Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto 2

“That's my story. I'm pretty lucky overall. Even with the ALS, my life is very satisfying. But my life expectancy is limited. My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech savvy. I think they're safe enough. I'm comfortable with my legacy.”

Hal and his wife Fran, photographed in 2013. Wired

Hal March 19th 2013, 20:40:02 PM BitcoinTalk Forum // HAL-FINNEY

I thought I’d write about the last four years, an eventful time for Bitcoin and me.

For those who don’t know me, I’m Hal Finney. I got my start in crypto working on an early version of PGP, working closely with Phil Zimmermann. When Phil decided to start PGP Corporation, I was one of the first hires. I would work on PGP until my retirement. At the same time, I got involved with the Cypherpunks. I ran the first cryptographically based anonymous remailer, among other activities.

When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee jerk reaction.

I was more positive. I had long been interested in cryptographic payment schemes. Plus I was lucky enough to meet and extensively correspond with both Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, generally acknowledged to have created ideas that would be realized with Bitcoin. I had made an attempt to create my own proof of work based currency, called RPOW. So I found Bitcoin facinating.

When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.

Designed Bit Gold, a precursor to Bitcoin. Modified the date of his Bit Gold paper and a reluctance to make his correspondances with Satoshi open to the public.

Nick Szabo is something of a legend in the crypto space, and for a good many reasons. Not least of which are his contributions to the development of Bitcoin, his early communications as a cypherpunk, and his continued influential input in economic, philosophical, political and crypto circles since. Perhaps most fascinating, however, are compelling facts surrounding his past and present which might be construed to present him as the creator of Bitcoin.

The rise of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology that supports them may at first glance have little to do with events that took place over 60 years ago in a corner of Eastern Europe. Try to find the thread connecting Bitcoin to the Hungarian revolution of late 1956 and you’d be forgiven for overlooking it. But it does exist and it runs through one of the most revered names in crypto, someone who has arguably done more than almost anyone to bring about this paradigm shift in how we create, store and use wealth. Nick Szabo’s and bitcoin’s stories both begin under the leaden skies of communist Eastern Europe. Nick Szabo, self-described ‘Blockchain, cryptocurrency, and smart contracts pioneer,’ was working on a cryptocurrency called bit gold before Bitcoin as we know it came into existence. The legal scholar and computer scientist hailing from America’s West Coast communicated regularly with early pioneers of modern cryptography and cypherpunks like Hal Finney and Wei Dai. Dai, also a University of Washington graduate in computer science from around the same time as Szabo, is similarly known for attempting to build his own digital currency prior to bitcoin, called ‘b-money.’

Bitcoin was born out of a yearning for greater privacy and reduced oversight from governments and institutions. Privacy and anonymity are central to its development and to the beliefs of those who helped create it. Nick Szabo in many ways embodies the Bitcoin philosophy. One of the most notable things about Nick Szabo is the lack of biographical information we have on him. It’s known he’s an American and studied computer science at the University of Washington, graduating in 1989. He then read for a law degree at the George Washington University Law School. Of his childhood, early life and parentage, almost nothing is known.

However, Szabo revealed in an interview that his father fought in the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union, all the way back in the late fifties. As a result, it seems therefore that Szabo grew up with a deep understanding of how easily governments and, by extension, other centralised authorities can abuse the power that they have. The power that comes from controlling the financial system is far more insidious and open to abuse. Many in crypto will point to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash as evidence of this, the banks that caused the disaster were bailed out and propped up by governments across the world.

It was in this atmosphere of the status quo preserving itself at the expense of the rest of us that bitcoin began to emerge, with Szabo at the forefront of the revolution. The proposals which he had been putting forward for years were about to break into the mainstream. Szabo is best known for his two key contributions to Bitcoin and crypto as a whole, his paper on Bit Gold and his conception of smart contracts. Bit Gold is seen as the precursor to bitcoin, which Satoshi Nakamoto would go on to refine in his bitcoin whitepaper. Smart contracts, which Szabo first wrote about back in 1996, enable the execution of cryptocurrency transactions and underpin the viability of the entire field. Quite simply, there wouldn’t be crypto without Nick Szabo’s work. Similarities to the concepts defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper are hard to miss.

While the aforementioned bit gold blog post has a published date of Dec 27, 2008, the post was actually published in 2005. Why Nick edited the date is a source of confusion and speculation for many. Further, the comment timestamps appear to have been updated to only show times, not dates.

Compared to some of the other figures central to Bitcoin’s inception, in some senses Szabo’s story is not as well documented.

His achievements in the fields of computer science and cryptography, as well as his formidable understanding of the nature of money, all make him remarkable enough.

A permalink to the post verifying the date as 2005, and other details present highly compelling evidence, but no answers as to why Szabo might have done this. Many speculate he didn’t want his bit gold post to predate the Bitcoin whitepaper, in a bid to conceal his identity. Further, while there is a mention of Wei Dai’s b-money in the white paper, there is no mention of bit gold, though reportedly Dai told Satoshi about it in an email exchange. Some critics of this theory argue that Szabo and Satoshi were simply unaware of one another and/or their respective projects.

Also interesting to note is that while Hal Finney, Wei Dai, and others have made their correspondence with Satoshi public, there are no known emails between Szabo and Satoshi, despite Nakamoto’s awareness of Bit Gold.

Col Pal Maleter defected to the rebels when he was told to take five tanks to fight them, making him a national hero in the Hungarian Civil War.

The Guardian

I DESIGNED BITCOI… GOLD WITH TWO LAYERS

Satoshi

January 12th 2009, 08:41:00 AM

From: Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshi@vistomail.com>

Date: Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 8:41 AM

Subject: Re: select failed 10038 fix

To: hal.finney@gmail.com

You can send to my Bitcoin address if you want to, but you won’t get to see the full transfer sequence: 1NSwywA5Dvuyw89sfs3oLPvLiDNGf48cPD. I just thought of something. Eventually there’ll be some interest in brute force scanning bitcoin addresses to find one with the first few characters customized to your name, kind of like getting a phone number that spells out something. Just by chance I have my initials.

