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Satoshi Nakamoto and the Origins of Bitcoin –
Narratio in Nomine, Datis et Numeris
There is a Story is in the Name, Dates and Numbers
Jens Ducrée, School of Physics Sciences, Dublin City University, Ireland, email: jens.ducree@dcu.ie
Abstract
The mystery about the ingenious creator of Bitcoin concealing behind the pseudonym Satoshi
Nakamoto has been fascinating the global public for more than a decade. Suddenly jumping out of the
dark in 2008, this persona hurled the highly disruptive distributed ledger technology “blockchain” that
has added the missing native value layer to the internet. Purposely agnostic without advocating any
old or fielding new names, this paper first identifies the degrees of freedom Satoshi Nakamoto had
available in the design of Bitcoin, and in fabricating snippets of personal data.
By interweaving the substantial collection of previous and new circumstantial with direct evidence,
like relevant locations and happenings in history and at the time, a consistent skeleton of Satoshi
Nakamoto’s biography transpires. The results underpin that the iconic creator of Bitcoin most likely
encoded bits of information in his self-chosen alias, dates and blockchain parameters, which
particularly point to the numbers 21 and 42, and the numeral systems used in Bitcoin’s framework.
Moreover, a psychogram of a reclusive and capricious genius is drawn, which sheds new light on
Satoshi Nakamoto’s background, mindset, pastimes, and penchant for puns; this study may also
explain the motivation of his abrupt departure from the public, his continuing abstinence from
engaging with the Bitcoin community, and from reaping the fruits of his mindboggling wealth. From a
history of technology perspective, such an altruistic sacrifice for the benefit of his brainchild is entirely
unprecedented.
Introduction
The now notorious pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto [1] stands for the remarkable inventor of one of the
most ground-breaking innovations of the ongoing 21st century: the cryptocurrency [2] Bitcoin (tracker
symbol: BTC) with its underlying blockchain [3] concept; this disruptive technology has enabled the
“Web3” by equipping the internet with a native value layer. Yet, even up after more than a decade
after its launch in 2008/2009, only very little is known about this individual or group, who spent an
extraordinarily sophisticated efforts on hiding his/its true identity, biography, and whereabouts.
Satoshi Nakamoto was only interacting with the community for about two years between the second
half of 2008 and end of 2010, followed by a few emails in spring 2011 before completely vanishing in
April 2011. Afterwards, Satoshi Nakamoto appears to have surfaced with brief statements, one in an
attempt to stop a media-driven manhunt for a Japanese-American sharing his “name”, and to
intervene in a self-destructive civil war raging within the Bitcoin community; however, it has been
arguable whether these postings even originated from the elusive architect of Bitcoin.
Astonishingly, the mastermind of a banking revolution has (so far) never touched his rather
abundantly filled coffers of digital assets, which are estimated to be of the order of 1 million Bitcoin
(BTC), and which he is assumed to have been hoarded in 2009 as the dominant miner on the nascent
blockchain; assuming a trading pair of 30,000 US$ / BTC, these holdings roughly correspond to a
whopping 20 billion US$ at the time of writing, ranking him amongst the richest people on the planet.
Some pundits forecast a (volatile) growth towards 100,000 US$ / BTC, 500,000 US$ / BTC, and even 1
million US$ / BTC, which would lift him, possibly before the end of the decade, to the top of the Forbes
list of billionaires [4].
This is, to my best knowledge, the first time that the inventor of a “unicorn” technology that has
reached a total value on the range of 1 trillion US$ has stayed completely anonymous, and abstinent
from his fortune, fame and impact. This behavior starkly contrasting famous personalities like Bill
Gates [5], Steve Jobs [6], Elon Musk [7], Mark Zuckerberg [8], Jeff Bezos [9], or Jack Dorsey [10] in the
related IT/Web2.0 [11] space, or even other prominent blockchain pioneers like Vitalik Buterin [12,
13], Charles Hoskinson [14, 15], Gavin Wood [16, 17], Sam Bankman-Fried [18-20], Roger Ver [21], or
Changpeng Zhao (“CZ”) [22, 23].
Numerous initiatives aimed to unravel the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto [24-41]. There is a short list
of credible candidates [42-44] who are thought by the crypto community to have been capable of
assembling Bitcoin in 2008; all of them, if still alive, feverishly deny. A wider circle of people has been
more or less seriously “nominated” [33, 37, 38, 45-63], who would be severely contested by most
experts. Also, the entirety of these contenders has categorically dismissed their involvement; yet one
Australian-born candidate shot up in December 2015; he stubbornly insists having been the main
figure in orchestrating Bitcoin [30, 64-69], and even filed libel cases against those openly challenging
his inventorship [70, 71].
