Satoshi Nakamoto

The name surfaced in October 2008 on a cryptography mailing list, attached to a nine-page paper describing a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that needed no bank or central authority to work. A few months later the same author released the original software and mined the genesis block on the Bitcoin network, effectively starting the blockchain from block zero.

For roughly two years, Nakamoto posted on forums, exchanged emails with early cypherpunks and developers, and even fixed bugs in the code, all while giving away almost no personal details. One of the few known contacts was Hal Finney, a cryptographer who received the first-ever bitcoin transaction directly from Nakamoto's wallet. By spring 2011 the messages stopped, with Nakamoto's last known note to a developer saying he had "moved on to other things." Development responsibility then passed to Gavin Andresen and the team that grew into today's Bitcoin Core.

Blockchain analysis of early mining patterns suggests Nakamoto's addresses hold roughly one million bitcoin, worth tens of billions of dollars, none of which has ever moved. That silence is part of the mystique: several people, including Craig Wright and, more recently, cryptographer Adam Back, have been named or have claimed the identity, but none has produced the cryptographic proof, such as signing a message with the genesis key, that the community would accept. Courts and researchers have rejected or remained unconvinced by every claim so far, leaving Nakamoto's identity one of the internet's enduring unsolved mysteries.