…There isn’t any, but that doesn’t stop people forming their own hypotheses… including us!
You might be wondering why a team developing an Ethereum DApp using smart contracts is posting about Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin. Well just because we focus on Ethereum, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have any interest in the wider crypto market, and let’s face it, Ethereum simply wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Bitcoin. Besides… the whole mystery surrounding Satoshi Nakamoto is intriguing, and we all love a good mystery!
So here is our own theory on the man behind Satoshi Nakamoto:
First of all, I’ll rule out some of the people we’re pretty sure isn’t Satoshi….
Have you seen “A Beautiful Mind”?…. It was a film released in 2001 based on a book originally published in 1998. Russell Crowe played the part of John Forbes Nash Jnr. For those who don’t know, Nash was an American mathematician known for his contribution to “Game Theory” and his theories are commonly used in economic studies.
Nash is also attributed with the notion of “ideal money”. To understand the concept of “ideal money”, we first need to understand what Nash would deem as “bad money”. Taken directly from one of Nash’s lectures,
“Consider a society where the money in use is subject to a rapid and unpredictable rate of inflation so that money worth 100 now might be worth from 50 to 10 by a year from now. Who would want to lend money for the term of a year?”
It’s fair to say that Satoshi was inspired by Nash. You’ve probably already heard that you can create the words “I am Nash” using letters from SAtosHI NAkaMoto, but we believe that is was either deliberately planted as a red-herring or as a tribute to Nash, or that simply it’s purely coincidental. Coincidental in the same way that you can show major corporations in the name if you look for them:
SAmsung
TOSHIba
NAKAmichi
MOTOrola
There is no evidence to suggest that any of these companies were involved in the development of bitcoin in any way.
We also strongly believe that John Nash was not Satoshi Nakamoto, however, we do know that Satoshi was definitely a fan of Nash’s work, his theories and his notion of “ideal money”.
Some people have suggested that Hal Finney was Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s widely known that Finney was the very first recipient of bitcoins, sent to him to prove the concept worked. Finney actually stated in his posting on the bitcointalk forum that he’d already been working on his own currency (RPOW).
To quote directly from the forum posting,
“When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee jerk reaction.
I was more positive. I had long been interested in cryptographic payment schemes. Plus I was lucky enough to meet and extensively correspond with both Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, generally acknowledged to have created ideas that would be realized with Bitcoin. I had made an attempt to create my own proof of work based currency, called RPOW. So I found Bitcoin facinating.
When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.”
In this very same posting, Finney also talks frankly about his fight with the disease ALS,
“Today, I am essentially paralyzed. I am fed through a tube, and my breathing is assisted through another tube. I operate the computer using a commercial eyetracker system. It also has a speech synthesizer, so this is my voice now. I spend all day in my power wheelchair. I worked up an interface using an arduino so that I can adjust my wheelchair’s position using my eyes.”
He then mentions how he finds Bitcoin price fluctuations entertaining,
“And of course the price gyrations of bitcoins are entertaining to me. I have skin in the game. But I came by my bitcoins through luck, with little credit to me. I lived through the crash of 2011. So I’ve seen it before. Easy come, easy go.”
For someone at this stage in their life, dealing with an incurable disease that only worsens over time, he could’ve been completely frank and honest and stated that he had invented Bitcoin, to at least experience some of the praise and recognition that would’ve been bestowed upon him from the crypto community, but he instead preferred to be honest about the situation. He had already invested so much time and effort in RPOW, that it would be crazy to also be developing another crypto in parallel, where RPOW would have been created purely to put people off the scent.
In our opinion, Hal Finney was not Satoshi Nakamoto.
Other theories suggest it could be Wei Dai, however the original email sent by Satoshi to Wei Dai back in 2008, where Satoshi wants to recognise the work that Wei Dai had done on “B-Money”, and where Satoshi also references someone else (Adam Back) in terms of how he managed to contact Wei Dai.
“From: “Satoshi Nakamoto” <satoshi@anonymousspeech.com>
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2008 4:38 PM
To: “Wei Dai” <weidai@ibiblio.org>
Cc: “Satoshi Nakamoto” <satoshi@anonymousspeech.com>
Subject: Citation of your b-money pageI was very interested to read your b-money page. I’m getting ready to
release a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system.
Adam Back (hashcash.org) noticed the similarities and pointed me to your
site.”
As is the case with Finney, it would be extremely strange to develop a crypto (B-Money) and then email yourself mentioning another party (Adam Back) looking to add a citation for another crypto you had been developing.
For this reason, we very much doubt that Wei Dai is Satoshi Nakamoto, and neither is Adam Back.
So we now move towards someone that a lot of the wider crypto community believes to be Satoshi…..and that is Nick Szabo.
There are a lot of good reasons to believe that he could be Satoshi.
“Szaboshi Nikamoto”, as some people refer to him, worked on “BitGold”, a very similar concept to Bitcoin, three years before Bitcoin was released.
