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The question "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?" stands out as one of the most captivating mysteries of the 21st century. Interestingly, the lack of a definitive answer can sometimes be more beneficial when you're on a quest to uncover the identity of Bitcoin's enigmatic creator.
Now you see me, now you don’t. Satoshi Nakamoto's disappearance was one of the greatest magic tricks the world has ever seen, and through it, Bitcoin became truly decentralized. Satoshi Nakamoto’s gift to the world can’t be measured or completely understood. Bitcoin might become the cornerstone of a new civilization. It may be the single most important invention of our lifetime.
For Bitcoin to survive, its creator had to do a flawless job in various seemingly disconnected activities. Among them, perfect OPSEC from the very beginning. Both computers and the Internet keep records of every action taken inside their ecosystems. For Satoshi Nakamoto to disappear without a trace in that hostile environment, Bitcoin’s creator had to plan and execute every little step without incurring any error.
Consider this: Satoshi Nakamoto’s profile is so unique that, on paper, identification shouldn’t be a problem. First of all, Bitcoin’s creator had to be a cypherpunk. This fact alone reduces the possibilities to a small group of usual suspects. Also, Satoshi Nakamoto had to be well-versed in “public key infrastructure, academic cryptography, P2P network design, practical security architecture, and privacy technology.”
That list of attributes is from an article that tries to pin Bitcoin’s creation on Len Sassaman, a young cypherpunk who almost matches Satoshi Nakamoto’s profile. The article highlights another characteristic that seems harder to find than all of the others combined:
“Finally, they would have needed the ideological conviction and hacker ethos to ‘roll up their sleeves’ and anonymously build a real-world version of ideas that had previously been relegated to the realm of theory.”
How could Satoshi Nakamoto do all that and be all that and still manage to disappear? We will probably never know. And that’s just one of the miracles Bitcoin’s creator performed.
Before moving forward, let’s clear something up.
In the late '80s/ early '90s, a group of privacy-oriented developers and mad scientists banded around a mailing list to discuss and create every cryptographic technique known to man. One of their aims was to change society through cryptography. They saw privacy-enhancing technologies as a political tool.
Among the many members of the once popular mailing list were the creator of BitTorrent, people working on Tor, Netscape's Marc Andreessen, and Julian Assange. Also, five people many suspect to be Satoshi Nakamoto: Adam Back, Wei Dai, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and Len Sassaman.
Satoshi Nakamoto cited the work of the first two - Hashcash by Back and b-money by Dai - in the Bitcoin White Paper. Hal Finney, for his part, was the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction. In their correspondence, he told Satoshi Nakamoto about Nick Szabo’s work.
One of the mailing list’s founders, developer and mathematician Eric Hughes, published “A Cypherpunk's Manifesto” in 1993. His words describe the movement better than anyone could:
“We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.
Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.”
Eric Hughes’ words could easily apply to Bitcoin and clearly influenced Satoshi Nakamoto’s project. The group’s motto was “Cypherpunks write code,” which is also the title for this comprehensive and informative documentary about them:
Now, speaking about groups…
For Bitcoin to survive and succeed the way it did, the initial product had to be phenomenal. The Bitcoin network and its code evolved since then, sure, but that first iteration was almost perfect. And we say “almost” because in 2009 someone created 184,000,000,000 BTC, “the Bitcoin network was down for ~5 hours,” and the coins were destroyed.
The Bitcoin Network has been up 99% of the time and not 100%, but the point stands. That incident was the exception that proves the rule. The paper “Satoshi Nakamoto and the Origins of Bitcoin – The Profile of a 1-in-a-Billion Genius” makes the case for Bitcoin as a group effort:
“Dan Kaminsky, a highly accomplished security researcher, who competently scrutinized the Bitcoin code, stated that Nakamoto could either be a "team of people", or must definitely have been a "genius"; a former Bitcoin core developer, Laszlo Hanyecz, also known for the first real-world purchase by Bitcoin, uttered the feeling “Bitcoin seems awfully well designed for one person to crank out.”
However, perhaps surprisingly, it’s easy to find regular patterns in Satoshi Nakamoto’s steps. Bitcoin’s creator has a consistent writing style and his code seems written by one person. Curiously, several people noticed that there are no typos in any of his communications. Is that feat easier to accomplish by a lone wolf or by a team?
As it happens, Satoshi Nakamoto’s story is riddled with contradiction. According to Jameson Lopp:
“In all my time researching Satoshi, I've yet to come across any evidence suggesting it was a group. If it was a group, then they all operated on the same sleep schedule, consistent across code commits, emails, and forum posts.”
Plus, while discussing the Bitcoin v0.1 release, the “Satoshi Nakamoto and the Origins of Bitcoin” paper noticed:
“Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned on the same day at bitcoin-list along the release of Bitcoin version 0.1.2 “… I wasn't able to test it in the wild until now” [314]. Note the telling “I” in this statement; if Bitcoin has been invented by a team, it would certainly have made great sense to resort to it as a multi-eyed testbed.”
There are no facts in this section, only circumstantial evidence and opinions. That “I” speaks volumes, but it doesn’t prove anything. Satoshi Nakamoto might’ve been covering tracks and creating confusion. That seems like a requirement for preserving Bitcoin’s creator’s anonymity to this day.
Even though Satoshi Nakamoto’s OPSEC was nearly perfect, breadcrumbs seem to point to University life. Was Bitcoin’s creator a professor? Or a student, even? In 2014, the Wall Street Journal quoted Gavin Andresen, “the man who bears the title "Chief Scientist" for the Bitcoin Foundation,” saying:
"I think he's an academic, maybe a post-doc, maybe a professor who just doesn't want the attention," said Gavin Andresen in an interview at his one-man office in Amherst, Mass., last month. "And that's why he's proven anonymous."
Andresen also said he believed Satoshi to “be a smart, reclusive computer scientist who was brilliant but sloppy in his coding style.” About that code, though, consider what the previously mentioned Dan Kaminsky told The New Yorker about the time he tried to attack the Bitcoin network:
“He quickly identified nine ways to compromise the system and scoured Nakamoto’s code for an insertion point for his first attack. But when he found the right spot, there was a message waiting for him. “Attack Removed,” it said. The same thing happened over and over, infuriating Kaminsky. “I came up with beautiful bugs,” he said. “But every time I went after the code there was a line that addressed the problem.”
But we digress. Let’s get back to the subject at hand.
Perfect OPSEC notwithstanding, Satoshi Nakamoto left data. Researchers of many kinds analyzed it and, although nobody can say anything definite, there’s evidence supporting the academic theory. According to Evan Hatch:
“Satoshi’s code contributions and comments ramped up heavily during summer and winter break, but tapered off in late spring and the end of year, when an academic would have been taking and/or grading finals.”
Perhaps even more damming is the mythical Bitcoin whitepaper's format:
“Additionally, the Bitcoin whitepaper was released in a medium rarely seen on the Cypherpunk mailing list — a LaTeX formatted research paper with academic trappings such as an Abstract, Conclusion, and MLA citation.”
All of this is circumstantial evidence also, but this section’s case seems to be much stronger. Does that mean Satoshi Nakamoto was a professor for sure? No, it doesn’t. We don’t know anything about Bitcoin’s creator. Except…
With an active creator expressing opinions and conducting the ship, Bitcoin couldn’t be truly decentralized. Satoshi Nakamoto was a huge single point of failure. For Bitcoin to persist, its creator had to disappear. So, Satoshi Nakamoto did. Now you see me, now you don’t.
