Over the years, we’ve explored some intriguing theories about who (or what) created Bitcoin, ranging from the top government spy agency in America to a time-traveling AI and even the lizard people.
However, some are adamant that the creator of Bitcoin is much more human and has been under our noses this whole time, sporting a guru beard, sandals, and wearing a T-shirt with Satoshi written on it in large letters: the billionaire Twitter and Block founder Jack Dorsey.
“I believe that Jack has been outwardly signaling that he’s Satoshi for more than a decade,” deBanked chief editor Sean Murray tells Magazine.
“I don’t think his actions over the past decade are of someone saying ‘don’t find me’ but rather someone building on to the lore of how it’s him, why it’s him, that each blatant but indirect admission is part of the art, the brand of poetic terrorism that he subscribes to.”
So what makes some intelligent and respected people — including VanEck’s head of digital assets research Matthew Sigel — so confident that Dorsey is the creator of Bitcoin?
1. Jack Dorsey was one of the original cypherpunks in the 1990s and wanted to end dependence on the dollar
Like any good murder mystery, a killer requires a motive. Dorsey has this in spades.
Dorsey was one of the original 1,300 members of the famed Cypherpunk mailing list — a foundational online community founded in 1992 that prized privacy and digital freedom and laid the groundwork for Bitcoin as money outside the control of the state. He joined the list in 1996 while a student at the University of Missouri–Rolla at around 20 years of age.
Dorsey even created a website that promoted the cyberpunks’ mission using his university domain. It’s safe to say he was a massive fan of the movement and familiar with Adam Back and Hal Finney and DigiCash long before they became well known.
Fun fact: In 2003, Dorsey reportedly blogged, “I also wish to end my dependence on the American Dollar ($) and in that vein am setting up a bartering network.”
2. Dorsey’s ventures are about Bitcoin and decentralization
Dorsey’s alignment with the cypherpunk movement persists to today. In 2009, he founded the now crypto-forward payments company, Square (now known as Block), which has just rolled out Bitcoin payments to over 4 million merchants.
In 2019, after his second return as CEO of Twitter, he created Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter alternative that embodies some of Bitcoin’s decentralized ideals. It didn’t live up to his ideals of decentralization so he focused his efforts on supporting Nostr instead.
Then, earlier this year, Dorsey launched Bitchat. This decentralized communications platform enables people to contact each other without the need for the internet, which has proven particularly valuable amid government protests and natural disasters, much like Bitcoin has in the past.
His charity, Start Small, donated a whopping $21 million to OpenSats, a nonprofit that supports the developers of Bitcoin Core and other projects related to Bitcoin.
No matter which way you slice it, Dorsey is a cypherpunk OG who has the motivation, and as we will see, the know-how to create and support the growth of Bitcoin.
3. See? Plus, plus: Jack Dorsey had the know-how to code Bitcoin
So, if Dorsey wanted to create Bitcoin, did he have the skills to code it?
The answer to this is also a resounding probably. Dorsey was obsessed with computers since his father brought home an IBM PC Junior, when he was around 8 years old. They later got a Macintosh, and by the age of 11, he had taught himself to code.
“I was enthralled by both of them, mainly the ability to just change what they do. So I learned how to program in BASIC, and I played with HyperCard, and little by little I got better and better at newer programming languages like C,” said Dorsey in a Harvard Business School podcast in 2014.
By around the age of 15, Dorsey was already writing dispatch software for taxi cabs, couriers and emergency services that would later be used for decades.
When deBanked’s Murray Dorsey uncovered Dorsey’s early cypherpunk website from the late 90s, it showed Dorsey already knew coding languages including C, Python, Java, Perl, PHP, OCaml, JoCaml, Lisp, ObjC and more. And yes, it did show he knew how to code in C++, the language the original Bitcoin client was written in.
So, it’s not a giant leap to think that Dorsey would have had an even firmer grasp of programming by the time he was 32, which was how old he was when the Bitcoin white paper was…
cointelegraph.com