Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym of bitcoin's inventor. In 2008 Satoshi published the bitcoin whitepaper, in 2009 he/she launched the network, and in 2011 he/she disappeared for good. The true identity has never been confirmed, despite several candidates such as Hal Finney, Dorian Nakamoto and Craig Wright.

On 31 October 2008 an unknown person posted a document to a cryptography mailing list. It was nine pages long, carried the title "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", and was signed with a name nobody knew: Satoshi Nakamoto.

That document, the bitcoin whitepaper, described for the first time a digital money system without banks, without a central authority and without the possibility of spending the same coin twice. A few months later, on 3 January 2009, Satoshi launched the bitcoin network and mined the very first block, the so-called genesis block.

In that very first block Satoshi hid a line of text: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

It was a reference to a newspaper headline from that morning about a British bank bailout. A political statement, immortalised in code: bitcoin was an answer to the system that had caused the 2008 financial crisis.

Satoshi wasn't the first to experiment with digital money. In the 1980s and 1990s, cryptographers such as David Chaum (DigiCash), Adam Back (Hashcash) and Wei Dai (b-money) worked on comparable ideas. Most of them disappeared or were obstructed by governments.

The American cryptographer Phil Zimmermann was prosecuted for years after distributing his encryption program PGP worldwide, against US export restrictions. For Zimmermann the case ended in acquittal, but the message was clear: build technology that takes control away from governments, and you can expect trouble.

Bitcoin goes a step further than PGP. It takes the monopoly on money creation away from governments and banks. An inventor who steps forward under their own name risks legal, tax and possibly physical consequences. Anonymity wasn't eccentricity, it was a rational choice.

Over the years, dozens of people have been named as a possible Satoshi. Three candidates come up most often.

1. Hal Finney (1956-2014)

Cryptographer, early employee at PGP Corporation, and the first person in the world to receive a bitcoin transaction (10 BTC from Satoshi on 12 January 2009). Finney was active on the Cypherpunks mailing list, knew the legal problems around PGP up close, and stopped bitcoin development around the same time Satoshi disappeared. For some the most likely candidate; he denied it until his death in 2014.

2. Dorian Nakamoto

In 2014 Newsweek journalist Leah McGrath Goodman named a Japanese-American physicist as Satoshi. Newsweek even published a photo of his house. Dorian Nakamoto denied it fiercely and said he had never heard of bitcoin. The crypto community raised 67 BTC for him as an apology for the doxxing.

3. Craig Wright

Australian Craig Wright has claimed since 2015 to be Satoshi himself, but has never been able to prove it convincingly. In 2024 a British judge ruled that Wright is not Satoshi. Most cryptographers consider Wright not credible, among other reasons because he has never used Satoshi's wallet to identify himself.

Satoshi Nakamoto's real significance lies not in the identity, but in what he/she left behind:

• Bitcoin as a system. A money system that functions without a central authority.
• An open codebase. Bitcoin is open source, anyone can contribute, nobody is in control.
• A blueprint for decentralisation. Thousands of other blockchains (Ethereum, Solana, etc.) build on the principles from Satoshi's whitepaper.
• A precedent for anonymity as a strength. No face, no ego, no claim to the success, and still one of the most influential designs of the 21st century.

Bitcoin was born as a response to the 2008 financial crisis and as a warning against the surveillance tendencies of the 2001 Patriot Act. That law allows the US government to freeze accounts unilaterally. Satoshi showed it doesn't have to be that way. We are back in charge of our own money.

• What is Bitcoin?
• The Bitcoin whitepaper explained
• How many bitcoin are there?
• Bitcoin for beginners