A slew of other names has been dropped over the years [7, 48, 56, 58, 72-88], without sustained
traction or even consensus. At the end, and despite countless searches, we still do not know the
person(s) behind the alias Satoshi Nakamoto; as a matter of fact, the crypto-community
overwhelmingly agrees that this mythical genesis story bears great benefit for Bitcoin and its offspring,
second and third-generation blockchains.
While having published in the field of blockchain in recent years [89-97], the author of this article was
neither pertaining to the cryptographer and cypherpunk scene during the birth of Bitcoin, nor is he
affiliated with, or intends to specifically promote any of the potential candidates. He only had the
opportunity to have conversations with select insiders, who tend to be very cagey and reclusive, asking
for anonymity in the context of this work. This constellation bears the benefit of a rather unbiased, as
much as possible evidence-oriented approach to create a Satoshi Nakamoto profile. As per the Latin
part in its title, the story presented here is mainly derived from the name, dates and numbers set by
Satoshi Nakamoto, and their connection to creation of the Bitcoin blockchain and its contemporary
historical embedding.
The author has therefore deliberately left out quoting names (that are not already circulating in the
public), and also purposely refrains here from unveiling Satoshi Nakamoto’s real name, as he obviously
chose to stay private, which ought to be respected. Still, for instance, from a history of science
perspective, and possibly for a sound risk analysis the future of Bitcoin and crypto, it is worth
elucidating Satoshi Nakamoto’s biography, personality, motivations, and concerns. The idea that this
game-changing person may (hopefully) still be among us, like a “guy next door”, is certainly
enthralling. (A celebrity with a similar quest for anonymity is known in the scene of contemporary
street art uses the pseudonym “Banksy” [98].)
In such endeavor, this article has spotted several peculiarities that concern the free parameters
Satoshi Nakamoto had, to a considerable extent, at his own discretion for defining his persona, and
for setting the characteristics of the Bitcoin blockchain. While virtually all of these bits might be
coincidental when challenged in isolation, it seems that a substantial portion of them can be
corroborated by multiple independent sources and trains of reasoning.
Hence, by systematically compiling a tier of facts, ranking, and interpreting such circumstantial
evidence [99], and relevant historical and contemporary events, it can be inferred that Satoshi
Nakamoto wanted to play “brain games” with his audience. All of these “encrypted” pieces of
information are undoubtedly not meant to disclose his formal identity; they rather reflect his penchant
for witty riddles, which is not uncommon for a genius, and reveal facets of his mindset when
conceiving, giving birth, nurturing, and weaning off his baby Bitcoin.
After quickly reviewing the period when Satoshi Nakamoto was actively involved in Bitcoin between
2007/2008 and 2010/2011, important fragments of his personality and biography are compiled from
various publicly available news outlets. Especially the choice of his pseudonym turns out to indicate a
fondness for hidden messages. The next section details the variable parameters Satoshi Nakamoto
had available in setting up Bitcoin; it turns out that he might have particularly wanted to point towards
the numbers 21 and 42, in combination with the binary system.
Following the popular crypto-slogan “Vires in Numeris”, the following section, for the first time, makes
a best effort to interpretate these cues from a background of math, alphanumeric systems, geometry,
symbolism, history, and sciences. Next, a context to relevant happenings in the world of media and
sports is compiled before sorting this collection of leads. Finally, the most substantial parts of this
assortment of novel circumstantial evidence are wrapped around a scaffold of other known
information to assemble a possible biography and psychogram of Satoshi Nakamoto, a potential
“person of the century”. Then an example of a person showing good overlap with the attributes arising
from this article is given. While this effort is, owing to the general paucity of hard facts, of speculative
nature, it is actually highly unlikely that the real Satoshi Nakamoto would not display good overlap
with the profile produced this way.
Quite fascinatingly, and despite the fact that Bitcoin was published and launched rather recently in
2008/2009, and still “lives” on the internet, the methodology for unravelling its origins tends to
resemble more the reconstruction of a long-lost ancient culture; this is unexpected in the age of
information where data does not seem to ever get lost, and has a digital trace. The problem is that
the search quasi exclusively relies on sterile digital, rather than analog artefacts carrying some telling
”dirt”.
The Appendix first gathers a ‘request for comment’ catalogue to Satoshi Nakamoto candidates,
referring to the various, multi-facetted incidents raised in this article; next, an extended range of
possibly relevant happenings in the context of Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin regarding history,
politics, economy, finance, society, art, science and sports during key years for Bitcoin is compiled.
