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31 October 2008 – 26 April 2011) is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation.

As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database. Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin until December 2010. Various people have been posited as the person or group of people behind his name. He used a Japanese name and gave his residence as Japan, but many have speculated that he is actually a British software and cryptography expert who worked on bitcoin in the United Kingdom. If Nakamoto is an individual person, then his bitcoin holdings make him one of the wealthiest people in the world.

Nakamoto said that the work of writing bitcoin's code began in the second quarter of 2007. On 31 October, Nakamoto published a white paper on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com describing a digital cryptocurrency, titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher who read bitcoin's code, said that Nakamoto was either a "team of people" or a "genius"; Laszlo Hanyecz, a developer who had emailed Nakamoto, had the feeling the code was too well-designed for one person; Andresen has said of Nakamoto's code: "He was a brilliant coder, but it was quirky."

In 2024, the film Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery devotes attention to Back as a Satoshi Nakamoto candidate. It also highlights Back's move to Malta, his edits to Wikipedia's Bitcoin article that restored its Satoshi Nakamoto section and listed other suspects but not himself, and his appearance on the Bitcointalk forum on 17 April 2013, the same day the size of Nakamoto holdings first became public.

His home in Temple City, California, was also a few blocks from a programmer named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, according to Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg.

In a high-profile March 2014 article in Newsweek, journalist Leah McGrath Goodman doxed Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese-American man living in California, whose birth name is Satoshi Nakamoto, as the Nakamoto in question. Later that day, the pseudonymous Nakamoto's P2P Foundation account posted its first message in five years: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto." In a subsequent interview, Nakamoto denied all connection to bitcoin, saying he had never heard of it before and that he had misinterpreted Goodman's question as about his previous work for military contractors, much of which was classified.

In May 2009, he wrote a blogpost about bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto. In a May 2011 article, Szabo said of bitcoin's creator: "Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea (or in Dai's case his related idea) enough to pursue it to any significant extent until Nakamoto (assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai)." Szabo denied being Satoshi, and stated his official opinion on Satoshi and bitcoin in a May 2011 article.

The same day, Gizmodo published a story with evidence supposedly obtained by a hacker who broke into Wright's email accounts, claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto was a joint pseudonym for Wright and computer forensics analyst Dave Kleiman, who died in 2013. Wright has said that he chose the name "Nakamoto" in honour of Japanese philosopher Tominaga Nakamoto, whom Wright learned about from his Japanese martial arts instructor, and "Satoshi" after the Pokémon character Satoshi, because his name was anglicized as "Ash", and thus "Satoshi" represents the current financial system that must be burned into ash to make way for cryptocurrency. Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period 2008 to 2011.

Peter Todd – In 2024, an HBO documentary directed by Cullen Hoback titled Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery named former bitcoin developer Peter Todd as allegedly being Satoshi Nakamoto.

Quick Facts

• In a high-profile March 2014 article in Newsweek, journalist Leah McGrath Goodman doxed Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese-American man living in California, whose birth name is Satoshi Nakamoto, as the Nakamoto in question.
• If Nakamoto is an individual person, then his bitcoin holdings make him one of the wealthiest people in the world.
• Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin until December 2010.
• He used a Japanese name and gave his residence as Japan, but many have speculated that he is actually a British software and cryptography expert who worked on bitcoin in the United Kingdom.
• Peter Todd – In 2024, an HBO documentary directed by Cullen Hoback titled Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery named former bitcoin developer Peter Todd as allegedly being Satoshi Nakamoto.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Satoshi Nakamoto". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.