Immediately after the Jan 3 2009 mining of Bitcoin’s genesis block one might have expected Szabo to take to his normally bustling blogging activity to talk about the project. Interestingly, Bitcoin is not mentioned until a May 7 post entitled ‘Liar-resistant government’ that year. After 2009, Szabo’s blogging activity takes a significant dip, going from over 25 posts a year, to just a few sparse updates annually.

Perhaps most intriguing, however, is his strange embedded video post the same month Bitcoin went live, depicting cars attempting to beat a traffic control mechanism at a red light. The post reads: ‘Trying to beat the protocol can get you in trouble.’ Many take this post to be a reference to Bitcoin’s solution to the double-spend problem cryptographers and digital cash advocates had been struggling to solve for years, and which was now successfully addressed via Satoshi’s protocol.

During a 2017 interview on The Tim Ferriss Show, Szabo stumbled on his words almost labeling himself as the creator of Bitcoin. Satoshi sleuths didn’t miss the slip, and theorized it could be a subconscious revelation of the truth. When host Tim Ferriss asks Szabo about larger blocks and second layer solutions, Szabo replied ‘I’d definitely go for a second layer, I mean, I designed Bitcoi… gold with two layers.’ The linguistic mishap could be nothing more than a meaningless accident, or it could point to something deeper. The crypto space may never know.

Additionally there’s an oft-cited email Satoshi sent to Hal Finney in which the Bitcoin creator remarks that he’s haphazardly generated an address with his initials, ‘NS’. Some view these initials to simply stand for Nakamoto Satoshi, with the surname coming first in the Japanese style. Some have said the initials stand for Nick Szabo. What is less-often discussed is that Hungarian names are also given in the Eastern name order.

However, the community still remains divided as to whether Szabo truly did create Bitcoin. Even Szabo himself has outright denied this claim, calling out a journalist in an email that stated: ‘Thanks for letting me know. I’m afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi, but I’m used to it.’

Szabo’s achievements in the fields of computer science and cryptography, as well as his formidable understanding of the nature of money, all make him remarkable enough.

Designed b-money, a precursor to Bitcoin. Talented with cryptography, has a cypherpunk background and lives an intensely private lifestyle as described by the New York Times.

A main suspect is the computer engineer Wei Dai, the creator of the b-money system and the Crypto++ cryptographic library. Since the Bitcoin network was launched in 2009, a number of people have had suspicions that Wei Dai could have played the role of Nakamoto.

One reason people think that Dai played the Nakamoto part, is because the talented cryptographer has the smarts to pull it off. Moreover, Dai created a C++ library for cryptographic functions called Crypto++ and he’s still a member of the academic and cypherpunk community. Dai is also a staunch supporter of privacy and the New York Times described the cryptographer as an ‘intensely private computer engineer.’

Wei’s career works begin when he was a programmer in TerraSciences, an Acton, Massachusetts company. At this company, Dai worked on the development of security solutions and the secure communication of control stations aimed at the oil and gas industry. Later, Dai was part of the Cryptography Research Group at Microsoft, located in Redmond, Washington. During his work at Microsoft, he participated in the study, design and implementation of encryption systems for specialized applications.

Dai’s theories about anonymous electronic cash infrastructure can be found on the cypherpunks mailing list well before Bitcoin was released. The cryptographer also crafted an electronic money system called ‘b-money’ and it is the reason he is referenced in the Bitcoin white paper. In addition to his white paper reference, Dai and Nakamoto also exchanged a few emails in 2008, according to documents hosted on gwern.net.

Dai was already a well-established character well before Satoshi allegedly emailed him in order to discuss peer to peer electronic cash concepts. In the 2008 emails, the two discuss Nick Szabo and Dai assumes that the conversations prove Szabo could not be Nakamoto. The emails between Nakamoto and Dai were originally published in March 2014’s Sunday Times editorial.

Other than mere circumstances and coincidence, there’s really not a smoking gun pointing to Dai actually being Nakamoto and he’s never admitted it either. Theories of Dai being Nakamoto are also dismissed because Dai and Nakamoto engaged in email conversations and he’s referenced in the white paper, so he would have to be playing double agent roles. But that hasn’t stopped speculators in the crypto community who believe people like Hal Finney could have been Nakamoto too and played double roles.

Wei was a master of the C++ programming language, which is what Satoshi used to write the Bitcoin code.

Wei Dai in 2004 coolwallet.io

Satoshi

August 22nd 2008, 16:38:00 PM

Private Emails

From: Satoshi <satoshi@anonymousspeech.com>

Sent: Friday, August 22, 2008 4:38 PM

To: Wei Dai <weidai@ibiblio.org>

Subject: Citation of your b-money page

I was very interested to read your b-money page. I’m getting ready to release a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system. Adam Back (hashcash.org) noticed the similarities and pointed me to your site. I need to find out the year of publication of your b-money page for the citation in my paper. It’ll look like:

[1] W. Dai, “b-money,” http://www.weidai.com/ bmoney.txt, (2006?).

You can download a pre-release draft at http://www.upload.ae/file/6157/ecash-pdf.html Feel free to forward it to anyone else you think would be interested.

Hi Satoshi. b-money was announced on the cypherpunks mailing list in 1998. Here’s the archived post: http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1998/11/ msg00941.html

There are some discussions of it at http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1998/12/ msg00194.html.

Thanks for letting me know about your paper. I’ll take a look at it and let you know if I have any comments or questions.

Regular in the cypherpunk community, expert in cryptograpy and computer security. Had the skills to create Bitcoin and also used British English, following academic standards.

