Who Created Bitcoin?
The creator of Bitcoin is a shadowy figure
This is the one in a series of posts where we will explain how Bitcoin and other crypto currencies work. Do you have questions on Bitcoin and other crypto currencies you want answered? Post it here as a note and we will answer it if we can.
Who created Bitcoin?
The identity of the creator of Bitcoin is, perhaps appropriately, something of a puzzle. Bitcoin began as a technical exercise in a paper on how you might create a currency that was purely digital, secure and which had no central authority or backer. The paper (which was published in 2008) was titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” under the byline of Satoshi Nakamoto. It was posted to the Cryptography Mailing List, where programmers and others discussed encryption and other related technologies. Foreshadowing the problems that Bitcoin would have later, the only response was somewhat cynical. “We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.” responded James A. Donald. “For transferable proof of work tokens to have value, they must have monetary value.”
Nakamoto seems to have been undeterred by this negative reception, and decided to put his ideas into practice. In 2009, he released the first Bitcoin client, the piece of software that transmitted transactions over the Internet. He also mined the first block, starting the process that created Bitcoins out of a mathematical puzzle.
He remained active over the next couple of years, posting to the Cryptography mailing list and the Bitcoin mailing lists that grew up around the nascent crypto currency. As the Bitcoin community grew, he took a back seat, letting others take the lead on developing the protocols and programs behind Bitcoin. His last post on the BitcoinTalk.org forum was in 2010, and in November of that year he stopped responding to emails, according to the person who had taken over the lead programmer position. Since then, he has not responded to requests from many people, leaving the project to run under its own steam. In effect, he has vanished.
So who is or was Satoshi Nakamoto? There is no certain answer. There are plenty who are happy to speculate, though. Some say that the entire project was created by an intelligence agency, or that Nakamoto was a pseudonym for a group of people who created the currency. Some go as far as to suggest that the whole thing was a Ponzi scheme, where a secretive cabal of users are sitting on huge hoards of Bitcoins, waiting for it to peak before they sell and kill the currency off.
“And it would appear that most of the non-circulating coins are in the hands of a very small number of people — who, one may reasonably suspect, were involved from with building and propagandising Bitcoin from its very beginning. So, who are the lords of Bitcoin?” — Stanislav, Loper OS
The Bitcoin Foundation (who promotes the currency and oversees the software used to run it) plays down the elusive nature of the creator of their currency, instead preferring to look forward and play up the open-source nature of the currency. “Satoshi’s anonymity often raised unjustified concerns, many of which are linked to misunderstanding of the open-source nature of Bitcoin” says their FAQ on the subject. This, they claim, means that it is safer than other, closed source or controlled currencies. Because the code behind it can be freely downloaded and analyzed, there are no hidden backdoors. As to Satoshi, they say that “the identity of Bitcoin’s inventor is probably as relevant today as the identity of the person who invented paper.”
More info
The Crypto-Currency — Joshua Davies, The New Yorker.
Who created Bitcoin? — The Bitcoin Foundation
The Well-Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto — Bitslog
Satoshi Nakamoto — Bitcoin Wiki
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