Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Explained With Pros and Cons for Investment ? 2024

On January 3rd, 2009 — at around 18:15:05 UTC — Satoshi Nakamoto mined the very first bitcoin. Which was fitting, given that Satoshi is to Bitcoin as Alexander Graham Bell was to the telephone. The inventor had revealed the creation to a tiny online community of cryptography-obsessed computer scientists and hackers two months earlier. In that scene, Satoshi was already a familiar name — if not a real one. Years before the world heard a peep about Bitcoin, someone using the Satoshi pseudonym had been posting to message boards and emailing fellow developers, never identifying a location, a nationality, or even a real name. Satoshi released Bitcoin and saw it begin to catch on, and then — in April 2011 — sent an email to a developer friend saying, “I’ve moved on to other things.” 

After that? Satoshi disappeared into thin air

What Do We Know About Satoshi Nakamoto?

We know that Nakamoto created Bitcoin. This fact is based on the famous Bitcoin white paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” published online in October 2008.

Nakamoto was the author of the white paper, laying out the theory and operating structure of the Bitcoin payment system.

In February 2009, Nakamoto created the first ever online message board post dedicated to cryptocurrency, on the P2P Foundation forum.

In this post, Nakamoto stated, “I’ve developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin. It’s completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust. Give it a try, or take a look at the screenshots and design paper.”

Since that first post, millions of people have followed his advice.

By 2021, at least 1 million Bitcoin miners were verifying the data that make up the Bitcoin blockchain. However, those 1 million miners represent a fraction of the total number of Bitcoin holders, estimated to be more than 100 million people.

Today, Bitcoin is the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap, beating out all of the other major cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (ETH), Binance Coin (BNB), Cardano (ADA), and many more.

But even with BTC’s astronomical value and adoption, we still don’t know the identity of Satoshi Nakomoto.

Is Satoshi Nakamoto a Real Person?

There is at least one real person behind the name Satoshi Nakamoto. We know this because somebody created Bitcoin’s source code, published its white paper, sent emails and made forum posts about the cryptocurrency.

But the last email from Nakamoto was in April 2011. It was a short statement to a fellow developer where the Bitcoin creator said he had “moved onto other things.”

A final forum post credited to Nakamoto was made in March 2014.

At that time, Nakamoto simply said, “I am not Dorian Nakamoto,” about a Japanese-American physicist named the creator of Bitcoin in an article by Newsweek magazine.

Since this post, Nakamoto, who was actively working with other developers in Bitcoin’s early days, has completely vanished.

A few things are known for sure about Nakamoto, however.

• First, using time stamps on Nakamoto’s posts and emails, it’s assumed that Nakamoto probably resided either in the U.K., the East Coast of the U.S., or the West Coast when posting about the cryptocurrency.
• Second, Nakamoto was known to use the British/Commonwealth spelling of certain words like “favour,” with an added “U,” rather than the American “favor.” For this reason, some have speculated Nakamoto is from the U.K. or was educated in the U.K.
• Third, given the amount of Bitcoin traced to wallets presumably owned by Satoshi Nakamoto, Nakamoto is most certainly a billionaire. Although, none of that Bitcoin has ever been removed or even moved from any of those wallets to another.

So, there is most likely a real person behind the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Still, given the world’s difficulty finding the figure, Satoshi Nakamoto is probably not that person’s actual name.

Is Elon Musk Satoshi Nakamoto?

Some have speculated that SpaceX and Tesla founder, Elon Musk, might be Satoshi Nakamoto.

The rumor seems to have started with a blog post on the website Medium by Sahil Gupta.

Gupta had been an intern for Musk’s SpaceX company and believed Musk’s knowledge and interests could have led the billionaire to develop a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.

But Musk denies this claim.

Following the breadcrumb trail

Journalists, hackers, and intelligence agencies have all scrutinized the breadcrumbs Satoshi left behind in the hopes of divining the Bitcoin inventor’s identity. Though Satoshi pointedly never shared any personal details in his communications, he did once describe himself (in a profile on a peer-to-peer forum) as a 37-year-old man living in Japan — a fact that pretty much nobody believes. So where was he actually from? 

Satoshi left a potential Easter egg in the metadata of the Genesis block — the very first bitcoin ever mined: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. The text comes from a headline in that day’s Times of London. Satoshi also made  liberal use of Britishisms like “favour,” “maths,” “flat” (for his apartment), and the phrase “bloody hard.” All of which would point to the inventor as hailing from or being a resident of the United Kingdom — unless Satoshi had been devising red herrings since his earliest days of conceiving Bitcoin.

Researchers, poring over timestamps from Satoshi’s various online activities, narrowed the Bitcoin creator’s likely time zones to the UK (GMT), US Eastern (EST), or the US Pacific (PST). 

There are those who are convinced that Satoshi isn’t in fact one person at all, but rather a team of programmers, perhaps even including someone working inside the NSA. “He’s a world-class programmer, with a deep understanding of the C++ programming language,” Dan Kaminsky, one of the world’s top Internet security researchers, told The New Yorker in 2011. “He understands economics, cryptography, and peer-to-peer networking.” 

Kaminsky’s conclusion? “Either there’s a team of people who worked on this or this guy is a genius.” 

