In 2008, a person under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published the White Paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” which stood as the basis for the creation of Bitcoin. In addition to being a technical document, this white paper was a manifesto of intentions about how a currency should work in the digital environment.
As a result of Bitcoin‘s global popularity, many users and companies are wondering who is the person behind this pseudonym, which has given rise to several theories about possible candidates behind this pseudonym, which we will share below:
Hal Finney
Hal Finney was a cryptographer and cypherpunk activist (a person who advocates using cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies for social and political change) and inventor of the first Proof of Work (PoW) system, which would later be implemented in Bitcoin. Finney was the first person to receive bitcoins from Satoshi Nakamoto himself in a transaction of 10 bitcoins (BTC), as well as being one of the first developers of the software and the first person to run the Bitcoin software.
Some think Finney possibly downloaded the program on the same day of its launch in a forum, as a day later (January 10, 2009), he published a post on Twitter with the following text: “Running Bitcoin.” Sadly, Finney passed away on August 28, 2014, from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
In March 2014, Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg mentioned that Finney could be the creator of Bitcoin based on a handwriting analysis conducted by Juola & Associates. Until then, Finney’s handwriting was the most similar to Nakamoto’s (compared to the other suspects). The firm determined (later) that Nakamoto’s emails to Finney were very similar. For his part, journalist Andy Greenberg, after visiting Finney and viewing those emails along with his digital wallet history, concluded that the cryptographer was telling the truth when he claimed not to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Robin Hanson, Finney’s former colleague and co-blogger, went so far as to claim that there was at least a 15% chance that Finney was more involved than he had claimed in the creation of Bitcoin. The truth is that several times, through a public forum, he exchanged impressions with Satoshi Nakamoto about programming errors in the first version of the Bitcoin code and how to improve them.
Many think Finney is the strongest candidate because of his closeness to Satoshi Nakamoto. He was heavily involved with the project from its inception, had the closest contact with Nakamoto, and was able to use his identity to protect his private life. However, Finney’s death simply adds more mystery to the issue and makes future investigations more complex, making it possible that his secret may never come out.
Nick Szabo
Several people think that Nick Szabo (American cryptographer) is the creator of Bitcoin, as he is the designer of “Bit Gold,” a theoretical mechanism for a decentralized digital currency where a participant could use “computational power” to solve cryptographic puzzles to validate transactions, which is an idea very similar to Bitcoin. Szabo is also considered the father of smart contracts, coupled with the fact that he used pseudonyms in 1990 and was an early supporter of Bitcoin.
One of the first to point out that Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto was blogger Skye Grey, who in 2013 linked him to the Bitcoin White Paper through a handwriting analysis, which compared his “handwriting fingerprints” to determine if it was the same writer. Subsequently, Dominic Frisby and Nathaniel Popper pointed out him as the author of Bitcoin.
However, Szabo has not stopped denying it, although, in 2011, he stated, “Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know who liked the idea (or in Dai’s case, his related idea) enough to pursue it in any meaningful way to Nakamoto (assuming Nakamoto is not Finney or Dai).” It is important to note that Nick Zsabo was one of the first people to be part of the group of activists discussing Bitcoin.
Wei Dai
Wei Dai is a computer engineer who has made multiple contributions to the cryptography field; perhaps most importantly, his name appears in the Bitcoin White Paper. Dai is the creator of “B-money,” Bitcoin’s predecessor, which was used as a reference for its design. B-money sought to create a “distributed and anonymous electronic cash system.”
Wei Dai proposed B-money in 1998, ten years before Bitcoin appeared. Despite not being implemented, it was described as a way to execute Proof of Work (PoW) among its possible operating mechanisms. However, at the time, the project only offered a solution that took more work to implement in a distributed network. Chinese-born Wei Dai graduated from the University of Washington and worked for Microsoft, where he designed encryption implementations for applications. At the same time, he filed two patents for optimizing encryption algorithms. Along with Adam Back (current CEO of Blockstream and creator of Hashcash, also a predecessor of Bitcoin), he was one of the first two people Nakamoto contacted while developing Bitcoin in 2008. Dai has denied being Satoshi and believes that Satoshi did not even read his proposal (B-money) properly before re-interpreting it himself. Dai once stated, “I understand that the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, did not even read my article before reinventing the idea. He found out about it later and credited me in his paper. So my connection to the Project is quite limited.”