Len was a true Cypherpunk, equal parts brilliant, irreverent, and idealistic. He devoted his life to defending personal freedoms through cryptography, working as a developer on PGP encryption and open-source privacy technology, as well as an academic cryptographer researching P2P networks under blockchain inventor David Chaum.

We’ve lost far too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?

Embedded on every single node of the Bitcoin network is an obituary. Hacked into the transaction data, it’s a memorial to Len Sassaman, a man essentially immortalised in the blockchain itself. A fitting tribute in more ways than one. Len was a true Cypherpunk, equal parts brilliant, irreverent, and idealistic. He devoted his life to defending personal freedoms through cryptography, working as a developer on PGP encryption and open source privacy technology, as well as an academic cryptographer researching P2P networks under blockchain inventor David Chaum. He was also a pillar of the hacker community, a friend and influence to so many of the important figures in the history of infosec and cryptocurrency.

Even in his youth, Len was a self-taught technologist who gravitated towards cryptography and protocol development. Despite living in small town Pennsylvania, by 18 Len was on the Internet Engineering Task Force responsible for the TCP/IP protocol underlying the internet and later the Bitcoin network.

Always kind of the odd kid because he was smart, Len was diagnosed with depression as a teenager. Unfortunately, he suffered traumatic experiences at the hands of ‘borderline sadistic’ psychiatric practitioners, experiences which would presumably leave one distrustful of purported authority figures. In 1999, Len moved to the Bay Area and quickly became a regular in the Cypherpunk community. He moved in with Bram Cohen, creator of Mojo and Bittorrent, and was a contributor to the legendary Cypherpunk mailing list where Satoshi first announced Bitcoin. Other hackers remember him as intelligent and lighthearted, chasing down a squirrel at a Cypherpunk meeting and speeding around in a sports car with a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card in case he was pulled over. At 21, he made headlines for organizing protests against government surveillance, as well as the imprisonment of hacker Dmitri Skylarov.

Early in his career, Len distinguished himself as an authority in public key cryptography, the foundation of Bitcoin. By 22, he was presenting at conferences and had founded a public key crypto startup with famous open source activist Bruce Perens.

After the startup collapsed in the wake of the Dot-com Bubble, Len joined Network Associates to help develop PGP encryption central to Bitcoin. Working on the release of PGP7 in 2001, Len set up interop testing for OpenPGP implementations, putting him in touch with many important crypto pioneers. Len also contributed to the GNU Privacy Guard implementation of OpenPGP and worked with PGP inventor Phil Zimmerman to invent a new cryptographic protocol. When introducing Bitcoin, Satoshi said he hoped Bitcoin could be ‘the same thing for money’ that strong cryptography (i.e. PGP) was for securing files.

At Network Associates, Len worked on PGP alongside Hal Finney. Len and Finney shared one very rare and relevant skillset: they both were developers of the remailer technology that was a precursor to Bitcoin. Proposed by David Chaum alongside cryptocurrency, remailers are specialized servers for sending information anonymously or pseudonymously. It was very common to use them when contributing to the Cypherpunk Mailing list, which itself was built on distributed remailers. After high school, Len worked to support his family and never had the chance to attend college. In spite of this, in 2004 he secured his ‘dream job’ as a researcher and Ph.D. candidate at COSIC, the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography Research Group of K.U. Leuven in Belgium. Len’s Ph.D. advisor at COSIC was none other than ‘father of digital currency’ David Chaum. While Chaum laid the groundwork for the entire Cypherpunk movement and all cryptocurrencies, few could claim to have worked with him directly.

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LEN "rabbi" SASSAMA

1980-2011

Len was our friend. A brilliant mind, a kind soul, and a devious schemer; husband to Meredith brother to Calvin, son to Jim and Dana Hartshorn, coauthor and cofounder and Shmoo and so much more. We dedicate this silly hack to Len, who would have found it absolutely hilarious.

--Dan Kaminsky, Travis Goodspeed

P.S. My apologies, BitCoin people. He also would have LOL'd at BitCoin's new dependency upon ASCII BERNANKE :': .:::::.: .: .: : :.: ' ' ' ' : :': :.: _.__ '.: : _,^" "^x, : ' x7' `4, XX7 4XX XX XX

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A memorial to Sassaman has been permanently embedded into the Bitcoin blockchain.

Len worked at COSIC in Belgium until his death in 2011. In that time, he accumulated an impressive 45 publications and 20 conference committee positions. During Bitcoin’s development in 2008–2010, Len was increasingly active in financial cryptography. He joined The International Financial Cryptography Association and presented at the Financial Cryptography and Data conferences, where he also held a committee seat. Numerous clues suggest that Satoshi was working in academia during Bitcoin’s development, an idea embraced by Bitcoin Foundation founder Gavin Andersen. 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.

The idiosyncratic construction of Bitcoin’s code also suggests that Satoshi had an academic background. It has been described as ‘brilliant but sloppy’, eschewing conventional software development practices like unit testing but exhibiting cutting-edge security architecture and an expert understanding of academic cryptography and economics. 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. Compare this to other proposals like Bitgold and b-money which were unstructured blog posts.

Since COSIC was based in Leuven, Len was living in Belgium during Bitcoin’s development. This is salient given that a number of facts suggest that Satoshi was based in Europe, the primary focus of an early inquiry by The New Yorker. Satoshi’s writing exhibits spelling and word choices idiosyncratic of British English such as ‘bloody difficult’, ‘flat’, ‘maths’, ‘grey’, as well as the dd/mm/yyyy date format. Strangely enough, Len used the very same British English as Satoshi even though he was American. However, Satoshi also refers to Euros rather than pounds. Bitcoin’s Genesis Block also included a headline from that day’s copy of The Times newspaper ‘The Times 03/

Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks’. This headline was specific to the print version, which was only circulated in the UK and Europe. In 2009, The Times was a Top 10 newspaper in Belgium and ‘heavily used by scholars and researchers because of its widespread availability in libraries and its detailed index’.

