The question of who the real Satoshi Nakamoto is has been around since the beginning of blockchain. He is famous for producing the world’s first blockchain-Bitcoin. Seemingly out of nowhere he delivers this tech and three years later signs off with a message reading “I’ve moved on to other things”. He has not been acknowledged as working on the project since. Besides the mystery of simply identifying Nakamoto is his estimated worth of Bitcoin to the sum of over $60 billion dollars. This is a significant amount of the total supply (estimated around 5%).

There have been a few possible Satoshi suspects named over the years. Dorian Nakamoto was named by a reporter in 2014. The man shot down these claims quickly and Satoshi sent communication soon after claiming, “I am not Dorian Nakamoto”. Dorian was considered a strong candidate as he had a long career in engineering.

Another man, Craig Wright, announced himself that he was Nakamoto in 2016. The interesting thing about his claim is that a Senior Developer with Bitcoin (Andresen) spoke to validate this. This was met with a lot of scrutiny from the larger community and soon the claim faded.

The last suspect is Nick Szabo, a professional who helped immensely on the Bitcoin project. These claims came from many journalists trying to analyze communications and personality data on Szabo. Nick himself, has denied the claims and left the mystery continuing.

The mystery of who is really Satoshi Nakamoto may never be revealed and, in a way, this adds to the allure. Financially Satoshi holds enough Bitcoin to influence the market which makes people nervous. Perhaps one day we will move past the speculation driven obsession of blockchain and into the many applications based uses it can provide.

When that day comes, I hope we find out who the real Satoshi Nakamoto is.