The final section of the Appendix collects fun facts about the potential meanings of numbers
highlighted in this investigation.
Note that due to the striking rarity of material in the form of vigorously peer-reviewed papers that are
the best-practice in scientific publishing, the author decided to include (a selection of) the many
webpages and online articles that have been produced over time, entirely independently from this
work; these sources can, unfortunately, seldomly be properly validated, and may even be susceptible
to manipulation, e.g., by Satoshi Nakamoto himself, or an imposter and his promoters. Furthermore,
as the topic is of highly interdisciplinary nature, the reader is referred to a rather unusually
comprehensive repertoire of explanatory webpages, primarily to the English-language version of
Wikipedia [100].
It is fully understood that the resulting, large number of citations that are interspersed into the text
might slightly impair the reading experience; yet the author prefers to properly define topics;
furthermore, linking such an expansive base of information improves options for systematic data
mining for verifying and improving the story presented here. In a future update, hypertext, instead
numbered references, might further improve the reading experience. Unless specified otherwise, the
(European) date format DD/MM/YYYY is used throughout the text and references; note that specified
dates may vary by ±1 day, depending on the time zone applied.
The Birth and Infancy of Bitcoin
In July / August 2008, and thus just a few weeks prior to its launch, a “Satoshi Nakamoto” lunged “out
of nowhere” onto the cryptographer scene when ostensibly finishing up his now famous Bitcoin
whitepaper [101]; he used his email addresses from highly privacy-oriented email servers and found
a way to anonymously register the domain bitcoin.org [102, 103] on 18 August 2008. Around these
days, Satoshi Nakamoto contacted key stakeholders [104-107] about prior art and their proper citation
in the field of digital currencies [108-111], which he was, if not part of a clever ploy, not (fully) aware
of at that time.
The initial reception on this cryptographer forum in November 2008 was overwhelmingly skeptical;
only a handful of early adopters [43, 112-115] reacted during the first couple of weeks; even fewer
programmers joined Satoshi Nakamoto in developing Bitcoin [77, 116-118] in this embryonic period,
and often bowed out quite soon. On 03/01/2009, the Bitcoin blockchain was kicked off with the
Genesis block 0, [119, 120], which included the headline “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink
of second bailout for banks” [121] of the British newspaper “The Times” [122], followed by a (so far
not conclusively understood) hiatus of six days before publicly releasing Bitcoin v0.1 [123] and mining
block 1 [124] on 09/01/2009.
The father of Bitcoin is assumed to have been a dominant miner in the first year 2009 according to the
so-called “Patoshi patterns” [125, 126]. Moreover, Satoshi Nakamoto continued to actively participate
in the cryptography mailing list, until he increasingly handed over the responsibility starting in mid-
2010. On 13/12/2010 [127], i.e., after these roughly two years, Satoshi Nakamoto unexpectedly and
unglamorously disappeared from all online fora with a posting containing “… there is more to do …”,
and that he “… moved on to other projects ...” [128-130].
By then Satoshi Nakamoto had transferred the control over the Bitcoin project to Gavin Andresen [47].
From his follow-on email communication with select peers, it appears that Satoshi Nakamoto wanted
to mature his still nascent baby “Bitcoin” within its small developer community, and was strongly
opposed, and apparently even scared of enhanced public exposure; this manifested when Bitcoin was
eyed by Wikileaks [130-132] as a potential vehicle for bypassing its financial blockage in early 2011,
and when the CIA [133] called for an informative meeting on Bitcoin that eventually took place in mid-
2011.
On Sunday, 26 April 2011 [133-135], Andresen informed fellow coders: “Satoshi did suggest this
morning that I (we) should try to de-emphasize the whole ‘mysterious founder’ thing when talking
publicly about bitcoin.” After this day, Satoshi Nakamoto stopped replying, even to emails of his
“trustees”. Bitcoiners pondered sorrowfully why he had departed. But by then his epic invention had
become adolescent, living an independent life of its own. Part of Bitcoin’s long-term sustained success
is often attributed to Bitcoin’s conservative strategy of deploying rather well-established and
thoroughly field-tested, instead of highly advanced, but still experimental cryptographic methods.
A factor of Satoshi Nakamoto’s exit might have been that mailing lists are tough to cope with for the
faint hearted; for instance, rudeness, lack of respect and strong opinions without room for
compromise have led later to the notorious Bitcoin “civil war”, which drove out some early key
stakeholders [47, 136], who both directly conversed with Satoshi Nakamoto.
