A somewhat romantic story exists within the Bitcoin ecosystem regarding Satoshi Nakamoto. As the principle figure in blockchain technology, Nakamoto is often portrayed as a mysterious, lone wolf who paved the way to freedom from fiat currencies and centralised financing by creating Bitcoin. The maverick genius appeared briefly to notify the world of his vision before disappearing back into the shadows.

Some feel that the technology that birthed Bitcoin must have been developed by a team of individuals and it now seems that the true identity of Nakamoto is no longer a secret, as investigative work performed by America’s National Security Agency (NSA) has uncovered the person or people behind Bitcoin.

No Escape

Cryptocurrencies tend to attract fans of decentralized technology, anonymity, and disruptive financing that is free from excessive control. However, it’s become clear that you cannot hide from some of the world’s larger intelligence agencies and the NSA may just be able to track everyone, everywhere. This means that the NSA has all the tools to identify the mysterious figure behind Bitcoin and determine his real identity.

In the process of creating Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote thousands of emails and posts which are still publically available on the internet. These writings proved to be more than enough for the NSA to begin to determine Satoshi’s true identity. The NSA chose stylometry to try and build a picture of just who Satoshi was. Stylometry involves comparing texts to determine the author of a particular work and the NSA used the ‘writer invariant’ method of stylometry, taking the 50 most common words in Satoshi’s texts, and analysing them to find the frequency of those 50 words in various portions of writing. This resulted in a unique 50-number identifier for each portion. That eventually led to a unique ‘fingerprint’ for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing.

Worldwide Access

Once the NSA had obtained Satoshi’s unique fingerprint all that was needed was to compare it with trillions of writing samples available globally.

The NSA used programs such as PRISM, which allowed court-approved front-door access to both Google and Yahoo user accounts, and MUSCULAR which involves copying the data flows of the data centers of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook. This heavy duty approach resulted in the NSA analysing trillions of emails, posts, and articles from over a billion people. These mass surveillance techniques eventually resulted in a positive match; however, the Department of Homeland Security is currently denying knowledge of Satoshi’s true identity.

Rumours that Satoshi is actually a team of individuals still persist as no one has ever met Satoshi Nakamoto in person, and outside the NSA there’s no conclusive evidence that could lead to his identification. The very nature of the technology used in the creation of Bitcoin also contains collaboration as a central theme. The tracking down of Satoshi Nakamoto has placed a focus on identity and privacy, and it now seems that not even Bitcoin’s illusive founder was able to say anonymous.