These clues leave us with a paradox: they suggest Satoshi was European, yet someone with the requisite skillset and exposure to Bitcoin’s primary influences would likely have been American. Much of the Cypherpunk community coalesced conferences and meetups, part of why a disproportionate number hailed from America and especially San Francisco. The jobs where one could have gained cutting-edge professional infosec and crypto experience were similarly concentrated in the US.

Analysis of Satoshi’s posting history suggests they were a European ‘night owl’ who worked on Bitcoin after returning from a job or school during the day. At one point, Satoshi also stated that an increase in mining difficulty happened ‘yesterday’, which would not have been true if they lived in the US.

When Len passed away in 2011, it represented a huge loss for the Cypherpunk and the tech community at large, a fact reflected in the huge outpouring of memories and sympathy that followed.

Assuming Satoshi lived a life outside Bitcoin, he did so during the working day when he was largely away from his computer at home.

Len at the W in San Francisco, February 2006

Simon Law

Proposed ‘Hashcash’ in 1997, an early version of the proof-of-work concept Bitcoin is based on. Back is also one of the only cypherpunks to not publish his emails with Satoshi.

Adam Back is the CEO of Blockchain technology company Blockstream. He has been involved in the development of cryptocurrency since the 1990s, and his development of Hashcash later went on to power the mining part of the Bitcoin protocol. Despite his work being referenced in the Bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi claimed to have not been aware of his paper. Adam Back claims to have talked on several occasions with Satoshi, but their conversations were never published.

It all started well before the Bitcoin white paper was published on Halloween 2008, as Adam Back described the technology on various occasions and as early as 1998. However, prior to the release of the cryptocurrency and white paper, Back seemingly removed himself from the public eye during the Satoshi’s development period between 2009 and 2010. A stark contrast from his previous activity, Back published zero academic papers or patents, and went silent on the mailing lists he was a frequent member of. Coincidently after Satoshi left, Back appeared on the bitcointalk.org forum acting as though he’s been around for quite some time.

There is also a number of other forms of circumstantial evidence that point to Back possibly being the creator of cryptocurrency. For years, during the early days, many people assumed that Back ignored Bitcoin for a while, and then joined the community with great fervor toward the technology. Back’s first posts and replies to other bitcoiners on the bitcointalk.org forum shows his technical understanding of the blockchain was more advanced than most. It’s also been highlighted that when Back joined the community after Satoshi left, he was bossing people around like he had always been around.

Back in 1997, Adam proposed a ‘partial hash collision based postage scheme’ which aimed to use cryptography to limit email spam. What Adam described later went on to be labelled as Proof of Work, the key consensus algorithm behind Bitcoin dictating how blocks are mined on the network. Adam was one of the world’s first Cypherpunks talking about the possibility of a cryptocurrency over the course of 10 years before the development of Bitcoin. He openly criticised his own and others’ work and discussed the changes needed to resolve any anonymity, scalability, and transparency issues in developing a decentralised digital currency on the Cypherpunk forums.

The earliest form of publicly available communication from Satoshi was his email to Wei Dai in 2008, where he asked for a date to reference. In this email Satoshi mentions he was pointed to Dai’s b-money paper by Adam Back, however these emails have never been proven to exist. Another strange coincidence is that Satoshi supposedly sent the first release of Bitcoin to Back, but he claims that he shrugged it off without mining a single coin. This raises suspicions: a proficient cryptographer and cypherpunk, who had invented an underlying concept behind Bitcoin and pursued electronic cash for much of his career, simply didn’t bother opening a project that solved issues he had planned to address for the past decade?

In 2012, Back began updating the Bitcoin Wikipedia articles, providing in-depth insight to the history of the project. What’s worth noting is that Adam only became involved with the Bitcoin project and forums during April 2013, entering with the presence of a well-established character. Two days after joining the forum, Back references an obscure mining bug fix in one of his posts, although it was never mentioned in the notes of the 2010 change log it was part of. Speculators could point to this as evidence that Back was involved with the Bitcoin project far earlier than he claims, if he is not Satoshi himself.

Adam Back took himself completely out of the public eye during the development of the Bitcoin project from 2009-2010.

adam3us

April 18th 2013, 11:27:49 AM

BitcoinTalk Forum

I consulted for Nokia on ecash crypto back in 2002. I worked at Zero-Knowledge Systems from 2000-2003. So anyway I know a few things about ecash, privacy tech, crypto, distributed systems (my comp sci PhD is in distributed systems) and I guess I was one of the moderately early people to read about and try to comprehend the p2p crypto cleverness that is bitcoin. In fact I believe it was me who got Wei Dai’s b-money reference added to Satoshi’s bitcoin paper when he emailed me about hashcash back in 2008. If like Hal Finney I’d actually tried to run the miner back then, I may too be sitting on some genesis/bootstrap era coins. Alas I own not a single bitcoin which is kind of ironic as the actual bitcoin mining is basically my hashcash invention.

Back became CEO of Blockstream in 2016, a blockchain technology company he co-founded two years before. Blockstream aims to further the development of Bitcoin and has recieved over $100 million in investments, although Adam Back has never committed a single line of code. This raises questions about how investors could rely on him as a qualified individual with suggestions that non disclosure agreements were involved.

Both Satoshi and Back used British-English rather than American English. Their writing style was also extremely similar, using double spaces throughout their messages and using British spellings. As previously mentioned, the message hidden in Bitcoin’s genesis block featured a headline from The Times newspaper, based in the UK. Almost everyone who has been linked to Satoshi has American origins apart from Adam.

Back has denied allegations that he is Bitcoin’s creator, although he mines Bitcoin, only Bitcoins, personally, and he keeps what he mines. ‘I don’t sell them’ he said. One reason is, Back believes Bitcoin will go to $300,000 within five years, without any additional adoption by institutional investors. Retail investors, who’ve carried the torch for the last 10-plus years, since Bitcoin’s debut, will continue to show support as institutions remain cautious, he said.