Gavin Andresen described Satoshi Nakamoto as “a brilliant coder, but it was quirky.” [137] Others
believed that Nakamoto might have been a group: a highly accomplished security researcher [138],
who competently scrutinized the Bitcoin code, stated that Nakamoto could either be a "team of
people", or must definitely have been a "genius"; a developer who had emailed Satoshi Nakamoto
[139, 140] had the feeling “the code was too well designed for one person”.
There were some later messages [141, 142] sent from Satoshi Nakamoto’s online email and forum
accounts, but their genuineness remains heavily disputed. Yet, it would be worth pondering why
potential hackers did not make even more use of their power to speak in the name of Satoshi
Nakamoto for the sake of their own interests, e.g., to unite or seriously damage the Bitcoin
community, or to manipulate cryptocurrency markets.
Strangely, the creator of Bitcoin chose not to include messages in the blocks he succeeded to mine,
such as the headline of “The Times” in the genesis block 0 [119, 120], or in transactions issued from
Bitcoin addresses attributed to him, a mechanism that is enabled by his blockchain’s intrinsic scripting
language. Most remarkably, Satoshi Nakamoto seems to have never moved any coins, at least not
from his about 1 million BTC he is firmly believed to have mined in 2009 [143] (but possibly from other
addresses that he generated afterwards).
Personality & Bio
Pseudonym
The first choice of the mastermind of Bitcoin was evidently in his “name”, which is broadly
acknowledged to represent an alias; otherwise, the tremendous accompanying measures to mask his
identity would not have made any sense at all. His given (male) name “Satoshi” [144], as well as his
last name “Nakamoto” [145], are quite common, predominantly in Japan; it could also represent a
member of an Asian-American minority. Obviously, Satoshi Nakamoto selected a rather generic name
and nationality, rather than just a fantasy, gender- and stateless online handle; this choice might
indicate his intent to tailor a message through this artificial character. Note that in the Japanese and
other Asian cultures, the order of the two names is reversed, i.e., he would be called Nakamoto
Satoshi, and his initials would stand as “NS”.
To the author’s best knowledge, at least the (full) name is not inspired by a renowned historic figure
or fictional character in the Japanese or global culture. The singular of the pseudonym implies a male
individual, not a team; the immense effort to coordinate and protect a cover of between multiple
conspirators now over more than a decade also suggests this hypothesis of a single actor. If Satoshi
Nakamoto was a moniker a group, the durability of their bullet-proof collusion pact must have been
fortified by a vigorously sanctioned agreement or self-commitment, e.g., to protect against the threat
of prosecution by a federal agency. Thus, for the sake of this paper, we consider Satoshi Nakamoto a
single male (he/his), even though it could also be part of a “red herring” strategy to mislead about
gender, or to conceal a party of contributors. Notably, to the author’s best knowledge, all candidates
pitched as Satoshi Nakamoto (so far) are men.
The pseudonym also leaves room an interesting aspect. There is some significant scope for its
translation from Japanese into English; “Satoshi” may be translated as intelligent history [146],
knowledge, or wisdom [147, 148]. The initial syllable “Naka–” of his last name can be rendered as
“being within”, “between or in the middle of something” [149]. The final part “-moto” constitutes a
common terminus of Japanese family names; “Nakamoto“ may stand for "the origin; the cause; the
foundation; the basis" [150]. As a faint hint, reversal (and minor deletion / insertion) yields
“Ottomakan”, possible hinting to the historic Ottoman Empire [151] (1299-1922), and thereby a
connection to modern Turkey (Republic of Türkiye) [55, 152].
In absence of reference to a known figure, and in the context of Bitcoin and ideological spirit, the
chosen pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto might thus reflect a self-description which may be construed
as “a genius who is highly focused on work to disrupt the foundations (of the established banking
system)”. The entire stage name may also be creatively understood as “central intelligence”.
Moreover, it is worth pointing out that in Chinese, Satoshi Nakamoto may be read as “the wise one of
Chinese currency” [153, 154]. It is indeed reported that three-letter agencies like the CIA [155], DIA
[156], NSA [157], or other entities pertaining to the United States Intelligence Community [158], the
FBI [159], or their international equivalents [160-166] and hybrids [167, 168], have, by the secretive
nature of their own service, the vital importance to military communication [169], or by eavesdropping
on their targets, a keen interest in cryptography, and are (nowadays) likely to be involved in
cryptocurrencies [170].
