Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of the Bitcoin protocol, published a paper outlining it via the Cryptography Mailing List on Nov. 1, 2008.
He then released the first version of the Bitcoin software client in 2009. He participated with others on the project via mailing lists until he finally faded from the community toward the end of 2010.
Nakamoto worked with people on the open-source Bitcoin team but never revealed anything personal about himself. The last anyone heard from him was in the spring of 2011 when he said he had “moved on to other things.”
But he was Japanese, right?
“Satoshi” means “clear thinking, quick-witted, wise.” “Naka” can mean “medium, inside, or relationship.” “Moto” can indicate “origin” or “foundation.”
Those things apply to the person who founded a movement by designing a clever algorithm. The problem, of course, is that each word has multiple possible meanings.
It is not known for sure whether Satoshi Nakamoto was Japanese or not. It’s rather presumptuous to assume that he was a ‘he.’ Allowing for the fact that this could have been a pseudonym, ‘he’ could have been a ‘she’ or even a ‘they.’
Does anyone know who Nakamoto was?
No, but the detective techniques people use when guessing are sometimes even more intriguing than the answer. The New Yorker’s Joshua Davis believed Satoshi Nakamoto was Michael Clear, a graduate cryptography student at Dublin’s Trinity College.
He arrived at this conclusion by analyzing 80,000 words of Nakamoto’s online writings and searching for linguistic clues. He also suspected Finnish economic sociologist and former games developer Vili Lehdonvirta. Both have denied being Bitcoin’s inventor. Michael Clear publicly denied being Satoshi at the 2013 Web Summit.
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