Satoshi Nakamoto is the name that stands behind the unknown person or group of people who created Bitcoin and its original implementation. As the part of this implementation, they also made the very first Blockchain database. As the main problem at the beginning was the digital currency double-spending, their first task was to solve it somehow. The development of Bitcoin was active until late 2010.
Satoshi Nakamoto claimed to be Japanese man, born in 1875, but there were many different speculations about who he was. It the search for the true identity of Nakamoto people mainly focused on finding out how many non-Japanese cryptography and computer experts were living in Europe and the United States. Since 2017, it is believed that Satoshi Nakamoto has around one million Bitcoins, which would be USD 7 billion according to the current price in late 2017.
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Creating the Bitcoin
In late 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com explaining how the Bitcoin works as a digital currency. In the beginning, it was called Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Soon after the first BTC story public appearance, Nakamoto released the first BTC software that launched the network and the very first units on Bitcoin cryptocurrency, called simply Bitcoins. In January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto published the version 0.1 of Bitcoin software on Sourceforge.
At that time, Nakamoto was saying that the very first steps in creating this new digital system were taken in 2007. Even then, the founder of this cryptocurrency knew that due to its core design, this digital system would be able to support a wide range of money transaction types. The implemented solution enabled specific codes and data fields through the use of a predictive script.
The founder of a Bitcoin then made a website with a bitcoin.org domain and continued his collaboration with other developers on the bitcoin software until 2010. By that time, he handled the control over the source code repository and network alert key to Gavin Andersen and transferred a few related domains to some prominent members of the Bitcoin community. At that point, Nakamoto stopped working on this huge project. Before he finally finished working on it, Nakamoto made all modifications to the source code himself.
Further development
Nakamoto left a famous text message in the first mined block ever, which said “The Times 3 January 2009 Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks”. It refers to a title in The Times magazine which was published on 3 January 2009. It is clear that the first block was mined a little bit earlier than this specific date. The genesis block had a timestamp of 18:15 GMT on 3 January 2009.
This block is different to any other blocks because it didn’t have a previous block reference. It means that it required a custom code in order to mine it. These timestamps prove that Nakamoto didn’t mine all these early blocks by himself, but with the help of others. The public Bitcoin transaction log shows that Nakamoto’s known addresses contain around one million Bitcoins. In mid-2017, this was worth more than $6,000,000,000.
Nakamoto’s identity
Satoshi Nakamoto never exposed any of his personal info when he was discussing technical things. He had some commentaries on the banking system and fractional-reserve banking system. In 2012, on his P2P Foundation profile, he claimed to be a 37yo male living in Japan. However, many speculated that he was not Japanese due to his native English fluency and the Bitcoin software that wasn’t labeled in the Japanese language.
He used a lot of occasional UK English terminology (and even British spelling) in both source code commenting and forum posts. It all led to a considerable doubt, making the skeptics think that Nakamoto, or the person who claimed to be Satoshi, was actually of the native English speaking origin.
Other speculations
A Swiss-based coder and crypto community member, Stefan Thomas, researched the timestamps for each bitcoin forum post by Nakamoto, more than five hundred posts. His results have shown a huge decline posting between 5 am and 11 am UK time, even on weekends. These results once again led to the speculation that Nakamoto lived far away from Japan and its time zone, and he was sleeping at those “offline” periods of time. It suggests that he was located somewhere in the UTC -5-time zone, which would be EST time zone in North America, and some parts of Central America, Caribbean, and some parts of South America.
Conclusion
Whether Satoshi Nakamoto was a single person or a group of people, a Japanese coder or a worldwide group of coders, it is still difficul to determine the real identity of the founder of Bitcoin even today.