However, it is widely believed to be unlikely that such governmental institutions have directly
instigated Bitcoin [171], at least not as part of their remit as a public agency. Nevertheless, their former
or present renegade staff, or their external service providers, might have gained sufficient knowledge
of technologies and methods to pull off Bitcoin in a self-driven after-work or post-contract initiative.
This hypothesis was also advocated by insiders the author communicated with under the condition of
their anonymity.
Overall, given these semantics and their fit to a personality required to realize Bitcoin, the choice of
the stage name Satoshi Nakamoto does not seem to be pure coincidence; in fact, it made the author
curious about further revelations that he might have encoded. Just to mention that the Bitcoin and
crypto advocate Elon Musk [7], presumably as a good joke, considered Satoshi Nakamoto as an
acronym for large Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and US-owned companies / conglomerates SAmsung
[172], TOSHIba [173], NAKAmichi [174], and MOTOrola [175] – as a highly gifted individual, Musk
certainly enjoys spotting patterns.
Ideology
Cypherpunk Movement
From his very motivation to engage into the monster effort of creating Bitcoin, as well as from his
interactions with the community, it can be deferred that Satoshi Nakamoto was distinctively
contemptuous of the legacy financial system, as expressed by the citation in the genesis block, and
shared the ideologies [176] which were a signature of the cypherpunk [177, 178] movement:
libertarianism [179], crypto anarchism [178], and Austrian economics [180].
Mysterious “X”
A number of libertarian-minded statements were posted on 9 & 10 December 2002 by an entity “X”
under the topic “Virtual peer to peer banking” on the Usenet [181] groups alt.internet.p2p and
uk.finance [182]. Their discovery sparked fiery speculation on Reddit [183] and Bitcointalk [184]
whether these postings originated from the person later filing under the pseudonym “Satoshi”
Nakamoto” [25].
Indeed, the text bits [185-187] “idea of a future with virtual peer to peer banking”, “fixed total amount
of money”,” virtual coin”, “deflation would replace inflation”, “the “community can bypass the old
powers (countries and governments)”, “new p2p system”, ”current monetary systems were mainly
backed with gold”, “virtual peer to peer system could be other scarce resources, relatively easy to
exchange via internet”, “computer processing power, bandwidth and data storage”, “virtual
currency”, “replace the system operator by a secure peer to peer system”, “replace the underlying
currency with something else, or slowly uncouple the underlying currency” exhibit many attitudes,
objectives and features that entered Bitcoin a few years later in 2008/2009. Whether “X” was the
individual later masquerading as “Satoshi Nakamoto” could (so far) not be verified. The posts of “X”
were traced back [25] to IP addresses [188] in the Netherlands [189, 190], and thus some regional
cryptographers [50, 72].
Date of Birth
Satoshi Nakamoto entered a profile on his personal page at the P2P Foundation [191, 192]. Apart from
his nationality or residency in Japan, he provided 05 April 1975 as his date of birth. The real Satoshi
Nakamoto is unlikely to be born on this very day, as this would resemble publishing his passport
number. The reason is that there are 365 options in the year, and – say – 100 cryptographers who
could possibly have developed Bitcoin. So given that dates of birth are rather overt biodata which
commonly resides in several unsafe online databases, especially considering that federal agencies
possess a backdoor to public administration, it would most likely lead to only one match per year.
Other than the arrival of the creator of Bitcoin on the planet, there are not many associated
happenings that caught the attention of the global news on that very day [193], except that it was a
Saturday in 1975, possible referring to his chosen given name. Still, there was a sequence of potentially
relevant events in the two days prior to Satoshi Nakamoto’s birthday [194] (see also Appendix).
On 03 April 1975, the chess genius Bobby Fischer [195] very surprisingly declined to play in a chess
match against Anatoly Karpov in Manila, The Philippines, thereby turning down a chance to receive a
premium of more than USD 1.5 million. He thus became the first world chess champion to willingly
forfeit this most prestigious trophy. Bobby Fischer’s rather odd behavior shows amazing parallels to
Satoshi Nakamoto’s sudden withdrawal in 2010/2011, and his ongoing abstinence from reaping the
future of his 1-million BTC fortune. On 04 April 1975, Bill Gates [5] and Paul Allen
[196] founded “Micro-Soft“ [197], a sea-change moment for the modern age of information.
