If Bitcoin was folklore, Satoshi Nakamoto would be one of the heroic protagonists of this set of popular stories. This Japanese-influenced name is the pseudonym chosen by the creator of Bitcoin, a decentralized and open source cryptocurrency based on a peer-to-peer network, to hide its true identity.
However, the world of cryptocurrency and its millions of users couldn’t stay quiet. Still today, everybody keeps trying to know who Satoshi Nakamoto really is and names are always being discussed. Could it be the computer scientist Martti Malmi, from Finland? Some facts point to him, since he was the first person ever to make a Bitcoin transaction.
And, then, there’s also Michael Clear, a top computer science student at Trinity College, in Dublin. Feeling like the detectives we are, we can risk saying that a lot of proof point to him. But there’s also the United Kingdom-based group composed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry. All of them are computer scientists and responsible for a patent application similar to the original Bitcoin document. That is why it’s so difficult to decide who we believe Satoshi Nakamoto is… because there are a lot of plausible options and like we used to hear in a famous movie, “there can be only one”.
Curiosity might kill the cat, but it won’t kill the Bitcoiner, so we can keep looking for Satoshi’s true name. It’s like a medieval quest that seems to have no ending (or solution, as well…). To help some of the most interested Bitcoin lovers and curious people in general, we created this awesome infographic that gathers the nine most likely identities for Satoshi Nakamoto. We believe one of them has to be the “father of Bitcoin”, who disappeared in 2011 without leaving a trace behind that could lead us to his path and actions. But even if we never find out who Satoshi is, he has our gratitude forever!