Back is a strong proponent of Bitcoin, believing that excessive money printing and volatile property investments will lead the cryptocurrency to an eventual price of $300,000.

I DON’T SELL THEM

Back met with Dorian Nakamoto at the 2019 Bitcoin conference.

Twitter

A Japanese mathematician famous for releasing his work without claiming recognition. Writes in British English despite his native language being Japanese.

A lesser known, yet uniquely compelling candidate for the real Satoshi Nakamoto is Japanese mathematician and number theorist Shinichi Mochizuki. With a long history of mathematical innovation, and purportedly proving conjectures thought to be near impossible to verify, he seems to almost come from an alien world. Mochizuki further painstakingly avoids the spotlight. Some, like American computer scientist and co-inventor of hypertext, Ted Nelson, go so far as to call him Satoshi.

Child of an international marriage, Mochizuki moved with his family from Japan to the United States at age five, and would go on to graduate Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire at age 16. From there it was Princeton University for a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D in mathematics, lecturing at Harvard for two years, and then a return to Japan in 1994. Mochizuki is currently a full professor at Japan’s prestigious Kyoto University.

In spite of impressive accomplishments and accolades such as proving Grothendieck’s conjecture on anabelian geometry in 1996, and being invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians, nothing would cause such a stir as his alleged proof of the ABC Conjecture in 2012. The conjecture is described as a ‘beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades.’

What maths experts found in reviewing the proof, however, was that they couldn’t even understand it, and Mochizuki couldn’t be bothered to explain.

Much like Bitcoin had been carefully dropped off as an alien creation on obscure corners of the internet at its inception, Mochizuki had dropped off a supposed bombshell in the field of mathematics and stepped back. He had even created his own terminology over a decade of isolated research which other mathematicians couldn’t parse despite their attempts.

Critics of Satoshi theories placing a Japanese as Nakamoto often cite Satoshi’s impeccable command of the English language and grammar in correspondence, and the cleanliness of his writing style. As a native speaker, this would have been a non-issue for Princeton salutatorian Mochizuki.

Also frequently cited is Satoshi’s use of typically British English expressions and spellings such as ‘bloody’ and ‘colour.’ Interestingly, Mochizuki’s mentor and doctoral advisor from Princeton, Gerd Faltings, is a German national. The two would have presumably communicated in English at Princeton in an academic setting, and the English formally taught in Germany is typically British English. Mochizuki would have also undoubtedly been exposed to the British usages at his prestigious boarding school, Philips Exeter Academy.

The inventor of hypertext, computer scientist and philosopher Ted Nelson feverishly rushed to produce an entertaining and insightful video on Mochizuki in 2013 after reading an article about him and deciding that Shinichi Mochizuki was indeed ‘the one.’

He did not send his work to the Annals of Mathematics. Nor did he leave a message on any of the online forums frequented by mathematicians around the world.

Right: Mochizuki in 2000 Tokushima University

Japanese culture is quiet, reserved, and hardworking, generally speaking. Humility and politeness go hand in hand with and an almost painful aversion to being the centre of attention. In Japan it is viewed as graceful and appropriate to do one’s work quietly, complete the task, and not make much of a fuss about it. This can be very different from the general Western individualist ethos, which often calls for flashy attention or a prize in the face of groundbreaking accomplishment.

On a linguistic aside, the name Shinichi means ‘new one’ in Japanese, and interestingly shares a syllable count with Satoshi. The surnames line up syllabically as well, but this could be nothing more than mere coincidence.

The most obvious argument against Shinichi Mochizuki being Satoshi Nakamoto is a glaring lack of known background in computers, coding, and cypherpunk ethos and knowledge. It’s hard to imagine though, that a scholar of his calibre in the field of mathematics would not have at least some working familiarity with these fields. Critics have pulled no punches in attempting to put the Mochizuki as Satoshi theory into the cultural paper shredder, even leveraging insult to do so. Still, like the other candidates, Mochizuki merits examination on a variety of counts, and further adds to the mystery of the hunt for Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator.

Mochizuki’s work has cracked some of the simplest and toughest problems in his field, attracting global media coverage.

Wright has claimed that he his Satoshi. Many experts have contested the evidence provided by Wright despite his success in convincing two well-respected Bitcoiners.

Craig Wright is an Australian computer scientist who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto. According to Wright, he was involved in Bitcoin’s creation along with his friend, the deceased computer security expert Dave Kleiman. He made this claim after Wired magazine and Gizmodo floated the possibility of his being Nakamoto in a December 2015 article. The article quoted from numerous sources, including Wright’s email correspondence and chat transcripts with acquaintances, and referenced business dealings to make its case.

Craig Steven Wright, born and raised in Brisbane, Australia, is a computer scientist that rose to prominence after claiming that he invented Bitcoin. Wright has said that he used this identity to develop Bitcoin while enlisting the help of Dave Kleiman, now deceased, and celebrated cypherpunk Hal Finney. The origin of Craig Wright’s assertion dates back to 2015 when Wired published an investigative article, indicating that Craig Wright could very well be Satoshi Nakamoto. These claims were based on a trail of blogs and leaked emails. Less than a day later, Wired updated its article and wrote that they ‘identified inconsistencies in the evidence supporting the notion that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto.’

In the presence of Gavin Andresen, the first maintainer of Bitcoin’s codebase, Craig Wright reportedly produced a cryptographic signature for the address Satoshi used to mine Bitcoin’s genesis block. This event led Andresen to publicly declare that he believed Wright was indeed Satoshi. But Patrick McKenzie, an early Bitcoin developer, quickly exposed the gimmick, proving Wright’s cryptographic signature had actually signed a different block than he was claiming to have. Andresen lost his credibility with the broader Bitcoin community, but he admitted that it was a mistake. Albacore, a cryptocurrency startup, launched an online tool that allows anyone to mimic Wright’s deceptive tactic. This was the final nail in the coffin for Wright’s public key sham.