Unmasking Satoshi

If Satoshi is indeed only one person, he belongs to a very specialized group of programmers that probably numbers in the dozens. Guesses about his identity have abounded. Some have been ridiculous. In 2014, Newsweek announced with great fanfare that the magazine had located Bitcoin’s creator  in Southern California — in the form of a 64-year-old retired physicist named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. Judging from his genuine befuddlement upon learning about his alleged creation, this Nakamoto clearly only possessed a similar name. (Satoshi, or someone possessing his login info, reappeared on the Bitcoin forum in 2014 to declare, “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”) 

Naturally, a wide variety of characters have claimed to be Satoshi. There is Jörg Molt, a German ex-DJ with Las Vegas-magician hair who has marketed himself as “cofounder of Bitcoin” to sell, among other things, a Bitcoin-branded sparkling wine. And Australian Craig Steven Wright, who, according to a 2019 Wired article, “either…invented bitcoin, or [is] a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.” 

Two of the most plausible suspects have both denied the connection. First is cryptographic pioneer Hal Finney (the cypherpunk who was one of Bitcoin’s first users). He died of ALS in 2014, but was adamant even on his deathbed that he neither was Satoshi nor knew the Bitcoin inventor’s actual identity. Late into his ALS, he laboriously responded to a Forbes reporter’s questions via eye-tracking software: “You have records of how I reacted to the announcement of Bitcoin, and I struggled to understand it. I suppose you could retort that I was able to fake it, but I don’t know what I can say to that. I’ve done some changes to the Bitcoin code, and my style is completely different from Satoshi’s. I program in C, which is compatible with C++, but I don’t understand the tricks that Satoshi used.”

Another prominent suspect is computer scientist and cypherpunk Nick Szabo (author of the smart contract concept that powers decentralized finance apps and creator of 1998 Bitcoin precursor Bit Gold), who has consistently denied his involvement. One simple reason to believe him? Szabo has been an active participant in the crypto scene before, during, and after Bitcoin under his own name. Why would he have created a phony identity for this one project?

There’s also the tragic, persistent speculation that Satoshi might have been a wunderkind cryptographer named Len Sassaman, who killed himself in 2011 following a long battle with depression. Indeed, two months before Sassaman’s suicide, in one of Satoshi’s final communications, Bitcoin’s inventor sent a cryptic email to another developer saying that he “probably won’t be around in the future.”  

Why Satoshi might want to remain anonymous

If the real Satoshi lives and breathes, there are some compelling reasons to stay hidden. The US government has a well-established track record of prosecuting individuals audacious enough to invent a competitor to the dollar. As The New Yorker reported, the FBI has declared it to be “a violation of federal law for individuals . . . to create private coin or currency systems to compete with the official coinage and currency of the United States.” In fact, federal prosecutors pursued a range of charges against the founders of a startup called e-Gold in 2007, claiming that their outfit didn’t explicitly prevent money laundering or other crimes. 

Assuming Bitcoin’s creator is alive, Satoshi could be on track to becoming the richest human being on the planet. But there’s one more fascinating twist. Because the Bitcoin blockchain is open, it’s possible for researchers to plausibly identify much of the bitcoin Satoshi mined in the early days of his invention. After the very beginning, when Satoshi sent a few bitcoin to early testers like Finney, Satoshi’s coins seem to have never been sent or spent or capitalized on in any way. Over more than a decade, as the Bitcoin inventor’s holdings have grown to be worth potentially tens of billions of dollars, the share of money Satoshi quite literally made has sat untouched — a vast cache of so-called “lost coins” that could be in circulation but aren’t. 

So who is Satoshi? One of the prime suspects? One of the many other people that have been identified as Bitcoin’s creator over the years? Someone nobody has ever suspected? Is Satoshi alive or dead? A single inventor or a team? As the years have passed it seems increasingly likely that we’ll never know the answers. 

What we’re left with is Satoshi’s trillion-dollar creation, a small cache of communications, and maybe one final gift. “Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more,” Satoshi wrote, in response to a 2010 BitcoinTalk thread about users losing access to their wallets. “Think of it as a donation to everyone.”

What Is Satoshi Nakamoto’s Net Worth

Nobody knows how much Satoshi Nakamoto is worth, and this is due to the anonymous nature of Bitcoin and investigators’ inability to be certain which wallets Nakamoto owns.

It’s assumed that Nakamoto owns at least 1 million Bitcoins. At today’s prices, it can be assumed Nakamoto owns roughly $20 billion in BTC.

However, other than the original 10 BTC transferred to Hal Finney in 2009, none of this Bitcoin has ever been removed or moved from any of its wallets since it was originally mined, presumably by Nakamoto. The value of this Bitcoin, though, might be one reason why Nakamoto wants to remain anonymous.

The wealth Bitcoin has generated could lead to upheaval in any individual’s life. Not to mention, the creator of Bitcoin could also face grave consequences from nefarious individuals or even governments.

This leaves many people wondering: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Is Bitcoin’s creator alive? Why hasn’t he, she or they come forward? Will we ever discover the truth about the anonymous genius behind one of the most important financial developments of the 21st century?

Many blockchain experts, like Andrew Lokenauth, founder of the financial resource site, Fluent in Finance, think we’ll probably never know the answers to any of these questions. One thing is certain, though, whoever created Bitcoin wanted to remain anonymous for one reason or another, and that person (or people) has done a good job at that.