In a lifespan of more than a decade, Bitcoin has gone from being the place obsession of a group of cypherpunks on message boards to one of the world’s major currencies. Though, the identity of its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, remains unidentified.
For over the past years, Satoshi’s true identity has been the subject of feverish speculation, with many names having been put forward. This is scarcely astonishing; for people love a mystery, for one thing. Another gigantic stash of Bitcoin that Satoshi has mined in the cryptocurrency’s early days has been unscathed. Were he (or she, or them) to return, those Bitcoin will have a possibility of flooding the market, potentially affecting the cryptocurrency’s price.
The Bitcoin must be set free so that it can be decentralized
Starting with the facts, Satoshi was known to be motivated by a vision of a currency that hasn’t replied on trust in third parties or the government. Thanks to The Complete Satoshi, the Bitcoin creator’s ideas and philosophies are preserved: “What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.”
Stating Satoshi’s clear intentions here, it is likely to be true that maintaining his anonymity was necessary to make sure that the Bitcoin remained a truly decentralized creation.
Crypto creators have an outsize influence over the communities that grow up around their coins, which caused many of them to disquiet in the past. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin is “not too excited that the community assigns so much importance to him,” according to his father in a New Yorker profile. Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, meanwhile, surrendered ownership of any of his creation. In a Reddit post, Lee said, “It is a conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence.”
Crypto creators have an outsized influence over the communities that grew up around their coins; it has caused many of them to unrest in the past. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s creator, is “not too excited that the community assigns so much importance to him,” according to a New Yorker profile. Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, on the other hand, has surrendered the ownership of his creation. In a Reddit post, Lee has stated, “It is a conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence.”
Over the years, Bitcoiners have not been shy about expressing a desire for Satoshi Nakamoto’s return. In a Bitcoin forum post about maximum Bitcoin block size, one user says, “Satoshi’s opinion would help the community to decide, not because he is more competent than the current core developers, not because he is an authority figure but because it would reassure investor confidence.” However, a conflict of interest similar to the one Charlie Lee has encountered may well have been anticipated by Satoshi; it makes itself inevitable that the creation and creator cannot genuinely coexist in public.
Bitcoin’s Dark Side
A competing theory is that Nakamoto knew the authorities would come after Bitcoin’s creator if he or she has been finally identified. Bitcoin may be the successful cryptocurrency that everyone knows today, but it was far from the world’s first attempt to an alternative to the state-issued currencies. In 2011, Bernard von NotHaus was convicted of creating, owning, and vending his private money, the liberty dollar.
A similar fate may have faced Nakamoto, who surely knew that Bitcoin would gather some powerful enemies. Governments didn’t generally like when threats to their dominion and financial policy emerge. While they might not ban Bitcoin itself, it could certainly make life uncomfortable for its creator, if his locations are known.
Substantial Films, a British film production company, have picked on the idea. In the forthcoming film entitled “Decrypted,” Satoshi Nakamoto is tortured by the NSA to gouge out information that may be able to destroy the entire crypto industry.
For most people, Bitcoin is still synonymous with Silk Road, debatably the world’s most notorious darknet market. Silk Road has become a popular destination for those looking to launder money and purchase illegal goods using Bitcoin. Notwithstanding ultimately being shut down by the FBI in 2013, the market has dealt an early blow to Bitcoin’s perceived legitimacy as another currency, and Nakamoto didn’t want to deal with the fallout.
Many hands make work lighter
This is another possibility: Perhaps Satoshi Nakamoto is not a person, but many.
By some accounts, it comes as quite the surprise that a single individual was supposedly able to create a cryptocurrency now amounting to billions of dollars, all while completely covering their tracks.
Even though Satoshi was claimed to be a 37-year-old Japanese man, Bitcoin’s original whitepaper is always written in perfect English, and his email address allegedly comes from a German provider.
Others take these facts to mean that Bitcoin was a partnership rather than a solo enterprise. Adding to this, Bitcoin’s creation established such a command of both financial and computer programming that many now believe a unique mind individual could not have possibly plotted the famed cryptoasset.
Here is something remarkable: Some people say Satoshi Nakamoto is, in fact, the Central Intelligence Agency. According to the CIA project, Satoshi Nakamoto is also translated to “central intelligence,” and the fact that nobody knows who Nakamoto was a tell-tale sign that intelligence professionals generated Bitcoin. If an intelligence agency programmed Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity would be privy.
As facing many competing theories, the crypto community has little choice but to resort to speculation. In one of Nakamoto’s last confirmed emails, he or they claims to have “moved on to other things.”
No Comment