Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the
unknown person or persons who designed bitcoin and created its original
reference implementation. As part of the implementation, they also devised the
first blockchain database. In the process they were the first to solve the
double-spending problem for digital currency. They were active in the
development of bitcoin up until December 2010.
Nakamoto has claimed to be a man living in
Japan, born on 5 April 1975. However, speculation about the true identity of
Nakamoto has mostly focused on a number of cryptography and computer science
experts of non-Japanese descent, living in the United States and Europe.
As of 24 May 2017, Nakamoto is believed to own
up to roughly one million bitcoins, with a value estimated at approximately $4
billion USD as of September 2017.
- Development of bitcoin:
In October 2008, Nakamoto published a paper on The Cryptography Mailing list at
metzdowd.com describing the bitcoin digital currency. It was titled Bitcoin: A
Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. In January 2009, Nakamoto released the
first bitcoin software that launched the network and the first units of the
bitcoin cryptocurrency, called bitcoins. Satoshi Nakamoto released the Version
0.1 of Bitcoin software on Sourceforge on 9 January 2009.
Nakamoto claimed that work on the writing of
the code began in 2007. The inventor of bitcoin knew that due to its nature the
core design would have to be able to support a broad range of transaction types.
The implemented solution enabled specialised codes and data fields from the
start through the use of a predicative script.
Nakamoto created a website with the domain name "bitcoin.org" and continued to collaborate with other developers on the bitcoin
software until mid-2010. Around this time, he handed over control of the source
code repository and network alert key to Gavin Andresen, transferred several
related domains to various prominent members of the bitcoin community, and
stopped his involvement in the project. Until shortly before his absence and
handover, Nakamoto made all modifications to the source code himself.
The inventor left a text message in the first
mined block which reads 'The Times 3 January 2009 Chancellor on brink of second
bailout for banks'. The text refers to a headline in The Times published on 3
January 2009. It is a strong indication that the first block was mined no
earlier than this date. The genesis block has a timestamp of 18:15:05 GMT on 3
January 2009. This block is unlike all other blocks in that it doesn't have a
previous block to reference. This required the use of custom code to mine it.
Timestamps for subsequent blocks indicate that Nakamoto did not try to mine all
the early blocks solely for himself.
As the sole, predominant early miner the
inventor was awarded bitcoin at genesis and for 10 days afterwards. Except for
test transactions these remain unspent since mid January 2009. The public
bitcoin transaction log shows that Nakamoto's known addresses contain roughly one
million bitcoin. As of 18 August 2017, this is worth over $4,053,500,000. Due
to the hardfork in which Bitcoin Cash was made, creating one Bitcoin Cash for
every bitcoin in circulation, he also owns roughly one million Bitcoin Cash,
worth about $675,510,000.
- Characteristics and identity:
Nakamoto did not disclose any personal
information when discussing technical matters. He provided some commentary on
banking and fractional-reserve banking. On his P2P Foundation profile as of
2012, Nakamoto claimed to be a 37-year-old male who lived in Japan, but some
speculated he was unlikely to be Japanese due to his use of perfect English and
his bitcoin software not being documented or labelled in Japanese.
Occasional British English spelling and
terminology (such as the phrase "bloody hard") in both source code
comments and forum postings led to speculation that Nakamoto, or at least one
individual in the consortium claiming to be him, was of Commonwealth origin.
Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and active
community member, graphed the time stamps for each of Nakamoto's bitcoin forum
posts (more than 500); the resulting chart showed a steep decline to almost no
posts between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Because this
pattern held true even on Saturdays and Sundays, it suggested that Nakamoto was
asleep at this time. If Nakamoto is a single individual with conventional
sleeping habits, it suggests he resided in a region using the UTC−05:00 or
UTC−06:00 time offset. This includes the parts of North America that fall
within the Eastern Time Zone and Central Time Zone, as well as parts of Central
America, the Caribbean and South America.
Satoshi’s initial email to Dai is dated 22
August 2008; the metadata for this PDF (pdftk bitcoin.pdf dump_data) yields as
the CreationDate the value 20081003134958-07'00' - this implies 3 October 2008
or a bit over a month later, which is consistent with the local date mentioned
in the Cypherpunk mailing list email. This is an earlier draft than the final
draft on bitcoin.org, which is dated 20090324113315-06'00' or 24 March 2009;
the timezone differs: -7 vs -6.
Gavin Andresen has said of Nakamoto's code:
"He was a brilliant coder, but it was quirky".
No comments:
Post a Comment