Age
This self-claimed birthday features two constituents. The year 1975 tethers him to the so-called
Generation X [198], and infers a “credible” age of 33 years around the time he was issuing the Bitcoin
whitepaper [101] and the Genesis block [119] in later 2008 / early 2009. A lot of great inventors were
at the prime of their creativity in the 30-50 age envelope [199], and that at this stage in life people
tend to have garnered sufficient personal life experiences and professional competences to form
strong opinions, and to execute on effective solutions.
Like Satoshi Nakamoto, also the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee (“TimBL”) [200] was 33
years old when he proposed an information management system in 1989 via the Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP) [201]. His invention seeded the World Wide Web (“WWW”, “Web1.0”) [202], the
technology that has most drastically changed lives of people, societies and economies forever, which
might have been on Satoshi Nakamoto’s agenda with Bitcoin as the “Internet of Value”.
Satoshi Nakamoto could have certainly shifted the (final one or two digits of) the year he claimed to
have been born, so maybe somewhere between 1960 and 1990, but probably not much farther.
Combining his assumed age and his gradual exodus from the Bitcoin community, it is unlikely that
Satoshi Nakamoto is mentally incapacitated, or has deceased in the meantime.
Year
The year 1975 [203] was marked by a few potentially related events (see also Appendix), such as the
Watergate scandal [204], the end phase of the Vietnam war [205], both shattering the US government
in Washington. Some less likely connections were that the Rockefeller Commission issued its report
on CIA abuses [206], the signing of the Helsinki Accords [207], which officially recognize Europe's
national borders and respect for human rights, the approval of the bailout of 6.9 billion total USD for
New York City [203], and the coining of the term “fractal” [208] by the Polish-born French-American
mathematician and polymath Benoit Mandelbrot [209].
Day in History
The situation is much different for the particular day in the past [210]. Blaise de Vigenère [211], a
French cryptographer, diplomat, translator and alchemist was born on April 05 in 1523. Kurt Cobain
[212], the enigmatic, anti-establishment artist, singer and angst-fueled songwriter of the American
grunge rock band Nirvana [213] from the Seattle music scene [214], an iconic figurehead of
Generation-X [198], committed suicide on 05 April 1994.
Most conspicuously for Bitcoin, during the Great Depression [24, 215] in 1933, US-President Franklin
D. Roosevelt [216] signed the Executive Order 6102 [217, 218], which made it illegal for American
citizens to privately own gold; this ban was not lifted for more than 40 years later by US-President
Gerald Ford [219], effective on 31 December 1974.
By virtue of his ideology, Satoshi Nakamoto certainly had a keen interest in monetary history, and was
concerned how individuals could preserve their personal wealth and keep it safe from state
intervention [220]. His deliberate choice of April 05 is likely to be related to this event as Satoshi
Nakamoto is accredited the quote “I was born when sound money was made illegal in the USA” (which,
formally, suggest an earlier date of birth). Even more, an immediate precursor of Bitcoin is dubbed
“Digital Gold”.
Sakura
A cherry blossom also known as Japanese cherry or “Sakura” [221]. Bloom typically occurs between
March and April in the Northern Hemisphere; the exact date depends on factors like the species,
climate, weather and geographical location, but a date around April 05 is not uncommon. In Japanese
Shinto-influenced mythology [222], cherry blossoms symbolize clouds due to their nature of blooming
en masse, besides being an enduring metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life.
First Contact Day
In the Star Trek sequel [223], the first interactions between humans and Vulcans “took” place on 05
April 2063 [224]. Sci-fi aficionados celebrate this “historic” event on this day of the year [225].
Privacy & Anonymity
As a mere fact that, even until today, i.e., nearly 1.5 decades after the release of the Bitcoin
whitepaper in fall 2008, and despite major efforts to track him, Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity has not
been unraveled; this proves that he was able to employ sophisticated methods to persistently protect
his anonymity. Using a pseudonym was only one part of it. As Satoshi Nakamoto, he never
communicated through analog channels like voice, video or personal meetings; instead, he exclusively
messaged electronically via email, and postings to online newsgroups.
Moreover, Satoshi Nakamoto employed technologies like the Tor [226] (“The Onion Router” [227], a
free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication) network [227, 228] and I2P
[229] (“The Invisible Internet Project”), he somehow found a way to register bitcoin.org [102, 103,
230] incognito with a prepaid credit card [77, 230], established email accounts at highly privacy-
focused domains like vistomail.com [231-233] (defunct as per time of writing) and
anonymousspeech.com [234-236] (shut down on 30/09/2021) for concealing his identity and location.
These capabilities clearly display the signature of an experienced, very privacy-conscious character
possessing skills which are actually quite common among cryptographers.
