Where is Satoshi?

That’s the big question that spawned my novel Satoshi No No. So, where is he?

First, some background

Satoshi Nakamoto — widely assumed to be a pseudonym — appeared online in 2008 with the Bitcoin whitepaper. The whitepaper described, in nine pages of terse but precise English, a clever new way to build a digital currency using a distributed, peer-to-peer network without the need for any central authority to issue the money. He wrote an elegant, working prototype, and invited other programmers to help him enhance the system starting in 2009. Satoshi led its development into a solid worldwide cryptocurrency network before handing it over to a public group of open source developers.

As one of the first persons to mine and use bitcoin, Satoshi amassed an estimated collection of 1 million BTC. As of December 2021, that fortune would be worth $46 billion US. Most of the coins have never been spent.

At first, it wasn’t that strange for Satoshi to keep his real identity secret. But when he announced that he had “moved on to other things” from bitcoin in late 2010, the mystery deepened. Each passing year proved the resiliency of the bitcoin network and increased the value of bitcoin in relation to fiat currency like the US dollar. But Satoshi didn’t touch his coins. Aside from his stash of cryptocurrency he also possessed the private key to the “genesis block,” the first ever bitcoin transaction, in which he had transferred 10 coins to Hal Finney, an early collaborator on the software.

If he touched his fortune, would anyone know?

The public nature of the bitcoin blockchain means that any attempt to spend Satoshi’s coins will be instantly noticed around the world. Or, if he merely wanted to prove his identity, he could use the private key of the genesis block coins, or any of his other coins, to cryptographically sign a message to the public.

Various enthusiasts constantly watch for transactions involving early bitcoin blocks that might belong to Satoshi. Since bitcoin is currently used far more as a commodity and store of value than as a currency, the number of transactions worldwide is still relatively low; it is small enough that no transaction can really go unnoticed.

Clues to his (or her, or their) identity

While he went by the Japanese pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, his flawless English prose, tinged with UK idioms, suggested that he was not Japanese, or at least not a native Japanese speaker. His whitepaper and coding style suggested someone with a solid academic and professional background, not a teenage hacker. He didn’t say much about his political views; he seemed to lean libertarian or quasi-anarchistic, but that was a common conceit in hacker culture. Perhaps the most valuable clue was the fact that each post he made to public forums was timestamped, and based on those timestamps, he kept waking and sleeping hours consistent with someone living in US Eastern Time.

While Satoshi assumed the persona of a man in his forum posts and emails, he never appeared in public or released a photo of himself. So it’s possible that Satoshi is a woman, a non-binary person, or a group of people. Designing the bitcoin software and protocol was an amazing feat for a single person, but as a programmer myself, I know how productive one can be, given inspiration, time, and resources. For better or worse, programmers and cryptographers tend, statistically, to be men — and relatively reserved men, at that. Furthermore, it would be unlikely for a group of Satoshis to remain cohesively anonymous over 10+ years and abstain from touching that much money. So the simplest explanation — that Satoshi is indeed one man — appears most likely to be the correct one.

In the years since his disappearance, Satoshi had been dubiously unmasked several times. Journalists and enthusiasts identified a handful of early bitcoin collaborators as possible candidates, to the point that many complained that the public fascination with Satoshi and their need to continually deny being him had taken time away from useful work on the bitcoin ecosystem. In a bizarre coincidence, a Japanese American named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, who lived near some early bitcoin developers, was fingered by Newsweek magazine, but further investigation showed that he had nothing to do with it. And other flamboyant characters, such as Australia’s Craig Wright, had claimed to be Satoshi for their own purposes; but of course, without supplying proof, these claims were met with derision by the cryptocurrency community.

Clues to his motive

The note in the first bitcoin block referred to a Times of London story about a central banking financial crisis. So perhaps Satoshi was motivated by an altruistic desire to give the world an alternative to fiat currency and the irrational exuberance of markets in general. Based on his writings, Satoshi really did seem to want bitcoin to become a viable currency for everyday payments. There was no sense that he wanted to be any more disruptive than a typical tech startup founder. He was not a crypto-terrorist, revolutionary, or anything of the sort.

But the biggest clue to his motive may be that he has not yet sold any significant portion of his original coins. This suggests that either he’s independently wealthy and has no need of the billions he could get for them, or he’s still so committed to the Bitcoin project that he doesn’t want to do anything that could upset its stability. And that brings me to my final point:

My own best guess

It’s truly astounding to me that Satoshi’s coins have been left essentially untouched for over 10 years. Years ago, I thought it would make a great story if somebody stumbled on a discarded bitcoin digital wallet that held Satoshi’s original keys, explaining his absence from the blockchain.

Imagine you are Satoshi, a reclusive genius who invented this amazing thing, got rich, and then lost your password. Or maybe your hard drive crashed, and you had no backup. Or maybe your computer got lost in a move. Whatever. It’s all gone. You had moved on from the Bitcoin project in 2010, anyway, to more interesting things. But then, after a few more years, Bitcoin really takes off. Your coins are soon worth millions, and then billions! If you came forward now without your original keys, how could you prove you were the real Satoshi? Wouldn’t you only be inviting ridicule?

This was always something of a joke to me — how could anyone be so careless? But the years went on and nothing changed, and then I eventually wrote and published my novel, and still nothing changed, and I started to think it wasn’t so farfetched.

Another possibility is that at some point, Satoshi sold his stake in bitcoin to a buyer who wishes to remain anonymous. But the problem with this theory is that the nature of bitcoin means that one cannot simply hand over a wallet. The buyer could never know for certain that the original owner did not retain a copy of the private key. The only reliable way to sell a wallet is to properly transfer the bitcoin to a new wallet and publish the transaction on the blockchain for all to see. And this hasn’t yet happened.

The final, more somber possibility, is that Satoshi is dead. Perhaps he died without leaving an executor, and his data fell into the hands of a benignly ignorant bureaucratic process as his personal assets were disposed to the government and auctioned to an unsuspecting bidder who simply wiped the drives. Or perhaps he did have an executor or heir, but they didn’t fully understand the magnitude of what he had left behind.

One thing is certain: the more time passes without any clue to Satoshi’s whereabouts, the more dramatic it will be if he ever steps forward. But that same passage of time also makes it more and more likely that he, like the bitcoin in a wallet with a forgotten password — and like all of us, eventually — is gone.