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Satoshi Nakamoto is likely a pseudonym used by the real person who created Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology. The main focus of the article was that why did the person behind the persona of Satoshi Nakamoto create such an identity. The answer to the question and other questions are answered as far as possible.
Entry of Satoshi Nakamoto:-
Satoshi Nakamoto first came into view when he mailed the Whitepaper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System to the Cypherpunks mailing list on metzdowd.com. He sent the mail using his Vistamail address on 30 Oct/1 Nov 2008. He later also published it on P2P foundation after registering on the site. Some cryptographic inventions people use in daily life without knowing are invented by those on the mailing list. But there is a twist here that before Satoshi sent that mail, he bought a domain bitcoin.org on 18 Aug 2008, two months before he released the whitepaper.
According to theymos, who is considered as one of the ‘top guy in so-called bitcoin hierarchy’ and further research noted below, the domain was registered anonymously by cash payment by anonymousspeech.com. It was a privacy respecting domain registrar who registered the domain in Japan, the same country Satoshi identified himself. Satoshi registered himself on SourceForge with the username nakamoto2 on 5 Oct 2008. SourceForge was where the code was compiled and released after every new update. Sirius a.k.a. Martti Malmi a developer helped Satoshi re-organize the webpage and maintain the bitcoin.org domain after he read the whitepaper. Later, the code was shifted to Github by other developers. He then helped to move a forum from SourceForge to bitcointalk.org domain.
The real person behind Satoshi Nakamoto might even be on the cryptographic mailing list under a different name or with another anonymous name before publishing the whitepaper, or he may be lurking on the mailing list just for gathering information. The members of the mailing list mostly communicated with their real names, and most of them knew each other in real life and had annual conferences in various parts of the world to discuss matters related to cryptography. To conclude, that the cryptographers on the mailing list and those who were not on the mailing list were not faceless ‘super-coders’ but had real identities.
Some cryptographers and different entrepreneurs dived into ‘digital currencies’ ideas before Bitcoin came into existence notable among them were Wei Dai:-B money, Nick Szabo’s:-Bitgold, David Chaum’s:-Digicash, Liberty Dollar from 2002 to 2006, E-Gold from 1996 to 2000, E-bullion from 2001 to 2008. Bernard von NotHaus created the Liberty Dollar, which was a physical currency pegged to minerals and gold. He ran the operation for 10 years and was later arrested by US Government on ‘bogus’ charges. Liberty Dollar and E-gold founders were given probation and the project was shut down based on the infamous ‘Patriot Act’.
He perfected each of these projects in his own way and created bitcoin, but majorly the blockchain technology. This is mentioned in the whitepaper references and further communications from him and credits it to Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, and other researchers. But none of these cryptographers and developers anonymously published their projects on digital currencies, none of them were arrested by any government.
Exit of Satoshi Nakamoto:-
Satoshi Nakamoto left the crypto community with his last post on the bitcoin forum on 10 Dec 2010 and after that, he never communicated publicly and vanished from the face of the earth. For over 2 years he was the lead developer of bitcoin code and had total control over it. But just before leaving he made Gavin Anderson, the lead developer, and left.
Exactly why Satoshi left is disputed; one major theory is that Wikileaks was going to start accepting bitcoin and that scared Satoshi. They were going to accept BTC as they were been banned by Card Companies, and PayPal had restricted their account; so the only choice they had left at that time was to use BTC, a decentralised currency, which they did on 15 June 2011, six months after Satoshi left. In Nov 2010, when Satoshi was going to leave in a few weeks, there were posts on the bitcoin forum to make Wikileaks accept BTC as practically it was the only choice left for them. But Satoshi disagreed with the opinion, arguing that if Wikileaks starts accepting BTC every single government will attack BTC, Blockchain as the code and community was not prepared to handle such attacks.
Wikileaks was not the first big organization to accept BTC. EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation)started accepting BTC around 20 Nov 2010 for a few months. They abandoned the idea for few years as they argued that it may be illegal for them to accept donations via BTC as it was not a legal tender. It didn’t create any problems for BTC and the community, as EFF was not the same as Wikileaks.
Satoshi publicly left the bitcoin community, but he still was communicating with other cryptographers privately by email. The emails of Mike Hearn with Satoshi were made publicly available by Mike where they discussed some questions related to blockchain till April 2011, a whole 5 months after he publicly left. There is also an email excerpt of April 2011 released by Gavin, where he communicated with Satoshi on matters related to his visit to CIA headquarters. The visit was for an emerging technologies conference for the US intelligence community. That was his last known private email released to the public by cryptographers who communicated with Satoshi Nakamoto.
The above article is half-way, you can find the other half and rest of the article on the link below on my blogging site. It includes abnormalities found with time zones, emails, etc., and some opinionated conclusions.
https://redrisingsun.com/the-known-life-of-satoshi-nakamoto/
Thank You,
AnonymousZ.
