Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? We are all Satoshi Nakamoto

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 things. 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 launched the documentary "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery", which identified Bitcoin's 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.

According to the traces left by Satoshi Nakamoto on the Internet from 2008 to 2011, it can be seen that Satoshi Nakamoto is a cryptography geek who is meticulous and encrypts his communication 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-Satoshi that it has developed to this day.

We are all Satoshi Nakamoto

In "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery", the director used a lot of shots to show what a group of long-term Bitcoin believers have done. Not only does it introduce what these core figures around Bitcoin do, the documentary also shows what companies around Bitcoin do, 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 US government regulations.

The documentary is good at telling stories, and uses human stories to vividly explain Bitcoin and the cryptographic culture behind it, as well as the history of its development.

The documentary also has another line, 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 Peter Todd, a core developer of Bitcoin. 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 cryptographic technology consultant of Bitcoin Core. According to records, Peter Todd submitted the Bitcoin core code for the first time in April 2012.

For the answer given by the documentary to the question "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto", people in the crypto industry think it is a joke. Peter Todd himself also denied that he was Satoshi Nakamoto on X.

The documentary may have done something wrong in the search for Satoshi Nakamoto, and it can only be regarded as a piece of gossip in the development of the encryption industry. However, over the years, the exploration of who Satoshi Nakamoto is has never stopped. Some reporters have gone to find him, and some people have come forward to claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto himself.

What kind of person is Satoshi Nakamoto? He insists on using PGP encryption and Tor network to communicate with anyone in the encryption community. And those information left on the Internet that can verify his personal identity, such as Satoshi Nakamoto claiming to be a Japanese; using British English in written expression; writing style similar to some cryptography colleagues; some traces shown to the outside world, having a Greenwich Mean Time schedule, using an email address on a free email server in Germany, etc. It seems that all of these are just Satoshi Nakamoto's vain attempts 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 main reason 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 is also the year when Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared. On the other hand, there is 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 1996 paper. 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.

Whether it is to find arguments to prove or refute whether these are Satoshi Nakamoto. In fact, it is easy, and 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 "we" who run Bitcoin nodes and "we" who use Bitcoin are responsible for Bitcoin.

The disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto is the first step towards decentralization

Satoshi Nakamoto not only created Bitcoin, but also maintained and guided the development of Bitcoin in the 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 clearly stated in the letter that he had shifted his focus to "other matters."

After that, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared and never appeared again.

In the more than three years from 2008 to 2011, his main actions were as follows:

1. On November 1, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the 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.Anger On December 5, 2010, WikiLeaks leaked the US diplomatic cables, and WikiLeaks was suspended from bank card and other donation channels. The Bitcoin community called on WikiLeaks to use Bitcoin to accept donations. In order to protect the Bitcoin that was still in its infancy, Satoshi Nakamoto appeared in the community activity of "opposing the Bitcoin community to donate Bitcoin to WikiLeaks".

4. On December 12, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto published his last article in the Bitcoin forum, and then he no longer spoke publicly, and only contacted a few people in the Bitcoin core development team through email. 5. On April 26, 2011, I made the last contact with Gavin Andresen by email. Other details that have been 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 most 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 wanted to work hard 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 the codes had to be finalized by him. Because of differences on some issues, users and developers also 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 side chains, but was opposed by many people. Another example is that Satoshi Nakamoto used a policy rule called IsStandard to limit 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 about Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin is that he deleted his name from Bitcoin's copyright statement. Bitcoin.org was updated, adding the names and emails of other developers to its contact page - including Gavin Andresen, Sirius, Laszlo and Nils Schneider, and deleting 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 email contained a copy of the encryption key of the Bitcoin alarm system, which actually gave Gavin Andresen sole control over security notifications. Later, Gavin Andresen seemed to replace Satoshi Nakamoto as the chief developer of Bitcoin. In 2014, he also withdrew from the development of Bitcoin software and focused on the work of 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 this: by running the development software Bitcoin Core, anyone can operate a full node and contribute to Bitcoin. It is this distribution of power 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 in realizing the decentralization of Bitcoin.