Bitcoin Genesis God Disappears in the Cyber Universe Abandoning 60 Billion USD

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This article comes from the WeChat public account: Snow Leopard Finance, author: Liu Yimo, title image from: Visual China
The internet has no secrets, but Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto is an exception.
Even though experts, hackers, curious onlookers, and sinister individuals from all over the world have been searching for clues to “flesh out” Nakamoto, the invisible billionaire who holds 5% of the world’s Bitcoin worth $60 billion has never revealed his true identity. In fact, he has been missing for a whole 13 years.
On October 8th, HBO released the documentary “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” which hinted at the true identity of Nakamoto, suggesting that he may be one of the early Bitcoin developers, Peter Todd, in a manner similar to the movie “Infernal Affairs.” However, Todd firmly denied this claim, stating that such irresponsible speculation could put him in danger.
Until now, no one knows for sure who this mysterious billionaire is in real life, and his profession, age, and gender are all shrouded in mystery. People are still tirelessly trying to find him, even though it seems futile.
But the search for Nakamoto has become a fascinating collective obsession on the internet.
I. The Disappearance of the Creator
In December 2010, Nakamoto posted on a forum as usual, discussing a technical issue related to DoS. This was not unusual, as he had posted hundreds of times in those two years, collaborating with various developers to improve the Bitcoin code.
However, what was unusual was that Nakamoto disappeared after posting this message.
He sent an email to a developer five months later, saying that he had “moved on to other things,” and he never appeared again.
Since then, people have never given up on finding Nakamoto.
Nakamoto is the founder of cryptocurrency and is known as the “father of Bitcoin.” On January 3, 2009, he released the Bitcoin code that he had spent over a year writing.
Nakamoto planned to issue 21 million Bitcoins over a period of 20 years, controlled by the software code. Every 10 minutes, new Bitcoins would be minted through a mechanism similar to a lottery, and miners (people trying to obtain Bitcoins) would guess the correct answer through a process of trial and error to win Bitcoins.
Unlike sovereign currencies, Bitcoin has no physical form or national endorsement. It consists only of tens of thousands of lines of code and a less than 10-page “Bitcoin Whitepaper.”
During the two years that Nakamoto was active on the internet, Bitcoin was still relatively niche and did not receive widespread attention. However, after his disappearance in 2013, the price of Bitcoin skyrocketed, leading to a years-long blockchain frenzy.
Despite the constant criticism and claims that it is “worthless,” the price of Bitcoin has fluctuated and by 2024, it has risen to $60,000 per coin, undoubtedly becoming one of the highest-return assets for investment.
And Nakamoto holds 1.1 million Bitcoins, accounting for 5% of the total, worth over $60 billion at the current market price. This huge fortune has been floating on the internet since 2011, untouched.
Who exactly is Nakamoto? Why would he ignore such a massive wealth? This is one of the biggest mysteries of the internet age.
Nakamoto claimed to be a 36-year-old Japanese individual who, out of dissatisfaction with the monetary policies of sovereign nations following the 2008 financial crisis, wanted to create a currency free from the control of real-world monetary policies and bankers, which later became Bitcoin.
Economist Nouriel Roubini, who accurately predicted the 2008 financial crisis, is a well-known critic of cryptocurrency. He believes that if the internet collapses, all assets will be wiped out. But he speaks highly of Nakamoto personally, stating, “Nakamoto may be an idealist who really cares about how to save people who have been bullied excessively.”
But this idealist, in hundreds of posts over two years, never revealed any personal details and did not leave any valuable clues for searchers.
He used an untraceable email address and website and had never used the name “Satoshi Nakamoto” as an encoder before Bitcoin.
From 1997 to 2008, Adam Back, the inventor of Hashcash (a technology for implementing cryptocurrency), and a cryptographer, had some email correspondence with Nakamoto and was the first person to have contact with Nakamoto. However, he said that he was not even sure if “Satoshi Nakamoto” was truly Japanese or just a unique pseudonym. “It’s like a biblical story, nobody knows exactly what happened because it was so long ago.”
Nakamoto skillfully disappeared using nearly perfect anonymity.
“He thought of everything,” said Cullen Hoback, the director of “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery.”
II. Searching for Nakamoto
Nakamoto took great measures to protect his privacy, but it does not mean that the internet is helpless in this regard. It is like the Locard’s exchange principle in modern forensic science: every contact leaves a trace.
Computer experts study the code left by Nakamoto like linguists study language. Nakamoto chose the programming language C++, and they suspect that C++ was not the first programming language Nakamoto mastered, or that he was not originally a programmer.
Some people try to find clues from the natural language used by Nakamoto—English. He displayed the language proficiency of a native English speaker in his posts, using exclusively British English, and covering topics from the Austrian School of Economics to the history of the business market.
The most notable is a sentence Nakamoto inserted in the code when he mined the first 50 Bitcoins (also known as the Genesis Block) in 2009: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” Many people deduced from this that Nakamoto is actually European, as The Times only covers a few European countries.
Others have tried to deduce Nakamoto’s identity based on his posting time and frequency, believing that Nakamoto is a doctoral student who has summer and winter vacations and has a deep knowledge of cryptography, economics, and computers.