Craig Wright is a notable critic of Bitcoin’s block size limit, playing a vital role in mobilizing the 2017 Bitcoin Cash hard fork that pushed for gradual increments to Bitcoin’s block size limit. Just over a year after the fork, the Bitcoin Cash community clashed heads over technicalities, leading to a split. Another fork was inevitable. Once again, Wright was a driving force in the resulting fork, leading to the creation of Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV). Although the network has drawn the ire of the Bitcoin community, Bitcoin SV has seen reasonable success in achieving its scalability objectives. The primary reason the crypto community looks down on Bitcoin SV is due to the latter’s insistence that BSV is the ‘real Bitcoin.’

In 2021, Wright won the right to serve a copyright infringement lawsuit against the operator and publisher of bitcoin.org, the website that operates as one of the earliest code documentation platforms for the cryptocurrency’s creation. Wright argues that as the main creator of bitcoin, copyright ownership over Nakamoto’s original white paper belongs to him. Cease and desist letters were sent far and wide by Wright’s lawyers to stop the paper being hosted on several platforms earlier this year, which prompted bitcoin proponents such as Square Crypto, Facebook crypto subsidiary Novi and others to upload the document in a show of solidarity.

Wright has long been adamant about his position as the creator of Bitcoin. Much to a skeptical crypto ecosystem’s irritation, he has done everything except prove he was Satoshi Nakamoto.

Australian Federal Police officers searched the home of Craig Steven Wright in Sydney's North Shore, December 9, 2015.

The New Yorker

Craig Wright

May 5th 2016, 15:47:56 PM

CraightWright.net

I’m Sorry

I believed that I could do this. I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me. But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot.

When the rumors began, my qualifications and character were attacked. When those allegations were proven false, new allegations have already begun. I know now that I am not strong enough for this.

I know that this weakness will cause great damage to those that have supported me, and particularly to Jon Matonis and Gavin Andresen. I can only hope that their honour and credibility is not irreparably tainted by my actions. They were not deceived, but I know that the world will never believe that now. I can only say I’m sorry. And goodbye.

Right: Craig Wright in an interview for GQ.

Financial Times

Craig Wright is also embroiled in a legal battle with Ira Kleiman, the brother of Dave Kleiman, who is suing Wright for 550,000 BTC, half of Satoshi’s 1.1 million BTC treasury chest, as his deceased brother is entangled in Wright’s Satoshi assertions. After several rounds of testimony during the lawsuit, Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida finally ruled that Wright’s testimonies weren’t credible. Wright’s defense in court for not being able to move his alleged BTC stash is that the coins are escrowed in a trust, whose private key will be delivered to him on Jan. 1, 2020 through a bonded courier. In January 2020, Wright revealed to the court that the bonded courier had arrived, but Kleiman’s lawyers said it’s just a list of 16,000+ addresses. Interestingly, one of the addresses listed belongs to a mysterious 50 BTC that recently moved after nearly ten years.

Wright denied that these coins belonged to him despite speculation that the assets are directly connected to Satoshi Nakamoto.

The nature of the Kleiman case has also revealed the questionable honesty of Wright. He has been accused throughout the case of lying to the court, delaying the case, submitting forged documents, and ultimately rendering the entire debacle incredibly expensive. Still, there is no definitive answer as to whether Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto or not. All the evidence provided thus far by Wright and his bastion of loyal followers have been dismissed due to the aforementioned inconsistencies and contradictions.

The latest in a series of opportunistic lawsuits commenced by Wright over the years designed to force the world to acknowledge his claim to the identity and legacy of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Craig Wright has claimed that he worked in collaboration with Kleiman to create Bitoin, and is currently wrapped up in a court case with the passed computer forensics expert.

Dave Kleiman was a noted Forensic Computer Investigator, an author of multiple books and a noted speaker at security related events. He died in his home in April 2013 of complications from MRSA. Kleiman was a regular contributor to a wide array of online forums and mailing lists where he assisted network engineers and other IT professionals of varying levels in solving their issues, regardless of the level of difficulty involved. He was also well known as an advisor to engineering professionals in numerous industries.

Possible Bitcoin pioneer Dave Kleiman had been using cocaine, pills, and alcohol before he died, according to a Palm Beach medical examiner. There was also a bullet hole in his mattress. A close friend and one-time partner of Wright, Kleiman has been called a brilliant computer forensics specialist. He has also been called a co-creator of Bitcoin by Wright, and would have been capable of the technical side of building Bitcoin.

The circumstances of Kleiman’s death are mysterious, tragic, and ugly. He died alone and in poverty sometime before April 27, 2013, when his body was discovered by a friend. Kleiman died of a heart attack at age 46. The investigators who found his body several days later described a filthy house. They found open bottles of alcohol and bloody feces tracked around the house. Kleiman had been confined to a wheelchair since a 1995 motorcycle accident, and had been hospitalized frequently before his death. He had recently checked himself out of a free Veterans Administration hospital, against the advice of doctors. Much of the end of his life was spent in a free VA hospital.

Kleiman’s death is at the heart of the $10 billion Bitcoin lawsuit involving Craig Wright. Dave Kleiman’s half brother and heir, Ira Kleiman, told the court Dave should have had around 320,000 bitcoin, then worth more than $40 million, when he died. Yet, his house was in foreclosure and he had been refused a tiny payday loan days before he died.

In a recent court filing Wright suggested Kleiman’s brother Ira bought a $400,000 house with bitcoins found on Kleiman’s computer after his death. Ira Kleiman is suing Wright for half of the 1.1 million bitcoins the pair would have mined if, as Wright claims, he and Dave Kleiman were the brains behind the first cryptocurrency.

