Jessy, Golden Finance
"Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?" - This may be the biggest mystery in the history of the development of the crypto world.
In the past two years, the discussion about who is Satoshi Nakamoto has become less heated. In the Bitcoin community, the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem and the change of technology are more important. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto may not be important. After all, after Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared, Bitcoin has been running smoothly under the maintenance of the core development team.
However, every once in a while, someone will come up with a reason to look for Satoshi Nakamoto, or claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto. This time, HBO in the United States released a documentary (Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery), which identified Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd as Satoshi Nakamoto. This conclusion was regarded as a joke in the crypto community, and Peter Todd himself denied this conclusion on X.
Based on the traces left by Satoshi Nakamoto on the Internet from 2008 to 2011, it can be seen that Satoshi Nakamoto is a geek who is well versed in cryptography. He acts meticulously, encrypts all communications with anyone, and never discloses personal information.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Perhaps only those who can transfer the wallet assets with more than one million bitcoins can prove themselves, but the real Satoshi Nakamoto wants to hide himself. Perhaps it is precisely because Bitcoin has achieved de-Satoshiization that it has been able to develop to this day.
We are all Satoshi Nakamoto
In (Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery), the director used a lot of footage to show what a group of long-term Bitcoin believers did. Not only did he introduce what these core figures around Bitcoin did, the documentary also showed what companies around Bitcoin did, such as Blockstream, which is committed to promoting the adoption of Bitcoin by individuals, companies and even countries.
Moreover, the film also presents some major events in the development of cryptocurrency, such as the block size dispute, the rise of Ethereum and altcoins, and some regulations of the US government.
The documentary's storytelling level is good enough. It uses human stories to link together and vividly explain Bitcoin, the encryption culture behind it, and the history of its development.
The documentary also has another plot, which is also a big gimmick for its external publicity, which is to find out who is Satoshi Nakamoto. The documentary uses arguments to lock the final answer on Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd. At the end of the documentary, the director confronted Peter Todd face to face, and Peter Todd smiled awkwardly and said to the camera, "We are all Satoshi Nakamoto."
Peter Todd, a Canadian, is 39 years old and is a heavyweight developer and cryptography consultant for Bitcoin Core. According to records, Peter Todd submitted the Bitcoin Core code for the first time in April 2012.
People in the crypto industry think the answer given in the documentary to the question “Who is Satoshi Nakamoto” is a joke. Peter Todd himself also denied that he is Satoshi Nakamoto on X.
The documentary's search for Satoshi Nakamoto may be wrong, and it can only be regarded as a piece of gossip in the development of the crypto industry. However, over the years, the exploration of who Satoshi Nakamoto is has never stopped. Some reporters have gone to look for him, and some have come forward claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto himself.
What kind of person is Satoshi Nakamoto? He insisted on using PGP encryption and the Tor network when communicating with anyone in the crypto community. And the information left on the Internet that can prove his personal identity, such as Nakamoto claiming to be a Japanese; using British English in writing; writing style similar to some cryptography colleagues; and some traces shown to the outside world, such as having a Greenwich Mean Time schedule and using an email address on a free email server in Germany, etc., all seem to be Satoshi Nakamoto's vain attempt to hide some of his deliberate flaws.
But people try to use the clues left by Satoshi Nakamoto to analyze who he is. For example, some people think that Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki is the one, mainly because he is Japanese. Another Japanese who is considered to be Satoshi Nakamoto is Dorian Nakamoto. For example, the late cryptographer Len Sassaman is also considered by some to be Satoshi Nakamoto, because Sassaman committed suicide in 2011, which happened to be the year when Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared. On the other hand, there is also overlap between the two people's technical contributions. Another person who is considered by the public to be a possible person is computer engineer and legal scholar Nick Szabo, who created the concept of smart contracts in a paper in 1996. In 2008, he proposed the concept of decentralized currency and published a paper on Bitcoin Gold. He is considered to be a pioneer of Bitcoin, and he is also a person who likes to use pseudonyms.
