Skip to main content

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, cryptocurrency’s elusive creator?

Cryptocurrencies have revolutionized the finance industry and the way people perceive the concept of money. Digital assets that use cryptography to secure transactions and creation, cryptocurrencies are the first form of decentralized currency — meaning no bank or middleman controls its use.

One of the best-known forms of cryptocurrency is bitcoin. Created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin is the first (and currently most valuable) cryptocurrency in the world. December 2017 saw the highest recorded value of the currency at more than $19,000. While the price of a single bitcoin has since fallen to around $10,000, even that is incredibly impressive considering bitcoin was only worth $1,000 at the start of the year.

Unlike other forms of currency, bitcoin is not backed by any central organization (like a bank or country) or by a physical item (like gold). It sits atop a public ledger blockchain, where a highly sophisticated mathematical formula creates scarcity and allows users to “mine” portions of the currency.

Creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is also credited with the invention of the first blockchain database, which set the foundation for more forms of cryptocurrency to emerge like Ethereum and Litecoin. However, despite the fact that Nakamoto is such an important figure in the world of modern finance, not much is known about the elusive cryptocurrency creator.

what is bitcoin
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to be a Japanese-born man in his 40s, but the thing is, no one really knows for sure. Whether Nakamoto is a man, woman, or group of individuals is unknown as well, because the mysterious creator has somehow remained anonymous — despite the rising popularity of the cryptocurrencies that Nakamoto helped create.

Which begs the questions: Where did the name Satoshi Nakamoto come from if no one actually knows who this person is? Even though the name Satoshi Nakamoto is being used a placeholder until the real creator(s) come forward, the name itself certainly didn’t show up randomly.

An online profile under the name Satoshi Nakamoto was first used on the P2P Foundation website in 2008, a peer-to-peer networking site where the first papers on bitcoin were released. Another account under the same name  released Version 0.1 of the bitcoin software on Sourceforge in 2009. It’s clear that whether or not Satoshi Nakamoto is the cryptocurrency creator’s actual name or not, it’s the name they want us to know them by.

Nakamoto also communicated with users via email for a few years after the software’s release, but as not been involved with bitcoin since 2011. Nakamoto’s anonymity hasn’t stopped people from trying to figure out their true identity. A feature in Newsweek, which was released back in 2014, claimed to have discovered the true identity of Nakamoto, and pointed to a retired Japanese-American man living in California named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto.

Dorian Nakamoto denied any role in the creation of bitcoin and says that he is not Satoshi Nakamoto, but some people weren’t convinced. The day after the Newsweek piece ran, a comment from the original Satoshi Nakamoto on P2P posted simply “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Another feature, this time in The New York Times, claimed the creator of bitcoin was an American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo.  While Szabo’s career and interest in bitcoin might point to his involvement in the creation of the first cryptocurrency, he has denied that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, so the trail runs cold again.

But the search for Satoshi Nakamoto has posed more questions, like what the unmasking of the bitcoin creator would actually mean for the future of the currency and cryptocurrencies as a whole.

Many people don’t seem to care who Nakamoto is, and unless Nakamoto one day decides to step out from the shadows, there isn’t really much we can do to find out their identity — and probably not much to be gained from it either.

Bitcoin hasn’t and never existed in a vacuum. It wasn’t something that suddenly showed up out of the blue, but was created by building off the ideas of multiple people over several decades. And while Satoshi Nakamoto helped push the industry to new limits, they weren’t the only person/people capable of doing so.

Satoshi Nakamoto has been instrumental in the cryptocurrency market for sure, but they also haven’t really been involved in it in any meaningful way since 2010. Most of the open-source code has been rewritten by a group of programmers whose identities are known, drawing focus away from Nakamoto. So while it might be interested in finally learn who Satoshi Nakamoto really is, it wouldn’t likely have a big impact.

However, despite their anonymity, Satoshi Nakamoto is estimated to be worth upwards of $20 billion (although the exact number varies widely from $6-20 billion, but they’re still a millionaire whichever way you spin it) and could be the 44th richest person in the world, according to Forbes.

Knowing who holds that much money (5% of the entire bitcoin stash) could definitely have lasting implications, but won’t likely affect the future of cryptocurrencies as a whole.

So for now the identity of the “father of cryptocurrency” will remain a mystery. But bitcoin and other currencies like it will continue to have lasting impacts on money for a very long time.

Editors' Recommendations

Brie Barbee
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Brie is a writer from Portland, Oregon. She received a bachelor's degree from Portland State University in 2016, where she…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more