These convincing speculations seem to have greatly narrowed the search range—Joshua Davis, a reporter for The New Yorker, also thought so. He successively identified 23-year-old Michael Clear, a cryptography graduate student at Trinity College Dublin, and Vili Lehdonvirta, a Finnish virtual currency researcher, as Nakamoto, but only received awkward laughter and silence from them. His speculations did not gain widespread recognition.
After The New Yorker, the baton of searching for Nakamoto was passed to more media and people in the cryptocurrency industry. They followed the few available clues and made continuous guesses about Nakamoto’s true identity, as if walking on a pilgrimage.
In 2015, The New York Times identified cryptographer Nick Szabo as Nakamoto because his concept of “Bit Gold” closely matched Bitcoin, and both quoted a famous quote from economist Carl Menger.
In 2016, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright claimed to be Nakamoto and received recognition from media such as The Economist and BBC. However, a UK court ultimately ruled that he was not Nakamoto and sentenced him for false statements and forgery.
American writer Evan Hash believes that all discussions about Nakamoto’s identity are misleading and even “thoroughly stupid and unethical.” In an article in 2021, he argued that the late cryptographer Len Sassaman was Nakamoto. Sassaman was known for developing privacy tools such as PGP and Mixmaster and was also a member of a group called “Cypherpunk” along with Nakamoto.
With more and more speculative guesses, most of which cannot be confirmed or refuted.
Before the release of “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” the decentralized prediction platform Polymarket on Ethereum launched a vote: “Who will HBO’s documentary identify as Nakamoto?” The day before the documentary was released, Nick Szabo ranked first, with the index reflecting the betting trend exceeding 32%, and Elon Musk was also on the list. As of October 8th, the betting amount exceeded $44 million.
Now the answer is revealed. The director of the documentary, Cullen Hoback, noticed that under one of Nakamoto’s posts on the Bitcoin forum in 2010, there was a reply from Todd, and he believed that Nakamoto had forgotten to switch accounts and accidentally replied with his real identity. Another reason is that Todd remembered this detail very clearly when interviewed for the documentary, even though it was more than a decade ago.
But Todd himself firmly denied this speculation.
The tendency to seek the truth in the post-truth era is becoming increasingly apparent—who Nakamoto is is not important, what is important is who people believe Nakamoto is.
III. “We Are All Nakamoto”
As a challenger to sovereign currencies and financial order, Nakamoto’s disappearance may be a smart choice.
One characteristic of Bitcoin is that it favors privacy compared to sovereign currencies. Although Nakamoto knew that Bitcoin could not achieve complete anonymity and surveillance resistance, it was already a utopia for economic libertarians compared to sovereign currencies.
However, those who attempt to challenge the existing sovereign currency order often invite lawsuits.
In 1998, an American citizen privately minted silver and gold coins and called his currency Liberty Dollar. In 2011, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison and fined $500,000.
Internet-issued currencies are not above the law either. E-Gold was a digital gold currency issued by a private company in the United States, with over 5 million accounts at its peak. In 2007, the U.S. government accused E-Gold of money laundering and other crimes because users did not have to provide complete identification when using it. Shortly after the founder was arrested, the E-Gold project was shut down.
Coming forward as the founder of Bitcoin is not beneficial for Nakamoto; on the contrary, it carries high risks.
Moreover, “a person is innocent until proven guilty,” and owning $60 billion itself can be a huge security risk. Director Hoback believes that Nakamoto understands that once Bitcoin succeeds, such as being accepted by central banks, and he holds a significant share (about 5%), he will definitely be targeted.
All the people who have been suspected of being Nakamoto have avoided this speculation, without exception. It is as if Nakamoto’s identity is something ominous.
“If I were Nakamoto, I would destroy the ability to prove my identity as Nakamoto, so that I would never be tempted to come forward,” Todd said. On social media, there are numerous comments that do not agree with the documentary’s judgment and express a desire to protect Nakamoto, saying, “We are all Satoshi.”
Technically, the truth of Nakamoto’s identity may never be conclusively determined.
One important reason why none of the mainstream speculations have been confirmed is that since 2011, there has been no message that is widely believed to be signed with Nakamoto’s private PGP key (an encryption scheme). This is the least controversial method of self-verification. Jerry Brito, the executive director of the Bitcoin think tank Coin Center, further believes that “even if someone successfully signs with Nakamoto’s PGP key, it does not completely prove that they are Nakamoto.”
Another reason why Nakamoto’s identity is difficult to determine is that Nakamoto may have already passed away and can no longer come forward or trade Bitcoins. In the speculations about Nakamoto’s identity, many individuals are deceased, such as Sassaman, who committed suicide in 2011, and cryptographer Hal Finney, who passed away in 2014. If Nakamoto is among these individuals, not only will no one claim the identity, but the over $60 billion fortune will continue to float on the internet.
When the true Nakamoto cannot prove himself, anyone could be Nakamoto.
Today, the price of one Bitcoin has exceeded $60,000, but it has never become electronic cash and has not been widely accepted as a means of payment in most parts of the world. Nakamoto’s original intention has not yet been realized.
If he is still alive, faced with repeated speculations, he may empathize with Qian Zhongshu, a Chinese writer who is often visited by readers, saying, “As long as the book is good, why must we see the chicken that lays the eggs?”
This article comes from the WeChat public account: Snow Leopard Finance, author: Liu Yimo
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