
-Satoshi disappeared around the same time Hal Finney’s ALS was getting really bad
-Dorian Nakamoto was literally his neighbor, which would explain the pseudonym
He knew C++
Reasons to believe he is not:
-Doesn’t really write like Satoshi
-There are private Emails between Satoshi and Finney, and when you read them, it doesn’t really look like he’s sending it to himself
-He was one of the first public supporters of Bitcoin when most Cypherpunks dismissed it, but you could argue that this was done to give the project needed credibility to keep it alive
Nick Szabo:
Reasons to believe he is:
– Designed a mechanism for a decentralized digital currency called Bitgold, it never went live, but he publicly made it clear that he wanted to eventually do it, which makes sense, because he probably realized later that he wanted to be anonymous
– Knows a ton about sound money and monetary systems
– He was super public before the release of Bitcoin, ever since then he’s been almost silent, especially during the time Satoshi was still active, and even altered his blog to cover his tracks
– Satoshi publicly admitted to the first 2 characters in his wallet address “NS” being his initials, but people argue it’s the initials of Satoshi Nakamoto “SN” backwards
– He’s not known to have been good at or even know C++, this would explain the “sloppy” original code of Bitcoin and how long it took Satoshi to code it, he could have started learning C++ after designing Bitgold
Reasons to believe he is not:
– We have no idea if he even has the technical ability to code something as complex as Bitcoin
– Writes in American English, Satoshi seems to write in British English
Bonus:
Many people claim that it was a group 2-4 people, but from what I have been told, the code is too consistent, feel free to refute this in the comments if you know C++ very well and have gone over the code, I don’t know C++ myself.