Satoshi Nakamoto must be the most elusive billionaire in the world. He created the world's largest cryptocurrency, bitcoin, in 2009, and his net worth is more than $7 billion. But, even after nine long years, nobody really know who he is. And, that makes it one of the most compelling stories in the tech world.
A series of misidentifications of his identity happened over the years. The latest speculated 'Nakamoto' was billionaire Elon Musk, after the revelation of a former intern in his technology corporation—SpaceX. But, Musk debunked that rumour saying that neither he is the 'creator' nor he could remember where he kept his cryptocurrency. So the mystery still remains. But, the search would continue.
Nakamoto took one of the the hardest route to make money—to invent it. On January 3, 2009, a white paper was released and distributed to the cryptography mailing list with the author name “Satoshi Nakamoto”. Thus was created bitcoin—the result of his coding for more than a year, ranging 31,000 lines of code.
Satoshi means “wisdom” or “reason”, and Nakamota means “central source”. Initially Nakamoto was believed to be a 36-year-old person from Japan. But, later, there were speculations that the name “Satoshi Nakamoto” is just a pseudonym and it is possible that “he” could be a “she” or “they”. Some even suggested (jokingly) that it could actually be a group of four technology companies where “sa” stands for Samsung, “toshi” for Toshiba, “naka” for Nakamichi and “moto” for Motorola.
He never communicated with any of the bitcoin users over phone or in person. He used either emails or forums to express himself. In 2011, as the bitcoin was gaining more penetration, he vanished. His emails and forum posts also went to silence. In the last known communication of him, he told a bitcoin developer that he had “moved on to other things.”
In 2014, Newsweek misidentified a 64-year-old Japanese American named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto as the one behind bitcoin. Dorian denied this and the story has been deemed inaccurate. In 2015, Wired and Gizmodo published articles contenting that an Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto based on the anonymously sourced documents provided to them. Wright confirmed the claim, too. But he failed to provide sufficient evidences to support his claims.
A group named CIA Project's theory claims that the cryptocurrency is the creation of CIA. Their theory is based on the fact that “Satoshi Nakamoto” can roughly be translated as “Central Intelligence” in Japanese. But, their theory is considered not more than another conspiracy theory.
Two kinds of evidences would verify the identity of the real creator: One, a digitally encrypted signature originating from the private keys known to belong to Nakamoto; Second, the real creator would be able to describe in detail the work he did before the launch of bitcoin. But, until now, nobody has been able to provide the sufficient evidences. And, so, the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto still remains in shadow of mystery.
