Is this man Satoshi Nakamoto, the mastermind behind bitcoin?
Newsweek published a story Thursday that appears to shed light on the origin of “Satoshi Nakamoto,” the pseudonym for the person or group of people who created bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym, disappeared about three years ago after the controversial and often-misunderstood cryptocurrency got off the ground. Pseudonym-Nakamoto ran chat rooms where cryptographers worked on developing the code behind bitcoin, but then suddenly stopped participating. No one knew why, and the question of Nakamoto’s identity became one of the greatest sources of online conspiracy theories. Government agent, criminal, employee of a big tech company? All were in play.
So the potential revelation that he was just an incredibly smart, slightly odd, 64-year-old Japanese American train enthusiast from the suburbs of Los Angeles sent the bitcoin community in a tizzy. But even though the man that Newsweek found has a name, biography and libertarian values — “He would say, ‘Pretend the government agencies are coming after you.’ And I would hide in the closet,” his daughter recalled — that lines up almost perfectly with the pseudonym-Nakamoto’s online persona, it’s still unclear whether he is bitcoin’s “founder,” what that means, or if it really matters.
Newsweek says the Satoshi Nakamoto it tracked down is “the face behind bitcoin,” but perhaps he’s just “a face.” Quotes from human-Nakamoto indicate he played a role in bitcoin at some point, but the level of his involvement remains vague at best.
“I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it,” he told the magazine. “It’s been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection.”
(Nakamoto later denied any involvement in bitcoin, telling the Associated Press he first heard of the cryptocurrency three weeks ago after a reporter contacted his son.)
On the Internet, things that look like a duck and talk like a duck aren’t necessarily a duck. “Satoshi Nakamoto” could still be a pseudonym. As Jason Pontin, editor of the MIT Technology Review, points out, there could still be a group of developers who simply needed a name and lifted it from that very smart man who had helped them with a couple of questions.
One of the chief protests about this Nakamoto being the Nakamoto is that the writing done by pseudonym-Nakamoto doesn’t sound like the words of human-Nakamoto. Threads on Reddit and elsewhere point out that pseudonym-Nakamoto used elegant British English in online chats during the cryptocurrency’s development.
The human-Nakamoto doesn’t appear to have the same grasp of the language in his later writings. On top of that, pseudonym-Nakamoto posted during times that lined up with a working day in London — not California. So while human-Nakamoto could have been involved in the start of the project, there is still no additional evidence that he was the one typing on behalf of pseudonym-Nakamoto all those years. He could have passed that work on.
But all of this winds back to perhaps the most interesting question: Why care? Bitcoin is its own beast. The origins of Satoshi Nakamoto have made for fun fairy tales, but whether he invented it or not the cryptocurrency is off to the races.
The value of bitcoin didn’t shift noticeably on the news. The New York Times now calls it “a brand.” Governments and regulators are still going to ask all the same questions.
The one sticking point is that pseudonym-Nakamoto is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin (and human-Nakamoto should probably hire security guards). No one’s sure quite why it hasn’t been spent, but if pseudonym-Nakamoto were to cash out, it would probably cause bitcoin to fall in value, at least in the short term.
Another theory is that such a huge transaction could out his identity. Even though it is often characterized as a currency for those who wish to stay anonymous online, bitcoin does have anonymity issues — outside of being tracked down by reporters.