As per the whole setup of his persona, per his strict adherence to online communication and his
avoidance of live, in-person interaction, and his sudden disappearance from the community, it is
obvious that Satoshi Nakamoto was somewhat abrupt in his decision making, and very solitary; he
carefully avoided the limelight by expressing that others, like fellow developers from the steadily
growing Bitcoin community, should represent the emerging cryptocurrency project in public. It might
also be inferred from the still ongoing success in maintaining his privacy and anonymity over long
periods of time, and by his prolonged abstinence from reaping the fruits of his incredible wealth, fame
and impact, that Bitcoin was unlikely to have been created by a group.
Note that, in principle, Satoshi Nakamoto could have, and actually still can, include short texts in
transactions (through a 40 Byte metadata by the Bitcoin script command OP_RETURN [237]); if they
are issued from Bitcoin addresses the community widely accepts to be owned by him, such messages
would surely send some ripples to developers and markets. But Satoshi Nakamoto has (so far) never
tapped this pseudonymous communication channel that he programmed into his own Bitcoin code.
Cryptography
Highly gifted mathematical people that are keen on preserving their privacy are regularly drawn into
the fascinating field of cryptography. Other than the general public who are mostly careless of how
comprehensively data on their internet-connected devices and online activities are systematically
tracked, monetized, and attacked, cryptographers tend to be highly competent in protecting their
data, and to conceal their identity. Measures of cover up, like the anonymous registration of website
domains and email addresses by Satoshi Nakamoto, as well as air-gaped data storage, are believed to
be in the standard repertoire of privacy-driven cryptographers.
Scientific Publishing
In his whitepaper that was released to the “Cryptography” mailing list on Halloween 2008 [238] (or
01/11/2008 in Japanese time zone), the bibliography [109, 110, 239-244] turned out rather selective
and incomplete from a traditional scientific publishing point-of-view, e.g., by even missing out
pioneering work on electronic cash [45, 111, 245], and its presumably closest precursor Bit Gold [107,
246, 247]. In addition, the composition of the list is uncommon, with only one reference to a
publication in a peer-reviewed journal [240], four papers from proceedings of US and European
conferences in 1980 [243] and the 1990s [239, 241, 242], two web links [109, 110], and a historic first
edition of a standard textbook [244].
Benelux Symposium
Especially the second citation [83, 84, 239] would have surely raised eyebrows along the review
process submission of a classical journal. On the one hand, it presents rather preliminary work
compared to the other references. Furthermore, according to its proceedings [248] issued by the
“Werkgemeenschap voor Informatie- en Communicatietheorie (WIC)”, this symposium seems to have
primarily attracted local researchers from the Benelux [190]; such meetings tend to serve network
building purposes. Submissions are usually not as vigorously peer-reviewed, and important findings
are usually expected to be elaborated to full-fledged journal publications in the follow-up.
The corresponding citation in the whitepaper (which was, in a similar way, also presented at another
conference [83, 249] in Stanford [250]) was thus rather poorly noticed, and hardly retrievable by a
global audience. Hence, it looks like Satoshi Nakamoto himself, or at least a person close to him, must
have personally attended this “20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux” on 27-28 May
1999 in Haasrode, Belgium, a location within the strong research ecosystem of KU Leuven [251],
UCLouvain [252], UCLL [253], and IMEC [254].
There was one gifted cryptographer that has been affiliated with a local KU Leuven [37, 38, 50, 255];
his PhD supervisor David Chaum [45, 111], who was based UC Berkeley [256, 257] and Los Angeles
[258], is of the pioneers of digital currencies [111, 245], reaching way back in the early 1980s; his
(former) graduate student sadly decided to end his young life at the age of 31 in July 2011, i.e., just
weeks after Satoshi Nakamoto sent his last known email (of widely undisputed origin) on 26 April 2011
[259, 260].
Merkle Trees
Also citation number 7 [243], a contribution to a 1980 symposium held in Sunnyvale (San Francisco
Bay Area [257], California, USA), would have been rarely included by an author in the year 2008. This
work on so-called “Merkle trees” [261] roots in a 1982 [262] patent that was filed in 1979. The
technology has been outlined best in a 1987 book chapter [263], which would probably have been the
most retrievable and usable reference for the reader of the Bitcoin whitepaper [101].
