The greatest mystery in the tech world today is not how bitcoin works, but who is the creator of bitcoin. On October 31, 2008, someone under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto published a whitepaper on a cryptography mailing list. That event changed the history of money and left us all wondering about the mastermind behind it.

Over the years, many journalists and bloggers have tried to unveil the shadow cast on the creator of bitcoin without much luck. There have been a lot of candidates, some of them even self-nominated. However, none have given definitive proof of their claims, so we are still searching for the person behind the mystery.

There is, though, one stand-out candidate. I had to guess, I would say with great certainty that he is the creator of bitcoin. Before I tell you who I’ve chosen, let’s assess what we know about Satoshi Nakamoto. Or, better yet, what he wants us to know.

Satoshi’s profile on the P2P Foundation website

In Satoshi’s P2P Foundation profile, he claims to be a man from Japan, born on April 5, 1975. The problem is that he doesn’t behave or sound like someone from Japan. First of all, he wrote the whitepaper and his subsequent posts in perfect English. Secondly, his sleep pattern is very strange for someone living in Japan.

Bitcoin Forum member Stefan Thomas graphed the time stamps from more than 500 of Satoshi’s posts. He found that Satoshi Nakamoto never posted anything between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Japanese time. So, it’s possible — probable, even — that Satoshi’s entire identity is fictional.

But why would he pretend to be someone else?

There is a pretty good reason

Just like there was Pretty Good Privacy, a project that enabled people to send encrypted messages to each other. Phil Zimmermann, an activist who wanted to give dissidents a government-free communication channel, founded PGP. However, the USA government realized the potential of this technology and confiscated it. PGP and Zimmermann then become the subjects of a criminal investigation.

Phil Zimmermann

The only thing this technology did was enable two individuals to communicate without being eavesdropped on. So, imagine how the government would treat the creator of bitcoin, a technology that enables free money transfers without banks or intermediaries. The technology that takes money out of the hands of the government.

What do we know about the creator of bitcoin?

Now that I’ve covered my misgivings about his identity and reasons for hiding it, here’s what we know about Satoshi Nakamoto.

As I’ve already mentioned, Satoshi Nakamoto emerged with a whitepaper on cryptography mailing list metzdowd.com. His nine-page document proposed “a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party” on Halloween 2008.

Whitepaper screenshot

He then created the bitcointalk forum and posted the first message under the pseudonym satoshi. He also made a website with the domain name bitcoin.org and continued to work on bitcoin software. On January 3, 2009, Satoshi mined the first Bitcoin block, known as the “genesis block”.

The first bitcoin

Throughout 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto collaborated with other developers to modify the bitcoin protocol. He was involved in the bitcoin community and corresponded with them frequently. Then, all of a sudden, he gave the keys and codes to Gavin Andresen and transferred domains to members of the community. By the end of 2010, he had stopped working on the project.

Then, on Saturday April 23, 2011, the creator of bitcoin emerged once again to post his last message. When developer Mike Hearn asked him if he planned to rejoin the community, Satoshi replied:

I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.

And that was it from Satoshi Nakamoto

The man who had disrupted the financial system for good simply disappeared. But why then?

We should also take into account that Satoshi’s bitcoin addresses had — and still contain — about 1,000,000 BTC. In December 2017, when the price peaked, he had more than US$19 billion. For that short moment, Nakamoto was 44th richest person in the world! And to this day he hasn’t cashed a single bitcoin.

All this evidence suggests that something may have happened to creator of bitcoin. That is why I believe Hal Finney is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Unfortunately, Hal Finney was diagnosed with ALS in 2009 and fought the disease until his death in 2014. I imagine he created the future of money, but then had to retreat when the disease progressed. And then he died and left us with only rumors about the true identity of the creator of bitcoin.

He could not claim his throne.

Screenshot: Comments on Bitcoin.com

Who was Hal Finney?

Hal Finney was a computer scientist who graduated from Caltech in 1979. As a student, he received the “most brains” award from his peers. During his freshman year, he took a course on gravitational field theory designed for graduate students. It seems Finney was extremely intelligent, which fits the first criterion for being Satoshi Nakamoto.

Students also remember seeing Finney with a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. If he was reading this kind of literature, he could have easily formed libertarian views on life.

And he did. His views pushed him towards a little-known group of free thinkers and coders. In the early 1990s, he became a member of Cypherpunks. This movement was dedicated to the “widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change.” They were self-proclaimed defenders of privacy and Finney put his knowledge at their disposal to achieve the cryptoanarchist vision.

Finney and Zimmermann knew each other very well

When someone wrote on Cypherpunk’s mailing list about the above-mentioned Phil Zimmermann and his idea for PGP, Hal responded. He contacted Phil and became the first employee of PGP Corporation, working there until his retirement in 2011. That same year, Satoshi Nakamoto stopped his involvement with bitcoin.

Finney made a significant contribution to the new version of the PGP protocol, but he had to hide his involvement from the government. So he was very well aware of the problems Phil had regarding PGP. Because of that, I can understand his desire to hide his identity when creating bitcoin.

But why did he choose to be a man from a faraway Japan?