Other candidates
The people mentioned above had some communication or connection with Satoshi Nakamoto and out-stand by their achievements and also denied being behind said pseudonym; however, other people claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto but have little relationship or evidence and are characterized by being media cases or trying to take personal credit, something that may be contradictory to the essence of the Bitcoin White Paper. Two names stand out in these characters: Dorian Nakamoto and Craig Wright.
Dorian Nakamoto
In 2014, Newsweek magazine published an article mentioning that Dorian Nakamoto was the creator of Bitcoin, based on somewhat circumstantial evidence and an interview with journalist Leah McGrath Goodman in which he dubiously claimed to have worked on Bitcoin because of a misunderstanding.
Dorian Nakamoto became popular in the community after a misunderstanding, during which he dubiously claimed to have worked on Bitcoin. The main arguments in the article are that he is a Japanese citizen (although he lived in California) whose birth name is Satoshi Nakamoto; he is also a physicist who had worked on classified defense projects and as a systems engineer for some technology and financial firms. However, Dorian Nakamoto never actually worked on Bitcoin.
As we can see, this event is more of a media case. Although widely publicized, it was the least substantiated case, making it a less likely candidate.
Craig Wright
In late 2015, two parallel investigations by Wired and Gizmodo media pointed to Craig Wright as the creator of Bitcoin. Wright is an Australian computer scientist and entrepreneur. Even when he seems to possess the necessary skills, his desire and motivation to appear in public and declare himself Satoshi Nakamoto “without hard proof” contradict Nakamoto’s ideology, based on the cypherpunk philosophy that defends privacy in digital media. In the same year, the information came from a hacker who allegedly managed to infiltrate Wright’s email accounts, where it was apparent that “Satoshi Nakamoto” was a joint pseudonym that also included Wright’s forensic computer analyst and friend, Dave Kleiman, who had died two years earlier.
In 2016, Wright attempted to file Bitcoin patents, presumably intending to appropriate the technology. Wright created hundreds of patents on the subject of “blockchain,” which is not Bitcoin. He also tried to get a court to award him authorship of the Bitcoin White Paper without success.
Shortly after, the Bitcoin Core developer list received an email from the satoshi@vistomail.com account, attributed to Bitcoin’s creator since its inception, which read, “I am not Craig Wright. We are all Satoshi.” Despite the message not being authenticated, it caused more confusion about the Australian’s authorship. In 2016, the BBC and The Economist published articles describing how Wright had provided them with evidence that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, signing some digital messages with the cryptographic keys of early Bitcoin blocks. However, this was not incontrovertible proof, and many ecosystem members questioned it.
Craight Wright has committed different legal attacks against Bitcoin developers and former partners. For example, in 2021, he got Bitcoin.org to remove a link to the Bitcoin White Paper from its website through a court ruling since the site administrator refused to testify and reveal his identity. On another occasion, he denounced Gregory Maxwell, another developer, even though he had not been involved in Bitcoin for years.
In an article published in 2021, Wired, based on the opinion of several experts, described how an individual could prove to be the creator of Bitcoin. One is to move the first BTC created (and never moved) from one address to another. Another way is to sign a message with the genesis block’s cryptographic key or Nakamoto’s PGP key; this is the public key of the first reward for mining Bitcoin (the genesis block). These funds have never been moved. It is important to note that Wright did not apply any of these methods; he promised to provide the necessary evidence at the time, but in the end, he published in his blog that he regretted all these actions.
It is significant to emphasize that in 2024, Judge James Mellor of the UK High Court declared that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, mentioning the following: “The evidence is overwhelming; Dr. Wright is not the author of the technical report on Bitcoin. He is not the person who operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. He is not the one who created the Bitcoin System. Nor is he the author of the Bitcoin software.” This ruling ended a six-week trial in which the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a non-profit consortium of cryptocurrency companies, asked the court to declare that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, arguing that he had allegedly fabricated his evidence and repeatedly misrepresented his story as new inconsistencies came to light.
What do you think about this topic? Do you know any other theories about the creator of Bitcoin?
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