Ten years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto said goodbye to Bitcoin. What the BTC founder is doing today is unknown.
“I’ve moved on to other things” – “I now devote myself to other things.” Those were the famous last words of Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto. One is inclined to ask what it could be that the blockchain tinkerer has been devoting himself to since then. World peace? The invention of interstellar travel? For some, Bitcoin is considered to be the most groundbreaking invention of the last hundred years. A laconic “I now devote myself to other things” is the understatement par excellence.
The message comes from a message flow between software developer Mike Hearn and Satoshi himself. In it, Hearn asks a few questions, for example about mining difficulty, which, however, have remained unanswered. As explained in the mail, on April 23, 2011, Satoshi handed the project over to Gavin Andresen, who was the Bitcoin Core Maintainer until 2016.
The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is still unclear to this day. Theories repeatedly bring people like Hal Finney or Nick Szabo into play, who were involved in Bitcoin at an early stage and also had the necessary expertise to program the protocol. What is certain, however, is that Satoshi has Bitcoin assets of up to one million BTC – the largest digital gold treasure in the world.
On October 31, 2008, Satoshi published the white paper and described therein the Bitcoin system for the first time.