Satoshi Nakamoto

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous^[1][2][3][4] person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation.^[5] As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database.^[6] In the process, Nakamoto was the first to solve the double-spending problem for digital currency using a peer-to-peer network. Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010.^[7] Many people have claimed, or have been claimed, to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Nakamoto has not disclosed any personal information when discussing technical matters.^[22] He provided some commentary on banking and fractional-reserve banking. On his P2P Foundation profile as of 2012, Nakamoto claimed to be a 37-year-old male who lived in Japan,^[23] but some speculated he was unlikely to be Japanese due to his native-level use of English^[22] and his bitcoin software not being documented or labelled in Japanese. Some have considered that Nakamoto might be a team of people: Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher who read the bitcoin code,^[24] said that Nakamoto could either be a "team of people" or a "genius";^[25] Laszlo Hanyecz, a developer who had emailed Nakamoto, had the feeling the code was too well designed for one person.^[22] Gavin Andresen has said of Nakamoto's code: "He was a brilliant coder, but it was quirky."^[26]

The use of British English in both source code comments and forum postings – such as the expression "bloody hard", terms such as "flat" and "maths", and the spellings "grey" and "colour"^[17] – led to speculation that Nakamoto, or at least one individual in the consortium claiming to be him, was of Commonwealth origin.^[22][10][25] The reference to London's The Times newspaper in the first bitcoin block mined by Nakamoto suggested to some a particular interest in the British government.^[17][27]:18

Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and active community member, graphed the time stamps for each of Nakamoto's bitcoin forum posts (more than 500); the resulting chart showed a steep decline to almost no posts between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. This was between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Japanese time, suggesting an unusual sleep pattern for someone presumably living in Japan. As this pattern held true even on Saturdays and Sundays, it suggested that Nakamoto was asleep at this time.^[22]

Hal Finney (4 May 1956 – 28 August 2014) was a pre-bitcoin cryptographic pioneer and the first person (other than Nakamoto himself) to use the software, file bug reports, and make improvements.^[29] He also lived a few blocks from a man named Dorian Nakamoto, according to Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg.^[30] Greenberg asked the writing analysis consultancy Juola & Associates to compare a sample of Finney's writing to Satoshi Nakamoto's, and they found that it was the closest resemblance they had yet come across (including the candidates suggested by Newsweek, Fast Company, The New Yorker, Ted Nelson and Skye Grey).^[30] Greenberg theorized that Finney may have been a ghostwriter on behalf of Nakamoto, or that he simply used his neighbor Dorian's identity as a "drop" or "patsy whose personal information is used to hide online exploits". However, after meeting Finney, seeing the emails between him and Nakamoto and his bitcoin wallet's history (including the very first bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto to him, which he forgot to pay back) and hearing his denial, Greenberg concluded that Finney was telling the truth. Juola & Associates also found that Nakamoto's emails to Finney more closely resemble Nakamoto's other writings than Finney's do. Finney's fellow extropian and sometimes co-blogger Robin Hanson assigned a subjective probability of "at least" 15% that "Hal was more involved than he's said", before further evidence suggested that was not the case.^[31]