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For the past year Nathaniel Popper has been working on a book about the history of Bitcoin and writes in the NYT that it is hard to avoid being drawn in by the almost mystical riddle of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity. Popper has his own candidate for founder of Bitcoin, a reclusive American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo. Szabo worked in a loosely organized group of digital privacy activists who over decades laid the foundation for Bitcoin and created many parts that later went into the virtual currency. Bitcoin was not a bolt out of the blue, as is sometimes assumed, but was instead built on the ideas of multiple people over several decades. Several experiments in digital cash circulated on the Cypherpunk lists in the 1990s. Adam Back, a British researcher, created an algorithm called hashcash that later became a central component of Bitcoin. Another, called b money, was designed by an intensely private computer engineer named Wei Dai.
It may be impossible to prove Satoshi’s identity until the person or people behind Bitcoin’s curtain decide to come forward and prove ownership of Satoshi’s old electronic accounts and at this point, the creator’s identity is no longer important to Bitcoin’s future. Since Satoshi stopped contributing to the project in 2011, most of the open-source code has been rewritten by a group of programmers whose identities are known. According to Popper whoever it is, the real Satoshi Nakamoto has many good reasons for wanting to stay anonymous. Perhaps the most obvious is potential danger. Satoshi Nakamoto most likely collected nearly a million Bitcoins during the system’s first year. Given that each Bitcoin is now worth about $240, the stash could be worth more than $200 million. That could make Satoshi a target. "With his modest clothes and unassuming manner, Mr. Szabo could be the kind of person who could have a fortune and not spend any of it," concludes Popper, "or even throw away the keys to the bank."
[ Editor's note: The "b money" link does not appear to work. ]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 18 2015, @12:50PM
By analogy I'm not sure how he intends to profit, unless its some kind of weird elaborate extortion plan.
Hey guys, did you know Viktoras Baranauskas designed the USA copper penny? Somehow I don't think I would hit the publishing jackpot with a book about that dude. I mean he was a nice sculptor and most people know him by his "americanized" new name, but its still pretty much "whatever".
My suspicion is someone with vested interests is bankrolling the "journalist" with the hope and prayer that once upon a time the inventor/author had said something nice about Marx or inhaled while smoking weed or anything felt politically incorrect by anyone. The advantage of turning America into a 1970s eastern block KGB surveillance society is every human being is somehow, in some weird irrelevant detail, an enemy of the state, because everything has been defined to be an enemy of the state except itself. So anything the leaders want, can be denounced during the two minutes hate, given enough info. And this situation of anonymous invention REALLY pisses off big brother, how do they denounce the author of BTC without knowing who that is?
So I hope the guy never finds him. Ever.
My gut suspicion is there isn't "a" inventor anyway. Beyond the algo discussion in the article, there might not be one author, just code passed around an anon remailer between a couple participants and next thing you know one of the guys gets it up and running and slaps it on github and we're off to the races.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @12:53PM
George Washington designed the US copper penny.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Monday May 18 2015, @01:17PM
This is how I see it: There has been some interest in identifying the author. It has even been discussed on national news.
From the article: "For the past year Nathaniel Popper has been working on a book about the history of Bitcoin and writes in the NYT that it is hard to avoid being drawn in by the almost mystical riddle of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity.
If he outs the bitcoin dev then he will national recognition, and face time to promote his book. If he truly cared about the purpose of bitcoin, anonymity, then he would respect that and leave the dev alone.