Emerson Phillips
Satoshi Nakamoto is presumed to be a pseudonym, and it’s presumed to be the name used by the person or persons who developed Bitcoin. Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database – the engine that drives cryptocurrency.
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Nakamoto developed Bitcoin during the financial crisis of 2008 and released it in 2009. Then in April 2011, he disappeared.
His last known correpondence was an email to his colleagues to tell them he was moving on to other projects. He has not been seen or heard from since.
A little more than a month after Nakamoto’s email – in June 2011 – Bitcoin co-developer Gavin Andresen met with the CIA to give a presentation about Bitcoin.
He was invited to speak, so Bitcoin was already on the CIA’s radar.
Andresen saw the presentation as an ideal opportunity to discuss how Bitcoin could improve the world through a better currency, more competition, removing barriers to international payments, and giving people more autonomy in their financial dealings.
At the same time, Andresen expressed some apprehension about visiting. He was worried the CIA would influence Bitcoin developers to do something they don’t want to. But he considered it a chance to break down misconceptions about the project.
Pete Rizzo, editor of Bitcoin Magazine, recently made a tenuous link between Andresen’s 2011 visit to the CIA and the disappearance of Nakamoto.
Digital cryptography completely removes third parties from the financial transaction process. No banks, no government involvement in any way, and there’s no way of tracking transactions because they’re done exclusively between sender and recipient. Therein lies the beauty of cryptocurrency, proponents believe.
“I don’t think any of those goals are incompatible with the goals of the government,” Andresen optimistically, and perhaps naively, said.
Nakamoto’s identity and whereabouts is the greatest mystery in cryptocurrency. And despite the multitude of private internet sleuths who have carefully and relentlessly examined the evidence, the world is no closer to establishing who Nakamoto is.
Nakamoto’s supposed 1 million Bitcoin holdings would put him/her/them on the Forbes top-20 rich list. But to this day, his wallets remain untouched. Some consider this evidence that Nakamoto had philanthropic intentions – that he planned to to give Bitcoin to the world as a way to escape banking tyranny.
