Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? | CryptoNews

Your profile information in this foundation, contains all the little known data about it. According to what he wanted to share there, and this does not necessarily have to be true, he was born on April 5, 1975 and is a native or resident of Japan, at least for the date of the year. profile activity.

Developers who were in contact with him to collaborate with Bitcoin also had little or no personal information, although they frequently communicated with him. At least, that's what they say.

Programmer Hal Finney was the first to receive bitcoins, specifically 10 BTC, on January 12, 2009. The other techies were Wei Dai and Nick Szabo. All three are creators of cryptocurrency precursor systems and all three have been distinguished as candidates for Satoshi, though they denied it

Several developers have been suspected of being the person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, but all have denied this possibility. Image source: wimage72

For its part, the developer Laszlo Hanyecz, better known as the subject who bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC, was involved as a volunteer in the development of Bitcoin in 2010 At that time, he shared emails with Nakamoto, but he assures that all his discussions were limited to cryptocurrency. He has come to say that Nakamoto was "a little odd" (shared by Gavin Andresen, who would become the main Bitcoin developer), as well as paranoid and demanding. "I asked a few questions, but he always dodged them" confessed Hanyecz in May 2018. He also revealed that Nakamoto's answers were not, by far, immediate, because he always received them with several days of He therefore supposed that "he was busy working on something else"; and he emphasized that he had an almost suspicious desire to keep his identity in the strictest secrecy.

And in fact, he stayed until his sudden withdrawal in mid-2010, when he handed over control of the source code repository and the network alert key to Gavin Andresen, transfer domains related to other important members of the community and stop participating in the forums and send emails from their original address. Likewise, its portfolio, estimated at around one million bitcoins, remains in limbo.

The hypotheses were immediate. The computer security researcher Dan Kaminsky and Hanyecz himself came to the conclusion that such a code could only have been developed by one person. In the meantime, it has been speculated that Nakamoto is not really Japanese, mainly because he has shown perfect English and used to use expressions of British English, so it has been suggested that He could be a citizen of a country belonging to the Commonwealth of Nations, composed of 53 territories that share historical ties with the United Kingdom.

The assumption that this is not Japanese, or at least not in Japan, was reinforced by the Swiss programmer Stefan Thomas, who took work analyzing the schedules of all the Nakamoto posts (about 500) and came to the conclusion that its activity decreased significantly between 5:00. and 11:00 am Greenwich meridian; which is equivalent to Japan between 14:00 and 20:00. If we consider that during this period he slept, it is a little strange that he did it during the afternoon, so it is likely that he had been located in a region in the UTC-5 or UTC-6 time zone. But there is much more, according to accusations for each candidate.

Suspects

There are many people and organizations accused of hiding behind the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, and, of course, some have been more suspicious than others. Here is a list

Dorian Nakamoto

This is surely the best known candidate, even though it is perhaps the least likely. In 2014, Newsweek magazine published an article designating him as the creator of Bitcoin, based on rather circumstantial evidence and in an interview with journalist Leah McGrath Goodman where, due to a misunderstanding, she claims to have worked at Bitcoin. The main arguments used in the article are that he is a Japanese citizen (although he has lived in California), whose birth name is Satoshi Nakamoto; He is also a physicist who has worked on classified defense projects and as a systems engineer for several technological and financial firms; and, furthermore, according to his daughter, he had become a libertarian since 1990.

The alleged whistleblower of Nakamoto was "I am no longer involved in this and I can not discuss it. Was given to other people. Now they are in charge of that. I do not have any links anymore. "However, in a later interview, he made it clear that he had misinterpreted the issue and was not talking about Bitcoin, which he had never heard of before, but about his previous contracts with the military. [19659002] On the same date, the original profile of the creator of Bitcoin in the P2P Foundation published his first message for years: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto." Although, it is believed, his account in this foundation has been pirated, the legitimacy of this statement remains in limbo

Nick Szabo

Several people have named this great American cryptographer as the creator of Bitcoin, and with quite plausible reasons.For starter, he is the designer of so-called "gold bit", a theoretical mechanism for a decentralized digital currency, where a participant could devote computing power to solve cryptographic puzzles to validate transactions. something identical to Bitcoin, in fact. He is also considered the father of smart contracts. This, added to the facts that he used to use pseudonyms in 1990 and was one of the early supporters of Bitcoin, makes him even more suspicious.