There has also been stylometric analysis performed on the documents that Szabo has produced, compared to the emails sent by Satoshi. For those unfamiliar with stylometric analysis, this is basically where analysis of a persons writing style, if given enough input to work with, can identify a person almost like a thumbprint. According to the analysis and classification algorithms, Nick Szabo is linguistically very similar to Satoshi, who had written the original Bitcoin paper.
Interestingly from Nicks own infamous “unenumerated” blog, he says,
“…nearly everybody who heard the general idea thought it was a very bad idea. Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea (or in Dai’s case his related idea) enough to pursue it to any significant extent until Nakamoto (assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai). Only Finney (RPOW) and Nakamoto were motivated enough to actually implement such a scheme.”
So was Nick Szabo Satoshi Nakamoto?
Well we believe that Nick was the main driver behind Bitcoin, but we also believe he was assisted by another person. Nick didn’t code in C++ (The language that Bitcoin was developed in) but certainly had the capabilities to develop the concept of Bitcoin.
We believe he was helped by one other person
Ian Grigg
Ian posted a fascinating response to the claim made by Craig Wright (a man who publicly claimed to be Satoshi back in 2015)
What was fascinating was that Ian was actually agreeing that Craig Wright was Satoshi, and also that the late Dave Kleiman was also a member of the Nakamoto team (a claim that had been made by Craig Wright)
So why would he do this? Well Grigg certainly wouldn’t want the spotlight placed on himself or Nick, but at the same time we believe that he found it irritating that someone else was attempting to take the credit for a lot of the hard work he’d personally done on Bitcoin. So when another guy comes along claiming to be Satoshi, it actually angers Grigg because he knows the real truth!
He states, almost with an element of sarcasm,
“Now that he has come out as the team leader, as the quintessential genius behind the team, a new chapter opens up.”
He also cleverly words a sentence to state that Craig Wright simpy isn’t at the level of the true “creator” of the Bitcoin outfit (Nick Szabo) when he says,
“As you come to know Craig you will discover he is no legend, no God, no saviour. He’s just a guy, a prickly one at that, he’s a lot like those very difficult geek/nerd/blatherers that turn minor IT support into a social drama.”
When challenged about his claim that he has proof that Craig Wright is Satoshi, Grigg goes quiet. He doesn’t provide any proof, and this could possibly be attributed to him thinking, “I’ve probably said too much here already”, so decides to cease any further discussions on the matter.
It’s also worth pointing out that Grigg is also an extremely skilled C++ coder (The language Bitcoin was written in) so he would’ve had no problem developing the code for Bitcoin from a technical perspective.
In an interview by Jason Louv, Grigg said,
“When Nick Szabo first theorised about smart contracts, he was talking about the holistic nature of a contract, all phases: the negotiation, the recording, the performance and also dispute resolution. But when Bitcoin emerged, and programs or scripts, little programettes if you like, were placed into that architecture, people thought, “Oh gosh, now we can do smart contracts,” but they thought the smart contract was just the code. The code itself had no legal prose, it therefore had no meeting of the minds so it wasn’t a contract.”
It’s also worth mentioning that Szabo thanks Grigg on his unenumerated blog on multiple occasions:
“My thanks to Ian Grigg for pointing me to Yao’s article”
and
“Again my thanks to Ian Grigg for the pointer to this latest news.”
It was clear there was mutual respect for one another.
So this is our theory on how we believe the creation of Bitcoin played out….
Szabo really wanted to develop Bitcoin, but he felt that he needed some assistance. It wasn’t something he felt 100% confident that he could deliver on his own. So he decided to contact Grigg.
He explained to Grigg his concept and asked if Grigg was interested in helping him develop and code it. Grigg was intrigued and they quickly decided that it would be a good fit to work with each other. They both very quickly agreed that if they were going to do this, they would have to ensure that they would need to remain anonymous.
In Griggs own words,
“the secret was held by a tiny bunch of supporters ring-fencing around the team — for privacy, for safety, and for fear.”
We couldn’t find any evidence that Szabo had ever met Grigg face-t0-face, but bear in mind that the two didn’t need to meet face-to-face to create Bitcoin, as everything could be done via email exchange, and all email correspondence between the two would’ve been deleted immediately for security purposes.
So there you have it. Our theory is that Satoshi Nakamoto is:
Nick Szabo & Ian Grigg
We’d like to make it abundantly clear that this is pure theory which we have no hard evidence to support. If the real Satoshi Nakamoto doesn’t want to go public that that is his/her/their prerogative and we should all respect that. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t have our own little theories on the subject :-)
We’d love to hear your own thoughts on this.
References
http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001593.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_money
http://personal.psu.edu/gjb6/nash/money.pdf
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/finney/rpow/world.html
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0
http://www.gwern.net/docs/bitcoin/2008-nakamoto
https://web.archive.org/web/20070616052640/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html
https://towardsdatascience.com/stylometric-analysis-satoshi-nakamoto-294926cdf995
https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/06/smart-contracts-expand-credit.html
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html
