Satoshi Nakamoto: The Unknown Inventor Of Bitcoin
The mysterious inventor of what is now the world’s most valuable digital currency is better imagined than described. After all, we know next to nothing about him.
Finding Satoshi Nakamoto
No one is exactly sure if he ever lived but his name and invention gave him away as an irked Japanese, and we would never know what he wanted, but we have found some clues pointing to one thing: the cold-blooded destruction of our economic and political ethos.
There is in the obscure personality of Satoshi Nakamoto a clue that generates a mixed feeling of anger and glee, one that is mostly felt by those who are his sympathisers. Also, this feeling is easily inspired in just about anyone who takes to perusing his whitepaper, the Bitcoin whitepaper, with all the devotion that it fully deserves.
Through the act of perusal, the reader is consequently exposed to the rabble-rousing spirit of a revolutionary that Satoshi was in part , and he is left to wonder why his genius is still grossly underrated by the world. But only an intentional perusal is strongly recommended to understand the workings of the inner mind of Satoshi and the trajectory of his invention.
Satoshi, if a man of such reputation ever existed, was light years ahead of his peers and his generation. Barring all scepticism, he is reckoned as the man that single-handedly rewrote the history of money in few yet powerful living lines, one of which is a vivid description of how a technology is capable of “allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party”.
What Do We Know?
Today, there are as many underlying questions about this man and his invention as there are many probable answers about his motive and inspiration. But the closest we’ve ever come to discovering the truth is that Satoshi was either a figma of our imagination or the alter ego of a rabble-rousing entity that preferred anonymity to legend-making.
We do know that Satoshi, a supposed larger-than-life-figure, has built a crypto empire of 300 million people today, and that Bitcoin, his main invention, is the precursor to the growing horde of cryptocurrencies dotting the crypto space and the constant explosion of ideas in the web3 space.
Besides, we do know that the innovations such as NFT, DAO, Defi, etc that are now leveraging blockchain technology within the nascent web3 digital space can be remotely credited to the brilliant mind of Satoshi Nakamoto, even though no one has reported to have known or met him.
Satoshi Nakamoto: One Claim, Too Many!
For an invention that holds a lot of potential for transforming the future of money, we are quite familiar with the premise that it is on course to change the world. However, the unknown identity of its central figure has led to claims and counter-claims.
In one of the several instances where an attempt has been made to hijack Satoshi’s identity the Australian computer scientist Craig Wright recently told the world that he was the real Satoshi Nakamoto. But rather than been hailed for such a brilliant invention he was booed by an angry audience who saw him as an opportunist and a pathological liar.
Craig’s claim was a fiercely debated topic within the crypto community in 2021 and what made it all the more remarkable was that it was an intriguing part of the civil action instituted against him in a Miami court by the executors of his partner’s estate who accused him of a rip-off.
What some have dubbed as the “Bitcoin Trial of The Century was actually about Craig, his claim and his defence, and it was more of how a significant part of the court’s ruling hinted that Craig could not have been Satoshi, a dramatic end that dealt a fatal blow to his rise to legendary height. Although the trial ended in a tarnished reputation for him, it is yet to put an end to the claims and counter-claims to the invention of Bitcoin.
Dominic Frisby in his book Bitcoin, the future of Money?’ argued with a characteristic candour that the famous computer engineer Nick Szabo could possibly have invented Bitcoin, citing a striking similarity between Satoshi’s and Nick’s hand-writings and a more persuasive similarity between the concepts of Nick’s Bit Get and Satoshi’s Bitcoin.
There was also a claim by a certain Satoshi Shane-O who made a revelation in a podcast about how he and some other people started Bitcoin. In what was titled ‘The Bitcoin origin” a clue is provided as to the possibility of declaring Satoshi as the identity or the pseudonym used by a group of people who chose to stay below the radar. This line of argument holds water for some owing to the fact that the pronoun ‘We ‘ is used throughout the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Conclusion
The most controversial attempt to bring the founder of Bitcoin into limelight remains that of the 2014 scandal of Mr. Dorian Satoshi, the retired American-Japanese engineer who later categorically denied being the real Satoshi Nakamoto after his answer to a question gave him away as Satoshi and a Libertarian. But one thing Dorian’s denial proved is that Satoshi Nakamota’s identity may never be known.