Perhaps the first to point out was the blogger Skye Gray, in 2013, who linked it to Bitcoin's white paper using pen analysis, which compared his "fingerprints" for to determine if it was the same author. Subsequently, Dominic Frisby and Nathaniel Popper also named him as the author of Bitcoin. Despite this, Szabo has not stopped denying it. Although 2011 stated in this regard: "Me, Wei Dai and Hal Finney were the only people I knew who liked the idea (or in the case of Dai, his related idea) enough to pursue it significantly until Nakamoto (assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai). "

Wei Dai

Dai is a brilliant computer engineer who made multiple contributions in the field of cryptography, but perhaps its name already appears The Bitcoin white paper, as the creator of the "b-money", predecessor of the first cryptocurrency and which served as a reference for its design. The "b-money" sought to create a "distributed and anonymous electronic cash register system".

Dai, of Chinese origin, graduated from the University of Washington and worked, among others, for Microsoft. With Adam Back (current CEO of Blockstream and creator of Hashcash, also predecessor of Bitcoin), was one of the first two people to be contacted by Nakamoto while he was developing Bitcoin in 2008

Dai not only denied being Satoshi, but considers that he did not even read his proposal well before reinventing it: "… I understand that the creator of Bitcoin, who s & # 39; 39, calls Satoshi Nakamoto, did not even read my article before reinventing the idea himself.He later discovered and credited me in his paper.So, my connection to the project is quite limited. "

Hal Finney

Finney was a cryptographer and an enthusiastic cypherpunk activist, inventor of the first Work Test (PoW) system, which would later be implemented in Bitcoin. In addition, was the first person to receive bitcoins and one of the first software developers. Unfortunately, he died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) on August 28, 2014.

Hal Finney. Image Source: New York Times

In March of this year, Forbes reporter Andy Greenberg named him as a possible Bitcoin creator based on a pen-and-ink analysis conducted by the company Juola & Associates. Until then, Finney's writing was closest to that of Nakamoto (compared to other suspects). The same firm then determined that Nakamoto's emails sent to Finney were even more similar. For his part, Greenberg, after seeing Finney visit and see these emails with the history of his wallet, concluded that the cryptographer was telling the truth when he claimed not to be Nakamoto.

Nevertheless, Robin Hanson, excompañero and Finney's co-blogger, went on to say that there was a probability of at least 15% that "Hal was more involved than he had said." As another curious fact, Greenberg says that Finney lived a few blocks from Dorian Nakamoto in the United States

Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman

This option has been the one that has been the biggest issue for the media since its appearance in 2015. At the Late that year, two parallel investigations conducted by the Wired and Gizmodo media referred to Wright as the creator of Bitcoin. Wright is an Australian computer scientist and entrepreneur, and although he seems to possess the necessary skills, his desire to present himself in public and declare himself Satoshi Nakamoto without conclusive evidence contradicts the cypherpunk ideology that crypto- coin is born

. The information came from a hacker who allegedly infiltrated Wright's email accounts, where it could be seen that "Satoshi Nakamoto" was in fact a common pseudonym that also included a forensic analyst and Wright's friend. Dave Kleiman, who died two years ago.

Shortly after, the list of Bitcoin Core developers received an email from the account [email protected] attributed to the creator of Bitcoin since its creation, which said: "I am not Craig Wright. Satoshi. " Although the message has not been authenticated, it has generated more disbelief with regard to the paternity of the Australian.

For 2016, the BBC and The Economist have published articles describing how Wright had provided evidence that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, signing some messages with the cryptographic keys of the early Bitcoin blocks. However, this was not indisputable evidence and was challenged by many members of the ecosystem.

In an article published the same year, Wired, based on the opinion of several experts, described how an individual could try who is the creator of Bitcoin. One of them is simply to move the first BTCs created (and never moved) from one direction to the other. Another is to sign a message with the cryptographic key of the Genesis block, or with the PGP key assigned to Nakamoto.

None of these methods was applied by Wright, who promised to grant the tests needed at the time, but he eventually published his blog that he was not sure of. was repentant.