Exactly 15 years ago, on December 12, 2010, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, known as Satoshi Nakamoto, published his last message on the BitcoinTalk forum. Since then, there have been a few more non-public appearances—until the end of April 2011, Satoshi corresponded with some of Bitcoin's first developers. The last message was sent on April 26, 2011, to developer Gavin Andresen, asking him to downplay his figure as "mysterious and behind-the-scenes".
Satoshi's last public message on December 12, 2010, concerned a DoS attack on the first cryptocurrency's network and Bitcoin software updates. In those years, forums were one of the most popular platforms for communication. And BitcoinTalk, which appeared around the same time as the Bitcoin network launch in 2009, became the main open platform for Bitcoin developers to communicate.
On April 23, 2011, in a message to developer Mike Hearn, Satoshi wrote that he had "moved on to other things and that Bitcoin is in good hands with Gavin and everyone else," referring to developer Gavin Andresen, who had been actively involved in Bitcoin's development since 2010. In 2011, he was named by Satoshi Nakamoto as the lead developer of Bitcoin Core (Bitcoin's software).
The last known message, on April 26, was sent by Satoshi to Andresen, who announced on April 27 that he would give a presentation on Bitcoin at the CIA headquarters in June at a conference on new technologies for the US intelligence community. It is assumed that this may have influenced Satoshi Nakamoto's decision to cease public activities. After this letter, Bitcoin's creator handed over to Andresen codes containing a copy of the cryptographic key from the system for alerting Bitcoin network participants about critical errors.
Who is Satoshi
Subsequently, the identity of Bitcoin's anonymous creator became shrouded in theories and speculation about who was really behind the name Satoshi Nakamoto. One of them is that the direct creators of Bitcoin are the CIA themselves.
"Obviously, it's the CIA, we all understand that," said popular journalist Tucker Carlson during a closed panel discussion at the Bitcoin 2024 conference.
There is a version that the secrecy for so many years is explained by Satoshi's death. Nevertheless, researchers to this day continue to put forward candidates for the role of Bitcoin's first developer. For example, the authors of the documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, which aired on the American channel HBO in October of last year, named Peter Todd as the alleged creator of Bitcoin.
Other candidates for this role also include the famous cryptographer and one of the first Bitcoin proponents Hal Finney, an early advocate of digital privacy, cryptographer Len Sassaman, programmer and cypherpunk Paul Le Roux, computer scientist and cryptographer Nick Szabo, and the head of the crypto company Blockstream, Adam Back. However, some do not confirm these assumptions, while others categorically deny being Satoshi.
"If Satoshi were alive, and I don't think he is alive, I'm sure he'd have a big smile on his face," said the head of the investment company Galaxy Digital, Mike Novogratz, commenting to CNBC on Bitcoin's historic surge above the $100,000 mark.
Satoshi's Bitcoins
Speculation around the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto heats up along with the growth of the main cryptocurrency. But years of research and many theories about the amount of cryptocurrency Satoshi might hold have not led to finding definitive answers.
Although there is a public consensus in the crypto market, based on the work of researcher Sergio Demian Lerner. Based on data from the Bitcoin blockchain, Lerner identified a pattern called Patoshi—a distinctive feature of the blocks mined in Bitcoin's early years.
He suggested that the pattern could have arisen due to Satoshi's possible use of specialized mining software. Based on this marker, the researcher calculated the number of bitcoins that could have been mined by Satoshi—about 1.1 million bitcoins or over $100 billion at the current rate (over $92,000 as of December 12).
Such a huge amount of bitcoins, Satoshi, like any other network participant at that time, could have accumulated over several years of work on an ordinary laptop. This was possible due to low competition among miners and the high rate of new coin emission in those years.
For comparison, by the end of April 2011, when Satoshi sent the letter to Andresen, over 6 million bitcoins had been mined. Up to 10,000 coins could be mined per day. At the current moment, the rate of bitcoin creation rarely exceeds 500 coins per day.
The network's hash rate has grown from 0.1 Th/s (terahashes per second) at the end of April 2011 to over 1 billion Th/s at the beginning of December, which is a growth in power of more than 10 billion times—this figure reflects the growth of the Bitcoin network's computational power, according to Blockchain.com. As for the price, in 2011 Bitcoin was valued at tens of cents.
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