15 Mind Blowing Facts About Satoshi Nakamoto Every Crypto Enthusiast Should Know!

6 min readMar 1, 2018

Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used to refer to the creator of Bitcoin, the digital currency that has taken the financial world by storm.

The concept can be perplexing but, in the simplest terms, it’s a self-regulating, electronically created currency that is traded anonymously, without a bookkeeping authority or centralized bank. For more information on bitcoin and its history, check out this post from CryptalNews

Nakamoto’s identity has mystified many a cryptocurrency enthusiast and tech reporter. Many news outlets (Newsweek being the most memorable) have unsuccessfully tried to unmask the elusive person/group behind Bitcoin.

1) The Beginning Of Bitcoin

The first mention of Bitcoin came in the form of a 9-page white paper and, within a few months, Nakamoto had resourced partners, coders and developers all over the world to collaborate online with him and improve the Bitcoin software. This continued until 2011 when Nakamoto suddenly disappeared without warning.

2) Pseudonym

On the 1st November 2008, an email was sent to a cryptogenic mailing list from a user by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. The email contained the whitepaper for Bitcoin, and it was sent to many people who were well known for their belief in decentralisation and cryptography. The name Satoshi Nakamoto had people initially believing that there was a Japanese man behind it, but the perfect English used in the white paper and requests for translations had people second guessing this conclusion.

3) More Than One Person?

Many experts believe that Satoshi might have been more than one person. Even Lazlo Hanyecz (a developer for bitcoin) said “Bitcoin seems awfully well designed for one person to crank out”

4) Net Worth

Although Nakamoto moved “on to other things” in 2011, he didn’t walk away empty handed; researchers have discovered the Nakamoto’s account holds around 1 million Bitcoins. Based on the exchange rate of 22/02/2018, that makes him worth around $10,385,025,000 USD. At it’s peak, Bitcoin was worth $19,771 USD, meaning Nakamoto would have been worth $19.4billion USD and the 44th richest person in the world (source)

BUT he’s only spent around 500 bitcoins — that’s just 0.0005% of his acquired wealth! This may have something to do with many people believing that if Nakamoto was to spend any of his Bitcoin collection, it could trigger a massive sell-off and destabilize bitcoin’s entire economy.

5) Nobel Prize Nominee

In 2015, Nakamoto was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences by Bhagwan Chowdry — a professor of finance at UCLA (source)

6) Digital Communication

The Satoshi Nakamoto persona is not believed to have ever communicated with any bitcoin users over the phone or in person, favouring email and forums instead. There are many sites that allow you to read some of the earliest forms of communication from Satoshi himself with his developers.

7) Limited Supply

Bitcoins are “mined” by computers unscrambling blocks of “hashes” or complex strings of numbers and letters. Satoshi’s solution was to continuously increase the difficulty of unscrambling the hashes as more Bitcoins were created. As he wrote, “To compensate for increasing hardware speed … the proof-of-work difficulty [the unscrambling] is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they’re generated too fast, the difficulty increases.” (source)

8) Business Insider’s Most Impressive Person Of The Year

In 2013, Business Insider named Satoshi Nakamoto as the ‘Most Impressive Person of The Year’ (source)

9) A Group Of Companies?

Some bitcoin users have suggested (jokingly) that Satoshi Nakamoto could actually be a group of four Asian technology companies: Samsung, Toshiba, Nakamichi, and Motorola. The name can be created by taking the “sa” from Samsung, “toshi” from Toshiba, “naka” from Nakamichi, and “moto” from Motorola. (source)

10) Dead?

One theory is that Hal Finney, the first person to receive a bitcoin transaction, was actually Satoshi Nakamoto. Finney passed away in 2014 from ALS, so the mystery of the founder’s identity may never be solved. (source)

11) Extreme Measures

Nakamoto employed the latest encryption and obfuscation methods in his communications. Despite these efforts, Satoshi Nakamoto gave investigators he only tool they needed to find him — his own words. (source)

12) Stylometry

The NSA used the ‘writer invariant’ method of stylometry to compare Satoshi’s public writings with writing samples from trillions of people across the globe. By taking Satoshi’s texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5,000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words, resulting in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis. The result is a ‘fingerprint’ for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing. (source)

13) Discovered by the NSA

The NSA’s proprietary software, bulk email collection ability, and computing power made it possible for them to conclusively identify Satoshi. The NSA was able to place trillions of writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as Satoshi’s writings to find his true identity. The effort took less than a month and resulted in positive match.

14) So, He HAS Been Unmasked, Just Not Publicly

Very few people outside of the Department of Homeland Security know Satoshi’s real name. (source)

15) Not The First, But The Best (So Far)

Bitcoin wasn’t the first or the last digital currency, but Satoshi managed to come up with something that is simply more farsighted and bulletproof than anything else, combining the best features of existing digital coins while adding his own perfections.

He addressed one of the biggest problems in online transactions: fraud. In the real world, it’s the job of a centralised authority to prevent that from happening. But Satoshi figured out a workaround by cutting out that middleman: just make all transactions public, and have the entire community confirm a transaction is legit. “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust,” Satoshi wrote in his 2008 spec paper laying out the currency — a line which, it now seems, will echo through generations. (source)

“Can we take a moment to reflect on the fact that the Bitcoin protocol STILL hasn’t been hacked? One of the greatest comp sci accomplishments”
Erik Voorhees

Who do you believe is behind Satoshi Nakamoto? Read our post on finding the real Satoshi Nakamoto