While we may not know who Satoshi Nakamoto was, we know what he (or she) did. Nakamoto was the inventor of the Bitcoin protocol, publishing a paper
While we may not know who Satoshi Nakamoto was, we know what he (or she) did. Nakamoto was the inventor of the Bitcoin protocol, publishing a paper via the Cryptography Mailing List in November 2008.
Nakamoto then released the first version of the Bitcoin software client in 2009, participating with others on the project via mailing lists,until he finally began to fade from the community toward the end of 2010.
Nakamoto worked with people on the open-source team but took care never to reveal anything personal about himself, and the last anyone heard from him was in the spring of 2011, when he said that he had “moved on to other things.”
Was Satoshi Nakamoto Japanese?
Best not to judge a book by its cover. Or in fact, maybe we should.
“Satoshi” means “clear thinking, quick witted; wise.” “Naka” can mean “medium, inside, or relationship.” “Moto” can mean “origin” or “foundation.”
Those things would all 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.
We can’t know for sure whether Nakamoto was Japanese or not. In fact, it’s presumptuous to assume that he was actually a “he.” Allowing for the fact that “Satoshi Nakamoto” could have been a pseudonym, “he” could have been a “she,” or even a “they.”
Does anyone know who Satoshi Nakamoto was?
No, but the detective techniques that people use when guessing are sometimes even more intriguing than the answer. The New Yorker’s Joshua Davis believed that 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.
Adam Penenberg at Fast Company disputed that claim, arguing instead that Nakamoto may actually have been three people: Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry. He figured this out by typing unique phrases from Nakamoto’s bitcoin paper into Google, to see if they were used anywhere else.
One of them, “computationally impractical to reverse,” turned up in a patent application made by these three for updating and distributing encryption keys. The bitcoin.org domain name originally used by Satoshi to publish the paper had been registered three days after the patent application was filed.
It was registered in Finland, and one of the patent authors had traveled there six months before the domain was registered. All of them deny it.
In any case, when bitcoin.org was registered on Aug. 18, 2008, the registrant actually used a Japanese anonymous registration service, and hosted it using a Japanese ISP. The registration for the site was only transferred to Finland on May 18, 2011, which weakens the Finland theory somewhat.
Others think Nakamoto was Martii Malmi, a developer living in Finland who has been involved with bitcoin since the beginning and developed its user interface.
Another possibility is Jed McCaleb, a lover of Japanese culture and resident of Japan, who created troubled bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox and cofounded decentralized payment systems Ripple and later Stellar.
Another theory suggests that computer scientists Donal O’Mahony and Michael Peirce are Satoshi, based on a paper that they authored concerning digital payments, along with Hitesh Tewari, based on a book that they published together. O’Mahony and Tewari also studied at Trinity College, where Michael Clear was a student.
Israeli scholars Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir of the Weizmann Institute retracted allegations made in a paper suggesting a link between Satoshi and Silk Road, the black market web site that was taken down by the FBI in October 2013. They had suggested a link between an address allegedly owned by Satoshi, and the site. Security researcher Dustin D. Trammell owned the address, and disputed claims that he was Satoshi.
In May 2013, internet pioneer Ted Nelson threw another hat into the ring: Japanese mathematician Professor Shinichi Mochizuki, although he admits that the evidence is circumstantial at best.
In February 2014, Newsweek’s Leah McGrath Goodman claimed to have tracked down the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Dorian S. Nakamoto has since denied he knows anything about bitcoin, eventually hiring a lawyer and releasing an official statement to that effect.
Hal Finney, Michael Weber, Wei Dai and several other developers were among those who are periodically named in media reports and online discussions as potential Satoshis. A group of forensic linguistics experts from Aston University believe the real creator of bitcoin is Nick Szabo, based upon analysis of the Bitcoin White Paper.
Dominic Frisby, a comedian and a writer, also suggests that BitGold creator Szabo was the most likely candidate to be Satoshi in his book, “Bitcoin: The Future…
www.coindesk.com