According to a toxicology report, Dave Kleiman had used the tranquilizers including benzodiazepine (a class that includes Xanax, Ativan, and Valium) and nordiazepam, as well as remnants of cocaine, in the days before his death. The autopsy reported a blood alcohol level slightly above .10%, legally drunk. Investigators also found a fully loaded gun. Someone had recently fired another gun into the bed’s mattress, but no shell casings from that weapon were recovered.

That leaves a lot of mysteries. A June 2016 article in The London Review of Books, ‘The Satoshi Affair,’ says that unnamed sources close to Kleiman claimed he was a drug user and online gambling addict. It adds, ‘there is evidence he was associated with Silk Road, the online marketplace for all things illegal.’ The article also alleges that before he came out publicly as Satoshi Nakamoto, Wright was visited in Australia by Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road dark web marketplace. Still, cocaine is a surprising thing to find in the blood of a middle-aged cybersecurity expert and former Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputy.

Cocaine, benzos, booze and a bullet hole. The mysterious, tragic death of the man Craig Wright says helped him create Bitcoin.

Dr. Wright’s supporters initially predicted a swift result in his favor, saying Ira Kleiman had little evidence to support his claims. Mediation was set to happen on June 18, 2019. However new allegations, disputes over the integrity of testimony and documentary evidence, limited understanding of Bitcoin’s intricate workings, and Dr. Wright’s own access to vital information, have seen the case drag on for years. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have also played a part, limiting court time. The jury trial and ultimate outcome has been delayed multiple times, and in November 2020 it was scheduled to begin in June 2021.

This legal process has been long and convoluted, with reports and commentary often tainted by their makers’ support for either the Kleiman or Wright side. The court has at times struggled to grasp important Bitcoin concepts, and even seasoned Bitcoin veterans must admit large gaps in their own knowledge of Bitcoin’s origins and early history.

Even if the case does manage to arrive at a decision in mid-2021, it’s unlikely to satisfy everyone. It’s also unlikely to result in definitive proof of Dr. Wright’s and Dave Kleiman’s role in Bitcoin’s creation, and who has the right to benefit from it. This case may eventually conclude and take its place in Bitcoin folklore, but the overall Bitcoin saga will continue for a long time to come.

Kleiman served in the US army and was a police officer before a motorbike accident in 1995.

Patrick Paige

Dave Kleiman was an Army veteran, a paraplegic, and a computing wizard occasionally consulted by national TV networks for his expertise in computer forensics and security.

Le Roux is a programmer currently incarcerated by the US government. Documents in the Kleiman v Wright suit unearthed theories that the cartel boss had access to Wright’s hard drives.

Paul went on to become a cryptographic programmer who built a global drug and arms dealing empire and transformed himself into one of the most prolific criminal cartel bosses. U.S. law enforcement arrested Le Roux on September 26, 2012 for narcotics charges, ordering the assassination of at least seven people, and operating a criminal cartel, which circumstantially makes him a prime suspect.

Paul Le Roux is a former cartel boss, DEA informant, and software programmer who resides in jail after he was arrested for various crimes in 2012. There are a number of reasons why people believe Le Roux may have created Bitcoin and the first circumstantial evidence appeared during the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. During the discovery period in the lawsuit, Craig Wright filed a motion for a protective order and the filing had a significant number of redactions. However, there was one unredacted footnote in Wright’s filing called ‘Document 187,’ which was the URL to Paul Le Roux’s Wikipedia page.

As soon as this unredacted footnote was made public it went viral on cryptocurrency forums and social media platforms like Twitter. People began to suggest that Le Roux was possibly Bitcoin’s creator and somehow Wright obtained access to the criminal’s hard drives. Then after the Kleiman v. Wright lawsuit redaction leak, an anonymous individual posted a screenshot of Le Roux’s Congo Republic ID card. The card’s description notes Le Roux calls himself ‘Paul Solotshi Calder Le Roux.’

Individuals also suggested that Le Roux being a former software engineer shows he had the technical expertise to create the cryptocurrency. He was an autodidact coder, fluent in a range of languages but particularly in C++, the language of bitcoin’s software. Le Roux was knowledgeable in both encryption and networking, with a wide-ranging intelligence that enabled him to develop expertise across an extraordinary number of domains, albeit many of them illegal.

Most relevant to Satoshi was Le Roux’s experience building and disseminating his own software, that in many ways paralleled bitcoin. In the late 1990s, while working programming jobs by day, he spent nights and weekends coding a complex piece of disk encryption software called Encryption for the Masses, or E4M. In 1999, he announced E4M on a cryptography mailing list, launched a web site to release the open source code, and began patiently answering technical questions and taking suggestions.

It has now been suggested that Paul Le Roux may be Satoshi Nakamoto, and that Craig Wright is in possession of encrypted hard drives containing Le Roux’s multibillion-dollar stash of bitcoins.

Paul le Roux as a teenager in Krugersdorp, South Africa.

Evan Ratcliffe

A more famous successor to E4M called TrueCrypt, which Le Roux has never been directly tied to, but which several of my sources believe he was likely involved in, surfaced in the same manner. The creation of bitcoin mirrored this approach. Satoshi appears to have worked on the project for years before emerging out of the ether to announce it on the Cryptography mailing list in October 2008, with his now famous white paper. He then released the software on an accompanying web site, bitcoin.org, and spent years patiently answering technical questions and taking suggestions.

At the heart of his criminal organization was the online pharmacy network RX Limited, which generated hundreds of millions of euros in revenue annually from the illegal sale of prescription painkillers. The huge demand for painkillers during the opioid crisis in the US made le Roux a millionaire in the mid 2000s.

