Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
A sample chapter from my first book: The Case for Bitcoin
Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin. Beyond that, virtually nothing is known. His identity is an enduring, bitter mystery. He is a ghost. From the beginning, Satoshi took great measures to ensure his anonymity. So thorough was he that, despite widespread efforts to establish his identity, none succeeded.
We don’t even know whether Satoshi was a man or woman, an individual or a hidden cabal. All that can be inferred stems from his writings, which are those of an articulate, native English speaker. He was very likely an American or an Englishman; this is all that can be reasonably guessed, and even that is merely strong conjecture.
Attempts to uncover his identity have floundered, sometimes disastrously. Newsweek claimed to have unravelled the mystery with Dorian Nakamoto, a befuddled Japanese-American. The flimsiness of their account, relying completely on tenuously stretched circumstantial evidence, made them a laughingstock. The holes in their reporting were so cavernous that the story quickly sank. Still, the attention that their article attracted illustrated the deep interest in Satoshi’s identity.
People are drawn to knowing who created Bitcoin. We want someone to speak to us through news cameras to answer for Bitcoin and all its implications. Who will take responsibility for the threat it poses to governments? Who should be held accountable for all the outcomes that stem from it? The public desperately wants to know, which face lies behind the enigmatic inhumanity of the Blockchain?
If we could find Satoshi, the thinking goes, we could interview him. We could grill him. We could ask him to defend Bitcoin. Let us see how he fares in a debate against all the experts. Satoshi the person would embody Bitcoin. To our senses, his human traits would become Bitcoin’s. His personal failings would be Bitcoin’s. Any misdeed or misstep of his would be inherited by his creation. We would like to think that the Bitcoin apple could not fall far from the human tree.
Imagine Satoshi himself appearing on a television interview. Perhaps he would stumble through questions. Perhaps he’d have a giant wart on his nose. Critics would jump at the chance to find something wrong with him, the better to tarnish Bitcoin. There is no deed he could accomplish that would not be turned around and used to render judgment on Bitcoin. There is no person who could pass such a test, in which human characteristics must meet the sublime standards of cryptographic proofs. Inevitably, Satoshi the man could never equal Satoshi, the creator of Bitcoin.
Stymied by the lack of a human face, pundits blame Bitcoin. Created by a mystery man, Bitcoin is tainted by Satoshi’s unwillingness to show himself. As a defendant taking the Fifth is presumed guilty, Bitcoin must be insidious because its creator will not reveal himself. What does he have to hide anyway? Surely anything made by so pusillanimous a character could not be trustworthy. If we are to trust Bitcoin, let its creator come forth. As we trust the man, so too can we trust the algorithms. A faceless institution has no authority, so would they have you believe.
Such thinking is a relic from an era before cryptography, in which trust could only ever be as sound as human promises. Whether it was an individual, or an institution composed of individuals, trust always had a face. But judging Bitcoin in this way is deeply flawed. Meeting Satoshi is as necessary as meeting Euclid to confirm geometry. Newton’s theories of motion had nothing to do with Newton the man; we could care less. Mathematics is subject only to proofs, which have no human component. Science is strictly based on repeatable experiments. These fields are composed of people with their own flaws. But over long enough time scales, human biases are washed out like so much random noise. In the Scientific Method, evidence and skepticism win out over any human authority. Bitcoin should be judged in a similar, strictly technical way, eschewing the qualities of its inventor. This is precisely the analysis many pundits would like to avoid. Because they can find no technical flaw, and being intent upon rationalizing Bitcoin’s untrustworthiness, they must resort to old-fashioned mudslinging. Unsatisfyingly for them, there is no person to vilify.
Meeting Satoshi is surely unnecessary to verify the integrity of Bitcoin. As we have seen, all the code is open-source; the system has been intensively reviewed and stress-tested. And the protocol was designed in such a way that no one person, not even the creator himself, could manipulate it.
I suspect that meeting Satoshi would be deeply disappointing. Surely he would be a genius of the highest caliber. But invariably one would be underwhelmed by natural, human failings. The sublime workings of the Blockchain could not be mirrored by any person, no matter how brilliant or virtuous. Satoshi will remain much grander in anonymity than he could ever be in person.
Worse still, having a face to look to might undermine the very ethos of Bitcoin. The whole point is that a harmonious system exists with no trusted center. Even though Satoshi would hold no special place on a technical level, his continued presence would cast a long shadow over Bitcoin. We would find ourselves looking to him for guidance and for answers. He would ceaselessly be in the news. He would have the power, through public persuasion, to force through hard changes to the protocol. His celebrity status would give him undue sway over the protocol itself, rendering it his and not ours. The beauty of Bitcoin is that protocol changes must be wrestled over by the entire community. Although there are highly respected figures, such as Gavin Andreessen, no one can command the following of the network. Perhaps even Satoshi would fail in this today, had history unfolded differently. But surely, in there being no leader, Bitcoin is truer to its decentralized soul.
Satoshi’s absence is an enduring gift to the legacy of Bitcoin and all that stems from it. A single person could have monopolized the spotlight, been the voice and face of a revolution. But the Bitcoin revolution is so much more powerful without a face. It is a system that is so open, so accessible, that even its creator is anonymous. There is no purer a beginning. It sends a message, that anyone may be involved, may contribute, fork it, or even attack it, regardless of the typical human qualities that distract us: title, nationality, gender, appearance, etc. Satoshi’s imitators might be no-name hackers from a no-name country that introduce the Next-Big-Thing. Everything about Satoshi’s work was flat, non-hierarchical, and utterly meritocratic. A peer-to-peer network that existentially threatens governments. A creator with no face. Code that anyone can see but none can crack. A naked idea, unsupported by even one person, so meritorious that it could catapult within years to unseen heights on raw strength alone. This is the stuff of legend. And we are living it.
If you enjoyed this chapter, see the book: The Case for Bitcoin
Follow me on Twitter at @abarisser
