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It was May 2010 when the terms "Bitcoin" and "Satoshi Nakamoto" were echoed for the first time on the corridors of the University where I was attending my postgraduate studies. Yet, I decided that period that it wasn't worth to look further on them as I was already fed up from the ponzi schemes and frauds that I came across in my life and I had an impression that bitcoin was just another online scam hoping to fraud my hard earned money from my labour. Still, the idea that I was actually wrong about that impression was strong in my mind and I tried to stay informed in the future to learn more about this project, mostly whether Bitcoin would prove to be legitimate. Few years later in 2013, as Greece has been still under severe financial crisis and under the custody of IMF and ECB in order to save the German and French banks that have been exposed in Greek banking debt, I was found in unemployment and therefore I became a strong fiat fauceteer in order to support my income while looking for a work. It was that period that through , I came across Freebitco.in and I started earning my first Bitcoin Satoshi through its faucet. In fact, I was earning about 200 Satoshi per hour that period but still I had no idea how to invest or how to withdraw them somewhere. I was just raising them for fun. Soon after, and while moving to UK, the Moon bitcoin faucet emerged and I kept earning bitcoin Satoshi without having any idea about its future. 11 years later, I am pretty convinced that Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto Blockchain Revolution isn't a scam, just another online ponzi scheme that wants to steal my hard earned money.
For the past year that I have been trying to write articles on this platform, I have written quite many articles about altcoins and I have participated in quite few writing contests but I opted on purpose to avoid any special discussion about Bitcoin. Primarily, because I though I wasn't strong enough to write anything about the "King of the Crypto" and I didn't want to write inconsistencies just to lick your ears and write things that you enjoy to read just tip me a nice tip on AMPL or FARM. I didn't actually fell I have the knowledge about the technology and even worse I fell, I had nothing additional to provide in comparison to the thousands of articles that have been written so far about Bitcoin, on PUBLISH0X or anywhere else on the web. I only write articles when I believe I have something important to express and not because I am obsessed to support a writing streak of 84566679 days or publishing an article every day while writing boring things or just for tipping. Trading analysis of any kind isn't my cup of coffee as I am not interested in cryptotrading either.
However, I have written in my previous articles few things about my thoughts on Bitcoin and I have decided to put them altogether in one article even if that sounds boring and repetitive on a just another "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto" article. I am not trying to "invent the wheel", but I will only try to provide an analysis of my online research and few PERSONAL thoughts on the same questions that arose in my mind back on 2010 on the corridors of a Greek University. You might disagree with my opinion and thoughts, however you are more than welcome to do so and possibly you can express your own opinion on the comments bellow. Above everything there are no correct answers on my questions:
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto and even worse, what is the Satoshi Nakamoto's Vision ?
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto ?
I recently read an interesting article from Pete Rizzo editor on Kraken.com and BitcoinMagazine.com with title "The Last Days of Satoshi" and I was really intrigued to write these 2 articles of my thoughts about Satoshi Nakamoto from his flamboyant introduction, as follows:
They suspected that he was ], that he was Yakuza[], that he laundered money[]. They wondered if he was a woman[], laid claim just in case[] and joked about fucking him[]. They kept contingencies for if he proved crazy[], eyed for shifts in his sleep[], debated why he spoke and didn’t speak and sent him eager patches signed with pretty please[
If you read the article of Wikipedia about Satoshi Nakamoto you will find a very interesting list of the individuals that the authors believe who is Satoshi Nakamoto based mainly on linguistic analysis and comparisons of their writings. I will only present a list of the most notable and strongest candidates of them, according to my opinion but you can find the full story behind them on Wikipedia.
Hal Finney
Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto
Nick Szabo
Dr. Craig Wright
John McAfee
Elon Musk
Yes! Indeed, during a period on the first semester of 2021, I was completely convinced that the famous crypto enthusiast and new age entrepreneur and founder of Zip2, SolarCity, Paypal, The Boring Company, Tesla Motors and Space X has been indeed the individual behind Satoshi Nakamoto. Nobody could debate his programming skills or his qualifications in physics and the enthusiasm that he spread on the cryptospace with his involvement on the DogeCoin project. However, if he was Satoshi Nakamoto for real, that would mean that Satoshi Nakamoto Vision for a decentralised economy has been a complete fiasco as Elon Musk's main interest is profit and popularity as he is completely settled in the current financial establishment.