It is easy to find evidence to prove or disprove whether these are Satoshi Nakamoto. Who Satoshi Nakamoto is is not important to Bitcoin. What is important is that “we are all Satoshi Nakamoto”.
Satoshi Nakamoto is not the authority of Bitcoin, but "us" who run the Bitcoin nodes and "us" who use Bitcoin are responsible for Bitcoin.
The disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto, the first step towards decentralization
Satoshi Nakamoto not only created Bitcoin, but also maintained and guided the development of Bitcoin in its earliest years.
On April 26, 2011, US time, Satoshi Nakamoto sent his last email to Gavin Andresen, a core developer of Bitcoin (who was also Satoshi Nakamoto's most active assistant at the time), and made it clear in the letter that he had shifted his focus "to other matters."
After that, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared and never appeared again.
During the three years from 2008 to 2011, his main actions were as follows:
1. On November 1, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper (Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System).
2. On January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto mined the Bitcoin Genesis Block, realized the "mining" of the Bitcoin algorithm and obtained the first batch of 50 bitcoins.
3. Angered On December 5, 2010, WikiLeaks leaked US diplomatic cables and its bank card and other donation channels were cut off. The Bitcoin community called on WikiLeaks to use Bitcoin to accept donations. In order to protect the nascent Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto appeared at a community event opposing the Bitcoin community's donations to WikiLeaks.
4. On December 12, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto published his last article in the Bitcoin forum, and then stopped making public statements, only contacting a few people in the Bitcoin core development team via email.
5. On April 26, 2011, I had the last contact with Gavin Andresen via email.
Other details deposited in the history of Bitcoin development are that in the early days, Satoshi Nakamoto, as the chief developer of Bitcoin, did a lot for Bitcoin, but he also basically became the "dictator" of Bitcoin development.
For example, Satoshi Nakamoto registered the website bitcoin.org on August 18, 2008. This is the original community forum of Bitcoin and an open source project. Satoshi Nakamoto updated its code nearly 50 times in the first year. In August 2010, Bitcoin had a code vulnerability. Many early developers tried to fix the vulnerability, but in the end, it was Satoshi Nakamoto who wrote and released the patch.
At that time, Satoshi Nakamoto was the gatekeeper of Bitcoin, and all codes had to be finalized by him. However, due to disagreements on some issues, users and developers began to challenge Satoshi Nakamoto's authority.
For example, the most popular post on the forum at that time was about "Can applications exist on top of Bitcoin?" Satoshi Nakamoto himself supported sidechains, but was opposed by many people. Another example is that Satoshi Nakamoto used a policy rule called IsStandard to restrict the use of advanced commands, which was also condemned by some people.
It can be seen that in the last year before Satoshi Nakamoto left, people's attitude towards his leadership changed dramatically.
The end of the story of Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin is that he removed his name from Bitcoin’s copyright notice and updated Bitcoin.org to add the names and emails of other developers — including Gavin Andresen, Sirius, Laszlo, and Nils Schneider — to its contact page, and removed his own name and email.
Later, it is widely known that on April 26, 2011, Satoshi Nakamoto sent two emails to Gavin Andresen, the last of which contained a copy of the encryption key of the Bitcoin alert system, which actually gave Gavin Andresen sole control over security notifications. Later, Gavin Andresen seemed to replace Satoshi Nakamoto as the lead developer of Bitcoin. In 2014, he also withdrew from Bitcoin software development and focused on the Bitcoin Foundation, which he founded in 2012.
At present, the development of Bitcoin has basically achieved decentralization. For example, the operating logic of the Bitcoin Core team, the most well-known technical team of Bitcoin, is as follows: by running the development software Bitcoin Core, anyone can operate a full node and contribute to Bitcoin. It is this power distribution that prevents any single entity from controlling Bitcoin.
Bitcoin did not fall into decline after Satoshi Nakamoto left. The disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto was the first step towards realizing the decentralization of Bitcoin.
