Bitcoin's Unknown Founder

A brief history on bitcoin.

August 18, 2008 the domain name Bitcoin.org is registered, preceding the official launch of bitcoin by almost 5 months, followed by a publication of the bitcoin white paper explaining key concepts such as how bitcoin solves the critical problem of double spending and privacy wherein one party can spend their money on two separate occasions thus rendering the currency untrustworthy.

On the 3rd of January 2009, the first block (also named the “genesis block”) of a new protocol named “Bitcoin” utilizing technology the world has never seen the likes of before, is mined. This is where the world of cryptocurrencies begins its crusade to enact much needed change to the current financial establishments of the world.

In the following weeks & months, a boom of interest from an international group of enthusiasts hits the bitcoin project in an effort to test and verify that the entire protocol is validated and stable for a mass adoption. This included the initial release of the bitcoin wallet application users could install onto computers and store bitcoin, the first transaction that took place on the blockchain between Satoshi and Hal Finney, one of the developers that helped with developing bitcoin, and finally calculating the market price for bitcoin of $1USD for 1,309.03 BTC using the dollar amount of electricity needed to mine bitcoin.

From then on, more and more people began mining bitcoin which led to the creation of a market place for buyers and sellers to trade bitcoins, notably leading to the exchange of 10,000BTC for a pizza worth around $25. The mentions of bitcoin on various tech forums led to an increase in popularity and utilization of the bitcoin network.

Throughout the next 3-5 years, the bitcoin ecosystem goes through a mindboggling amount of events, some on the technical side that include developers battling hackers to patch previously unknown bugs and exploits that hackers discover, as well as creating new software that people can use to make mining bitcoin more profitable and accessible through the utilization of GPUs where previously mining bitcoin with CPUs was the norm. These advancements led to even more popularity and money flooding into bitcoin, creating huge price fluctuations and a drastic increase in the market cap of bitcoin going from $1 Million dollars to $1 Billion dollars on March 28th 2013.

With all the free flowing capital into the ecosystem, many shady websites began popping up such as the notorious Silk Road, causing the government to direct more attention toward bitcoin with the potential to end its entirety while the project was still small and lacked cohesion, however that was not the case. Along with the shady and downright illegal websites that cropped up came the adoption of a few legitimate companies such as Subway & Shopify which accepted BTC as payment for their services which provided some legitimacy towards the project which prompted TIME magazine to publish an article on bitcoin in its early stage of development.

Before the project had turned 5 years old, it was already evident by the amount of adoption of the public that bitcoin was something truly special, providing a decentralized financial system which gave people the option of opting out of their current financial institutions which were endowed with the power to control people’s money, and in turn had direct access and power to control them. No longer were people condemned to suffer at the hands of large government institutions, control was starting to be brought back into the hands of the people.

Just Who Exactly IS Satoshi Nakamoto?

One of the most anticipated questions people have in regards to Bitcoin is: “who actually created and owns bitcoin?” While this question can be seen by most people as a valid question following logical reasoning based on our current societal constructs, I want to take a different approach to the idea of needing to have a single entity exercising ownership of Bitcoin.

To understand Satoshi’s actions better, we must take a look at the way in which bitcoin was designed. It’s a fully decentralized system, allowing individuals to have sole ownership of their money, while being simple enough without much features (apart from the basics of hooking up miners to mine bitcoin and a wallet address to store bitcoins in as well as sending and receiving bitcoin to and from other users) to have the ability to run continuously without any intervention from third parties. The genius of Satoshi’s design can instantly be seen when we apply these same characteristics to virtually any other company or system in the world now, we would come to find that there aren’t very many which operate in a similar fashion.

Since the concept of a set-and-forget system is not predominantly found within our current structure in the business world, this is where the public have a preconceived notion that bitcoin would need to have someone leading the operations of bitcoin. I believe that Satoshi’s real identity has been concealed on purpose, to fit his own narrative in which there should be no one on top controlling something so important to society as money, and constructing bitcoin in that way would solidify bitcoins own identity well into the future after Satoshi’s death which is something humanity has only figured out how to do by appointing successor to a company to manage after the owners and CEOs have left.

A lack of knowledge about Satoshi’s identity is the ability to be decentralized at the highest degree, there is and never will be a sole operator of bitcoin because that is not how bitcoin was designed at the most fundamental level and because we already have centralized systems in place already, and so in spending efforts figuring out Satoshi’s identity, we would be trying to bring the bitcoin project back down to humanity where we could exist with it comfortably at the expense of having the world’s first ever decentralized currency located on the Internet where it can transcend time and live on indefinitely.

What Satoshi and the team of developers and cryptographers have created is the culmination of humanity’s technological advancement in the world. It will be something which will help lead humanity into the next step of our physical evolution, and to focus on the founding member’s identity is one of natural human curiosity along with the habits of the yesteryears wherein leaders were expected to be known in order to gain trust from the public.

Satoshi’s Million Bitcoin.

Apart from the little information we do know about bitcoin’s creator, we also know that Satoshi personally mined a total of 1,125,150 bitcoin at the beginning of the bitcoin launch to support the network before other miners logged on allowing Satoshi to gradually reduce his participation. Despite what others may claim, it isn’t certain that Satoshi is still in possession of all the coins mined by him. Since anonymity protects the owners of wallets to be discovered, the best we can do is assume that the addresses which mined the first blocks are Satoshi’s, which will leave a bitter taste to those who are still on the hunt for Satoshi’s identity.

Conclusion.

Despite the illusionary existence of Satoshi Nakamoto, a revolutionary technology has been granted to society and has already proved itself in many ways despite being such a young project when compared to other monetary systems, while at the same time being open for use by anyone with a computer and internet connection. New users looking to get into the Cryptocurrency ecosystem should be careful not to get lost in the minutia of it all and to focus on learning about the underlying technology that makes bitcoin the behemoth of a monetary transactional system it has become today and will continue to become. Who created bitcoin can most accurately be summed up as being a group of incredibly talented individuals looking to create a better future for humanity, and quite frankly they have achieved their goal plus a whole lot more.