The fascination with Bitcoin’s genesis is one of the reasons for the popularity of the digital store of value. Because Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency to have no leader – neither now nor then. At the beginning of the project in 2009, an anonymous programmer with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto was in control. But on the one hand, the author of the Bitcoin whitepaper gave up the reins early on. On the other hand, it is still unclear who Satoshi actually is.
But from the beginning, the myths about Satoshi’s identity have grown up. There are two main reasons for this:
On the one hand, Bitcoin is an ingenious solution to a mathematical problem that has been occupying computer scientists around the world for decades: we’re talking about the double-spend problem. How can it be ensured in a decentralized database that nodes acting independently of one another come to the same transaction status – i.e. to a consensus?
The answer that Satoshi was the first to give is called Proof-of-Work, which is the heart of the blockchain. Without a decentralized consensus mechanism, there is no decentralized money.
On the other hand, there are myths surrounding Satoshi’s almost legendary wealth. After all, according to data from the on-chain analysis service Chainalysis, around one million Bitcoin are in Satoshi’s possession. At the time of writing, that equates to around $ 40 billion.
Bitcoin treasure untouched
Now many a question arises: How can it be that no one has found this treasure yet? If Satoshi does indeed have $ 40 billion worth of BTC, he may have the strongest willpower in human history not to touch it. Or it’s just more complicated.
Because there are many theories about the whereabouts of the anonymous Bitcoin creator on the Internet. Billionaire Elon Musk recently had one of them Podcast Reproduced with Lex Friedman. Musk’s hot tip for Satoshi’s identity: Nick Szabo.
Well, you could look at the evolution of the ideas before the introduction of Bitcoin and see who wrote about those ideas. I don’t know exactly who created Bitcoin, but the evolution of the ideas for this is pretty clear and it seems that Nick Szabo is responsible for those ideas more than anyone else.
Elon Musk
Nick Szabo is a hot Satoshi candidate
The computer scientist is repeatedly associated with Satoshi Nakamoto. There are two main reasons for this: First of all, as a libertarian, Szabo has the ideological prerequisites that are needed to devote himself to the creation of non-state money. On the other hand, the computer scientist is the originator of BitGold, an experimental crypto currency that was created before Bitcoin but was never launched.
And then there was another Writing style comparison between Nick Szabo’s writings and the style of the whitepaper; Of all the test subjects, there was the greatest agreement at Szabo. Szabo himself has already denied several times that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.
That he was involved in Bitcoin, however, is also considered likely in the Bitcoin community – presumably with a group to which cryptography expert Hal Finney could have belonged. In the end, however, you won’t be able to say for sure. And that’s just as well.
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