Who Invented Bitcoin?

Satoshi Nakamoto is our hypothesis. We’re not finding the inventor of Bitcoin if we lose Nakamoto. So we started by asking dappGambl’s researchers to uncover all they could find about Satoshi, and we found a real person with that name. Yes, Satoshi Nakamoto is a man, aged 72 years, based in California but originally from Japan. He has a third name that you probably didn’t know about, “Dorian.” Oh, and he’s a retired engineer. Does that ring a bell? We could have stopped writing at this point because we found him! But this is where stuff gets complicated. Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto has made an official statement in the past denying that he invented our most beloved coin, Bitcoin. In fact, he said he didn’t have a clue about Bitcoin until his son mentioned it in 2014. So here is a new crypto coin that’s driving the world crazy, and then we have a poor old man being pressured to accept that he is the founder! This is crazy, right? A coincidence? We will find out.

How did we get convinced that Engineer Dorian might be in the dark regarding the founder of BTC, just like any of us? The internet estimated that the real Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto was born in 1975, which makes him 47 years old as of 2022. Of course, he never revealed personal information, but he once commented on his P2P platform that he was a 37 years old man living in Japan. That was in 2012. Engineer Dorian and the Satoshi we are looking for have a significant age gap of 25 years between them. That’s enough to let us know that this was pure coincidence. It’s okay to assume so because both of them have Japanese roots. So let’s allow Eng. Nakamoto to enjoy his retirement, as we proceed to look for the real Bitcoin founder.

Let’s take a different approach. The history of Bitcoin may get us close to our answers. Research shows that Bitcoin was an idea that sprung out of the 2008 great recession. This was a time when banks were shutting down with depositors’ money, creating distrust between the financial system and the people. Bitcoin’s white paper stated clearly that it would address the centralized control of money, mistrust between people and banks, and even privacy, by allowing transactions without sharing personal data. It further went ahead to explain how its blockchain would use cryptographic proof to ensure security and integrity within the networks, and there would be zero third-party intervention. A blockchain ledger would keep track of all transactions, just like financial institutions use ledgers. It would be a spread-out ledger across the entire Bitcoin network. Bitcoins would be mined by completing complex tasks, up to a maximum number of 21 million Bitcoins. The launching of this white paper named “Bitcoin”: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” to a cryptography mailing list on the 31st Oct 2008 gave Bitcoin life.

Bitcoin was put to use as open-source software for the first time in 2009. It happened when Nakamoto, the founder, mined the first block, popularly known as the Genesis block. This block represented the first-ever 50 Bitcoins to be mined. Other early contributors to the blockchain joined in and started mining too. Bitcoin was being popularised on the net, but no one was using it as a currency because it had not yet acquired any economic value. It took up to 2010, for a programmer identified as Laszlo Hanyecz to initiate the first-ever recorded transaction of Bitcoin. Laszlo successfully, negotiated to buy Papa John’s pizza valued at $25 with 10,000 BTC, giving BTC its first value of 4BTC per penny. Two exchanges, Bitcoin Market and Mt. Gox were established in the same year, as well as the first major mining pool, Slush.

Fun Fact: Fast forward to today 22nd May is called Pizza day in honor of the 10,000 BTC sent by Laszlo Papa Hones. Papa Jones owns $400 M worth of BTC if they were never disposed of.

Bitcoin then started catching the attention of merchants and different traders across the globe and has since grown in value to tens of thousands of dollars. The first adopters of BTC were members of the black markets. They viewed BTC as the best way to move huge money without government interventions. Silk Road, one of the largest black market online marketplaces that existed at that time recorded over $10M transactions before it was shut down by the FBI in October 2013. Silk Road facilitated the trading of all kinds of legal and illegal items like weapons, hard drugs, murderers for hire, stolen credit card details, and even had a gambling section, with Bitcoin being the only currency allowed. The FBI, Europol, and central banks started raising concern that this digital coin was likely to facilitate illicit trade and even terrorism. Crypto regulations started emerging after the Silk Road saga, with China taking the lead. Bank of China banned financial institutions from using Bitcoin in 2013 and effected a total ban in 2017. Other countries like the US and the UK have been heard talking tough about crypto and have gone further to implement some policies on the same.

The growth of Bitcoin stalled after these events. Many people thought that governments would totally crash BTC leading to panic selling that halved the price of the digital asset. BTC has gone through several circles of highs and lows while maintaining a strong uptrend. As of writing this, the price was $36,241 with a record of peaking at highs of $67,000+.

Bitcoin’s main repository is made up of about 150,000 lines of C++ code. If we were to include every single function and documentation, we would count more than 1M lines of code. So how did one person manage to write such a heavy program? Bitcoin is open-source software. Nakamoto published it and invited interested parties to help in building it. This means that he did not write the entire program, but simply developed a shell that guided other contributors in creating it. Hal Finney, a game developer, is among the earliest enthusiasts who offered to mine the earliest blocks of the coin as Nakamoto was conducting tests. Finney who has attended many interviews has denied any allegations that he was the founder of Bitcoin but says that several programmers joined the project to help Nakamoto accomplish his goals. So this was collaborative work. Mike Hearn was the core developer working hand in hand with the rest of the team to keep BTC alive. Gavin Andresen who had reached out to Nakamoto in 2010 acted as his right-hand man and eventually took over as the core Bitcoin lead maintenance person. Finney wasn’t fortunate to live long enough to witness the growth of Bitcoin, He died in 2014 from a neurodegenerative disease.

Satoshi Nakamoto remained anonymous through all his interactions with the programmers that chose to join him. Nakamoto posted on the BitcoinTalk forum on December 13th, 2010, for the last time, and sent the last email to his lead developer Mike on April 23rd, 2011 before disappearing into obscurity. Bitcoin has however continued to grow and has already gone mainstream with hundreds of thousands of businesses across the world accepting it. El Salvador was the first country to recognize Bitcoin as a legal tender in June 2021. Other countries such as the US, UK, and Paraguay, allow their citizens to use BTC under certain regulatory frameworks. Hundreds of other cryptos have also mushroomed under the inspiration of Bitcoin.