XRP CTO David Schwartz States That He Is Not Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto

Ripple’s chief technology officer David Schwartz states he’s not Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

Responding to questions asked on Twitter regarding whether he’s responsible for building the Bitcoin network, Schwartz says he didn’t know about Bitcoin until 2011 — two years after BTC appeared. Schwartz, who is one of the original architects of the XRP ledger, believes it is more likely Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator was in fact a small group of people, rather than a single person:

“I think it’s more plausible that Satoshi was a small group of people given the wide set of skills displayed and the amount of work done. It could have been one person, but that seems somewhat unlikely to me.”

Schwartz also states he has been slowly selling his Bitcoin for several years. Though he’s still bullish on the largest cryptocurrency overall, he says that the riskiness of the asset has persuaded him to sell.

Schwarts is the latest prominent crypto figure to deny Satoshi rumors. In May, Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson revealed that he thought Adam Back, co-founder and CEO of blockchain technology company Blockstream, could be the creator of Bitcoin:

“These are just great examples of what you would expect from the inventor of a proto-system that’s almost Bitcoin, to kind of keep doing that research. The other thing is that Back is an expert in cryptography and he has a lot of experience in privacy. So you say, OK, who would have enough operational security knowledge to create an alias that’s very secure and capable of defending against? That would be Back. Back was friends with Hal Finney. They knew each other for a long time. The very second person to enter the Bitcoin space.”

Back, however, denied it.

Hoskinson further noted that disagreement about Satoshi’s identity is good:

“[It] means the alias is working if people can have divergent reasonable opinions. Best to leave the old dog sleeping and move on.”

Back agrees that it is best for Satoshi’s identity to remain unknown:

“For what it’s worth, [computer scientist Hal Finney and Nick Szabo] both said it wasn’t them also. We’ll never know – many cypherpunks had no social media footprint, and anon posts. Probably a digital ghost, who burned the nym to be safe. Bitcoin is better as a decentralized digital commodity without a founder. We are all Satoshi.”