Gavin Andresen
Yanis Varoufakis
A Greek professor of economics, liberal politician of radical left and a Rock Star "Outsider", Varoufakis has put as an aim of his life to fight alone the capitalistic politico-economical system of the establishment and the global banking meritocracy therefore from an ideological perspective, he looks like a perfect candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto. Who can forget his legendary battles on 2015 on Eurogroup against the dominant European politicians and bureaucrats Christine Lagarde, Wolfgang Schauble or Mario Draghi when he tried to persuade Europe to write off the debt of Greek banking aka debt of German and French banks, according to his book "Adults in the Room"? Still, although Varoufakis is an excellent professor of economics with a career in American and Australian Universities during 80s and 90s, he lacks the computer programming skills of Satoshi Nakamoto in order to develop Bitcoin. Moreover, during the period that Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin paper and developed the project Varoufakis was busy in Greece that started to face the severe consequences of the monetary control of International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank (ECB) and Eurogroup. Nevertheless, I am confident that Satoshi Nakamoto has thoroughly studied Varoufakis world's best seller with title "The Global Minotaur" and to my opinion, he fits better as the unofficial ideological leader behind the Bitcoin project. As a final remark, I should say that the main difference between Yanis Varoufakis and Satoshi Nakamoto is the fact that Varoufakis is wrongly trying to fight the current politico-economical establishment from the "inside" while being part of it through his PanEuropean movement Diem25 and not "outside" of it as Nakamoto is doing. Therefore, he is destined to fail.
Here is a very interesting endorsement from Prof. Shaun Hargreaves-Heap, University of East Anglia
‘If you want to know how serious the current crisis is, you should read his book. With much eloquence, Yanis Varoufakis argues that the current financial problems are connected to the emerging fault lines of the international monetary system. The US (the Minotaur) used to govern the international monetary system, but no more; and this crucially means that there is no surplus recycling mechanism that can reliably stabilise the world economy. The elephant in the room, so to speak, is a stumbling Minotaur.’
The "Satoshi Nakamoto" Team
During my quest of finding more information about Bitcoin and the Blockchain Revolution, I attended recently an event about The NILLION Project launch at the University of Cambridge. After the event I had a very interesting discussion with Dr. Miguel de Vega, a cryptographer and founder of the project, that I met him after the event in the pub "Le Mitre" where we were all met for a beer in the end. Our conversation started on my question about his motivation and the motivation of other crypto-entrepreneurs and inventors to disclose their identity to the public and it ended like this:
Feax21: You know Miguel, there was no right or wrong answer on my question but as I brand myself a romantic cryptoenthusiast, I strongly believe that If Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to expose his identity, he could have been a millionaire and a very famous person!
Miguel de Vega: A Millionaire? A Billionaire! And maybe they are more of than one.
Feax21: I am completely certain about that! Good luck with your project!
That was indeed a very interesting discussion. Probably Dr. Miguel de Vega as a cryptography expert was right on his speculation or did he know something deeper about the true identity of "Satoshi Nakamoto" and he just gave me a hint of it? I really wanted further proofs to persuade myself on that. So I have decided to investigate again Satoshi Nakamoto's notorious paper with title "A peer-to-peer electronic cash system" that interestingly ins;t allowe to be found on bitcoin.org anymore after the legal action of Satoshi Nakamoto aka Dr. Graig Wright (what a joke!) but on the Michael Seylor's Microstrategy website. It was very interesting to realize that the paper has been actually written on the first plural person and not on the first singular although the publisher has been only one: Satoshi Nakamoto. Normally, a paper is written on the first plural person when there is a team behind a project, so apparently the assumption that there is more than one publisher of the paper is very strong and it is very likely that Satoshi Nakamoto has been only the name of a group or a team with the same Vision about a decentralised economy outside the current financial system.
