Despite Bitcoin’s open-source nature, we still know very little about its creator. Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used by the person or people that introduced Bitcoin through writing the Bitcoin whitepaper.

WHO IS SATOSHI NAKAMOTO?

Who is the mysterious creator behind Bitcoin? We don’t know much more than the name, Satoshi Nakamoto, which first appeared on the paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash” which was distributed by a cryptography mailing list in 2008. While there are a few suspects, Nakamoto’s identity still remains a mystery.

What we do know of Satoshi comes from his forum posts on the P2P Foundation and the code that makes up the Bitcoin network. This line of text was embedded in the Bitcoin genesis block, mined on January 3rd, 2009:

This line references a Times of London article that discussed an additional bailout for the banks after the 2008 financial crisis.

Satoshi’s thoughts on the banking system give us some clues as to why he built a monetary alternative that is designed to be both decentralized and trustless.

Hal Finney

The very first Bitcoin transaction took place between Satoshi and Hal Finney, a cypherpunk and programmer. While some suspect that Hal Finney may be the person behind the Satoshi pseudonym, this was never proven. After a five year battle with ALS, Hal Finney sadly passed away in 2014.

In 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto handed over control of Bitcoin to the community members and stopped working on it himself. Until that point, all of Bitcoin’s code had been written by Nakamoto.

What were the problems that Bitcoin solved which led to the demise of many digital cash projects? Check out our next lesson to find out!