Everyone knows Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin, and yet no one knows the true identity of the personor personsbehind the name.

Instead, were reduced to guesswork. As youd expect, a few potential candidates top the list. Heres our take on the situation.

Nick Szabo is many peoples most likely contender to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

The most commonly cited piece of evidence in the case for Nick Szabo is his work on Bit Gold. Designed in 1998, Szabos idea is credited with laying the groundwork for Bitcoin.

Bit Gold was a decentralized digital currency. Like Bitcoin, it relied on computer power to solve cryptographic puzzles. The answer would then form part of the question of the next puzzle, thus removing the danger of double spending. The currency was never implemented.

I was trying to mimic as closely as possible in cyberspace the security and trust characteristics of gold, and chief among those is that it doesnt depend on a trusted central authority.

The big clue came in spring 2008. Szabo posted a message on his personal blog in which he rekindled the idea of Bit Gold and put out an open plea for people to help him build it.

[Bit Gold] would greatly benefit from a demonstration [in] an experimental market . . . Anybody want to help me code one up?

The post initially went live on 17 May. Szabo later changed the date on his own site to show December, but you can still see the original on archive.org.

Bitcoins whitepaper was published on 31 October, and Nakamoto mined the genesis block on 3 January 2009.

It is also known that Szabo was interested in using pseudonyms as long ago as October 1993. You can still read an old message thread on cypherpunks.venona.com, in which he says:

Ive had several years to establish a net.reputation for Nick Szabo, and it might take a long time for any of my pseudonyms to catch up.

Szabo was born and raised California and graduated from the University of Washington. It would be fair to assume, therefore, that he would use American English spellings and phrases in his work.

In practice, there are numerous examples of British Englishboth in the original whitepaper and in Bitcoins code.

In the whitepaper, -our (for example, favourite) spellings are common. Theres also references to maths instead of math and flat instead of apartment. In the code itself (and in forum postings on Bitcointalk.org, Nakamoto uses the British colloquialism bloody hard on several occasions.

Finallyin what will become a reoccurring themeSzabo himself has repeatedly denied any suggestion that is Nakamoto.

The second candidate on our list is Hal Finney. Finney sadly passed away from ALS 2014.

Finney received the first ever Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto.

Some people have speculated that Nakamoto was a secondary account that Finney used to distance himself from his creation. He was also the first person other than Nakamoto to file bug reports and exchanged numerous emails with Szabo.

In more recent times, handwriting studies that compared Finneys work and that of the purported Nakamoto have shown considerable correlation.

But perhaps the most compelling evidence of all is the presence of a man named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto who lived just blocks from Finneys residence.

Around the time of Bitcoins launch (and remember, in the midst of the fallout from the 2008 financial crash), Dorian Nakamotos home was being foreclosed by a bank. It seems highly possible that Nakamotos name provided Finney with the inspiration for the name of the symbolic anti-establishment figurehead of the coin.

When asked, Dorian Nakamoto denied all knowledge of Bitcoin:

I have nothing to do with Bitcoin. I never worked for the company, I dont know any people there, I never had a contract there or anything like that. I wasnt even aware of the product.

Prior to his death, Finney said in a blog post that he was still unsure of Nakamotos true identity.

I thought I was dealing with a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere. Ive had the good fortune to know many brilliant people over the course of my life, so I recognize the signs.

The British question also raises its head again. Hal Finney was born in California and studied at the California Institute of Technology. It is unlikely he would use British-isms in his day-to-day life.

A couple of other peoples names pop up occasionally, but the cases are not as compelling.

In December 2015, both Gizmodo and Wired published independent investigations that claimed Australian Craig Wright was the creator of Bitcoin.

Wright immediately confessed and appeared to provide cryptographic proof of the claims. A closer analysis of the claims, however, raised significant question marks.

Its now widely accepted that Wrights confession was an elaborate hoax.

The final candidate is Wei Dai. Dai had been part of several crypto projects before Bitcoin, including b-moneyan anonymous, distributed electronic cash system that was referenced in the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Dai has also been name-dropped by both Szabo and Finney during interviews. In a post on his own website, Szabo said the following:

Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea (or in Dais case his related idea) enough to pursue it to any significant extent until Nakamoto.

Once again, Dai has denied all the speculation. Heres what he said in a post on lesswrong.com:

My understanding is that the creator of Bitcoin, who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, didnt even read my article before reinventing the idea himself. He learned about it afterward and credited me in his paper. So, my connection with the project is quite limited.

Okay, so what do the rest of the BlocksDecoded team think? Lets ask them.

I think its Hal Finney, or hes at least heavily involved with the group that identifies as Nakamoto. The fact that his handwriting is so similar (and its been compared in true Unabomber style) is quite compelling.

I think its a combination of Szabo and Finney, and maybe others. There are just too many coincidences for it to be anyone else.

Any myself? I think it was a joint project between Finney and Szabo.

The British vernacular can be explained away with Szabos love of pseudonyms; a time zone analysis showed that Nakamoto made almost no posts on Bitcointalk.org made between 10 pm and 4 am in California, suggesting a presence on the U.S. west coast.

The name has surely come from Finney.

Who do you think is Satoshi Nakamoto? Was it Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, or a well-mannered Japanese man with bizarre sleeping patterns?!

Let us know in the comments below.

Originally posted here:

Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? The Top 4 Candidates Revealed ...