authors note on Satoshi Nakamoto: I’m going to write “he” or “him” from time to time; but if satoshi nakamoto is a single person, he/she could be a male or a female.

His/her identity and nationality are unknown.  He is entirely unknown outside of Bitcoin as far as anyone can tell, and his (never used) PGP key was created just months prior to the date of the genesis block. He seems to be very familiar with the cryptography mailing list, but there are no non-Bitcoin posts from him on it. He has used an email address from an anonymous mail hosting service (vistomail) as well as one from a free webmail account (gmx.com) and sends mail when connected via Tor. Some have speculated that his entire identity was created in advance in order to protect himself or the network. Perhaps he chose the name Satoshi because it can mean “wisdom” or “reason” and Nakamoto can mean “Central source”.

Ultimately the design of Bitcoin and its use of cryptographic proof and fully open implementation is one that makes its creator, in a sense, irrelevant and only of interest for historical reasons.

For decades since at least the early 1980s, cryptographers and cypherpunks researched ways to build internet-native monies that go around the banking system. Many early implementations were centralized, and thus either failed to accrue a network effect and stagnated into bankruptcy or were actively shut down by the government.

On November 1, 2008, a computer programmer going by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto sent an email to a cryptography mailing list to announce that he had produced a “new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.” He copied the abstract of the paper explaining the design, and a link to it online.  

January 2009, Nakamoto released the first version of the Bitcoin software client, participating with others on the project via mailing list.  Nakamoto worked with people on the open-source team but took care never to reveal anything personal about herself/himself /themselves.

In October 2009, an Internet exchange sold 5,050 bitcoins for $5.02, at a price of $1 for 1,006 bitcoins, to register the first purchase of a bitcoin with money. The price was calculated by measuring the value of the electricity needed to produce a bitcoin. In economic terms, this seminal moment was arguably the most significant in Bitcoin’s life. Bitcoin had become a market good with a price, indicating that someone somewhere had developed a positive valuation for it.

On May 22, 2010, someone paid 10,000 bitcoins to buy two pizza pies worth $25, representing the first time that bitcoin was used as a medium of exchange. The token only needed seven months to transition from being a market good to being a medium of exchange. 

April 26, 2011 (my 26th birthday and the day before alabama tornado outbreak), the last day anyone heard from Nakamoto, he/she/they said its time to  “move on to other things.”

Some interesting quotes from Nakamoto messages:

“Yes, [we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography,] but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.”

“Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own”

“It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though”