I won't go into technical details about the context of the paper, but as a researcher, I decided to go even deeper and check what are the sources, the references of the paper written from the "Satoshi Nakamoto" Team ?
And by examining the references of the paper, it is very interesting to find out Satoshi Nakamoto didn't actually invented "the wheel" and what Satoshi Nakamoto actually did it was to combine technologies that already existed and described in papers published mostly in 90s with the oldest dating back in 1957 and the oldest in 2002, 6 years before Nakamoto's paper! So someone could make the hypothesis that the Satoshi Nakamoto Team actually consist of the owners of the papers used as reference at the Satoshi Nakamoto's paper and what they actually did it was to combine their knowledge in order to develop Bitcoin! And this group is comprised from very notable scientists, each one of them on their own field of specialisation. Merkle and Adam Back on cryptography, Haber and Stornetta et al. on time-stamping, Feller on probability theories and its applications and Dai on "b-money".
Satoshi is Female
On the previous year, I have been involved as a user on a platform called "Captain Bitcoin" founded by an ambitious Singapore-based cryptoenthusiast participated in various activities i.e. watching interesting crypto promo videos that have been secured by the platform in order to earn the native cryptocurrency called "Captain Bitcoin". In one of these promo videos, there was an exclusive interview with Nyla Rodgers talking about her "Satoshi is Female" project. I couldn't find a lot about Rodgers project on the web apart from a hive article with title "Satoshi is Female
According to the article, Rodgers is the founder of Mama Hope, a grassroots focused advocate for global communities, who is using the #satoshiisfemale tag to spread the message of blockchain and female empowerment in developing nations and according to her:
“Satoshi is Female is a metaphor for a more optimistic, global and inclusive future.”
I don't remember a lot about Rodgers interview on the Captain Bitcoin platform but interestingly she supported the idea that Satoshi is Female due to its caring nature and altruism that can be often found on female individuals. Indeed, I won't disagree that from all these candidates that are being outlined on this article and on the web in general, there are only male candidates of Satoshi Nakamoto. Many should indicate that the "Satoshi is Female" project has its origins in feminism, however the question that arose in my mind is:
What if in our male-dominant society we are too blinded to realise that Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Female?
Len Sassaman / David Kleiman
During my research to find more information about the most notable candidates of Satoshi Nakamoto which aren't mentioned on the wikipedia page of Satoshi Nakamoto, I came across an interesting article on Medium with title "Len Sassaman and Satoshi: a Cypherpunk History" talking about a cyberpunk cryptographer called Len Sassaman who tragically committed suicide on July 3rd, 2011, at the age of 31, following a long battle with depression and functional neurological disorders. Nevertheless, his death coincided with the disappearance of the world’s most famous crypto-pioneer and Bitcoin inventor: Satoshi Nakamoto. Only 2 months before Len died, Satoshi Nakamoto sent the final communication
I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future.
There wouldn't be any more dramatic end on the quest of finding who Satoshi Nakamoto is by naming Len Sassaman as Satoshi Nakamoto and it is so ironic that 10 years after his death, Len Sassaman's legacy as Satoshi Nakamoto has been evolved on the current Blockchain Revolution that we all enjoy.
On the oither hand, I find it too convenient to brand a decesead person as "Satoshi Nakamoto" because the deceased person is unable to defend himself and respond whether he is or not the personality that he is meant to be aka Satoshi Nakamoto. In a similar case, the brother of the late David Kleiman, an ex police officer who turned a computer-security and forensics specialist claimed in a court case unfolded in West Palm Beach, Florida, that his brother developed Bitcoin in collaboration with Dr. Graig Wright.
Epilogue
These are the thoughts that are being circulated on my mind during the previous years about Satoshi Nakamoto and the Satoshi Nakamoto Vision for a decentralised economy and certainly I could only speculate who is Satoshi Nakamoto without being able to provide a correct answer. However, in order to make the speculation more interesting, you can leave your comment who do you believe Satoshi Nakamoto is.
***Disclaimer: All information found on this article is for informational purposes only. I do not provide any personal investment advice so please make your own research before proceeding to any investment/trading action.***
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