But he quickly turned to even more profitable businesses: From his headquarters in the Philippines, he smuggled methamphetamine out of North Korea, shipped tons of cocaine to Australia, set up arms deals in Indonesia, and laundered his millions in gold from Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But that’s not all: Le Roux also offered Iran a missile guidance system for sale through a middleman. In Somalia he wanted to enter the tuna, arms and drug business on a large scale. He even built his own village for this purpose, and maintained a militia of more than 200 men to protect the operation. Although the project was eventually abandoned, it earned him a mention in a UN Security Council report.

Le Roux’s Republic of Congo ID Card surfaced, showing he previously went by the name ‘Solotshi’.

The New York Times

Le Roux had been famous among a community of hackers and privacy geeks as the author of an important piece of encryption software.

In court, le Roux confessed to participating in several contract murders, including one of his own contract killers. There are plenty of other unverified stories about le Roux that sound even more far-fetched. According to statements by former employees and business partners, he is said to have been involved in plans to smuggle gold belonging to former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to South Africa, and is even rumoured to have planned a coup in the Seychelles with a troop of international mercenaries.

The DEA tracked Le Roux for years. By 2008 and 2009, they started to get a pretty good picture of his online prescription pill network. The problem was the way he had constructed it, including building his own email servers and his own domain name registrar. It shielded him from the authorities developing the kind of evidence that they could use to actually prosecute him. He was also bribing authorities in the Philippines and Brazil to protect himself.

The DEA had a person who had been inside of Le Roux’s organization who they recruited to return with a fake deal, a big methamphetamine-for-cocaine deal to take place in Liberia. Le Roux by this time was very into expanding his empire and connecting with Colombian cartels and shipping drugs all over the Pacific. He essentially fell for the ruse, ending up in Liberia for a meeting with a supposed Colombian drug dealer, where they arrested him and then quickly brought him back to United States.

Le Roux pleaded guilty to being involved with RX Limited in January 2014. In December 2014, he pleaded guilty to trafficking methamphetamine into the US, selling technology to Iran, ordering or participating in seven murders, as well as fraud and bribery. In March 2016 it was revealed that US authorities had taken unspecified steps to protect Le Roux’s family. On 12 June 2020, Le Roux was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Upon his release, Le Roux is expected to be deported to the Philippines to stand trial for the murders committed in the Philippines, as well as in relation to an arms shipment intercepted by the government in 2009.

In a surprise plot twist in 2020, Paul Le Roux told the Manhattan Federal Judge, Ronnie Abrams, he was going to ‘start a business selling and hosting bitcoin miners.’ Le Roux said in great detail that he created a custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with ‘special optimizations.’ There is some circumstantial evidence that Le Roux could be Satoshi Nakamoto but the evidence is quite weak. There’s really no smoking guns that suggest Le Roux is Bitcoin’s creator except for the possibility of technical expertise and the coincidental disappearance timeframe. In addition, the circumstantial evidence and speculation stemming from the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, which is loaded with discrepancies too. So far, no one has been able to substantially connect Paul Le Roux with Satoshi Nakamoto and clues lead to a number of dead ends.

Vice

Crystal meth, weapons smuggling, contract killings and an attempted coup. For Paul Le Roux, no crime went too far.

Le Roux was apprehended in the Philippines after a DEA sting operation.

DENIED ALLEGATIONS, UNCONFIRMED AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE LEADS INCONCLUSIVE SATOSHI

ALLEGATIONS, UNCONFIRMED THEORIES CIRCUMSTANTIAL LEADS TO AN INCONCLUSIVE SEARCH FOR NAKAMOTO

THE SEARCH CONTINUES

Assuming Bitcoin’s creator is alive, Satoshi could be on track to becoming the richest human being on the planet. But there’s one more fascinating twist. Because the Bitcoin blockchain is open, it’s possible for researchers to plausibly identify much of the bitcoin Satoshi mined in the early days of his invention. After the very beginning, when Satoshi sent a few bitcoin to early testers like Finney, Satoshi’s coins seem to have never been sent or spent or capitalized on in any way. Over more than a decade, as the Bitcoin inventor’s holdings have grown to be worth potentially tens of billions of dollars, the share of money Satoshi quite literally made has sat untouched, a vast cache of so-called ‘lost coins’ that could be in circulation but aren’t.

So who is Satoshi? One of the prime suspects? One of the many other people that have been identified as Bitcoin’s creator over the years? Someone nobody has ever suspected? Is Satoshi alive or dead? A single inventor or a team? As the years have passed it seems increasingly likely that we’ll never know the answers.

A reoccurring clue used in the investigation of Satoshi is their use of British English and writing traits such as the use of double spacing. Natural language processing tools were applied to the Bitcoin whitepaper to compare it to numerous cryptocurrency related papers in an attempt to uncover the identity of Nakamoto. The results from the study suggested which author/authors in the corpus are linguistically and semantically similar to Satoshi Nakamoto. Based on the results, Satoshi who had written the Bitcoin paper may not be the same Satoshi who had exchanged emails. They may possibly be more than one person. Nick Szabo and Ian Grigg are the two authors who are linguistically similar to Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin paper and his email texts, respectively. In addition, Wei Dai and Timothy C. May are two potential candidates for the Bitcoin paper in terms of semantic similarity. Hal Finney and Ian Grigg are two possible candidates for Satoshi’s email exchanges.

LOST COINS ONLY MAKE EVERYONE ELSE’S COINS WORTH SLIGHTLY MORE

Unquestionably, efforts to uncover the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto will continue. The threat he poses to the cryptocurrency market is too great and the mystery surrounding his identity is too compelling. In a world where anonymity is increasingly difficult to pursue, Satoshi Nakamoto has succeeded beyond imagination in keeping his secrets.

What we’re left with is Satoshi’s trillion-dollar creation, a small cache of communications, and maybe one final gift. ‘Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more,’ Satoshi wrote, in response to a thread about users losing access to their wallets:

‘Think of it as a donation to everyone.’