1957 Edition of Textbook
Moreover, the last of the eight citations [244] pops into the eye as it refers to a standard (2-volume)
textbook “An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications”; the Bitcoin whitepaper cites its
1st edition from 1957. In Satoshi Nakamoto’s (proposed) lifetime, the mid-19th century hardcopy must
have been mainly available in antiquarian bookstores. If the content of this book was essential in
assembling Bitcoin for Satoshi Nakamoto, who supposedly read this source not earlier than the 1990s,
he would have normally referenced its much more recent editions from around 1970 [264], or even
an alternative source.
This peculiarity might hint to the significance of the year 1957 [265], maybe referring to the beginning
of the space age with the Soviet Sputnik [266] satellite, the start of the S&P 500 stock market index
[267], or IBM releasing the first Fortran [268] compiler; otherwise, this citation might be attributed to
a special relation or admiration of Satoshi Nakamoto (or his parents, family, friends, or mentors) to
the author; William “Vilim” Feller [269] (1906-1970), a Croatian-born professor who eventually retired
from Princeton [270], is widely remembered for pioneering probability theory as a branch of
mathematical analysis. Or was the choice of the 1957 edition of the book just a pointer to Satoshi
Nakamoto’s year of “birth” 1975 by swapping of the last two digits?
Odd Bibliography
Overall, except for two citations on digital currency projects [109, 110] that were, anecdotally, added,
post scriptum, to the draft of the whitepaper in late summer 2008, most references precede the
Bitcoin whitepaper by more than 10 years, and literally none of them is younger than 6 years; their
average year of publication is situated before 1990, i.e., about 18 years before the release of the
Bitcoin whitepaper [101].
Such a short and seasoned mix of citations, and its diverse caliber is unquestionably conspicuous, thus
indicating that Satoshi Nakamoto tried to mimic scientific publishing, but did not possess an extended
track record of active authoring in this arena; alternatively, he was simply not paying much attention
to academic etiquette, and dropped a brief, “quick-and-dirty” list. It is therefore more likely that the
person behind Satoshi Nakamoto came out of a relevant public agency or corporate background
where he routinely studied scientific papers, but had seldomly spearheaded authorship of publications
in top-quartile scientific outlets.
Professional Embedding
So rather than a profound rooting in an academic research position, Satoshi Nakamoto might have
had a (possibly brief) career in, or related to, cryptography in the corporate sector, or in a secret
service institution. These organizations regularly recruit top (mathematical) talent, that they identify
based on their educational scores, to their relevant departments. Before embarking him on a
dedicated cryptography training, these three-letter intelligence agencies would have rigorously
committed Satoshi Nakamoto to strict confidentiality over extended periods of time, even extending
way beyond the actual duration of his employment or contract [271].
Such thoroughly monitored obligations might explain Satoshi Nakamoto’s apparent fear towards
exposure of the nascent Bitcoin project to the CIA [155] in 2011. Personally, he might have even feared
to be in breach of grave commitments to his confidentiality, which actually would prevent him from
coming out for a long time, if not forever.
It is also known that highly capable cryptographers would have generously paid options as freelancers
or contractors in industry, or even on the dark side, which would elucidate why Satoshi Nakamoto
might have had sufficient money to be able to abstain from monetizing his BTC assets after his
disappearance; furthermore, his ideals might have directed him towards leaving his (early) mined
coins (so far) untouched in order to bolster a narrative of a mysterious origin and innate
decentralization that is indeed still deeply appreciated by “his” Bitcoin community.
Work Pattern
Analysis of Satoshi Nakamoto’s postings to newsgroups and commits to the Bitcoin subversion
repository in the final months of 2009 and 2010 [272] reveals activity peaks, involving “night shifts”,
in February, a noticeable gap between March and May, and intensive activity over the following
summer months. This fluctuating pattern may correspond to work obligations that are not compatible
with a regular office job, but more for a student or academic who is busy on campus during lecture
months in college, or a contractor, consultant or freelancer working along tight project completion
schedules. Due to the brevity of Satoshi Nakamoto’s online life, and his likely capability to forge
metadata to disguise his identity and whereabouts, it cannot be ultimately concluded whether this
calendrical, work-hour and time-zone patterns were just specific to the period of observation, or
recurrent over consecutive years.
Nationality & Country of Residence
The choice of his pseudonym would initially propose a Japanese person. People from other Asian
backgrounds, like Koreans or Chinese, owing to certain historic events, some deeply rooted
animosities, and clashes of culture, are less likely to voluntarily adopt a Japanese nationality. Actually,
there is a train of evidence that Satoshi Nakamoto possesses a Western, presumably a British /
Commonwealth or North-American nationality, or at least spent a good part of his formative years in
these cultural habitats.
In fact, virtually all (so far) seriously considered nominees originate from such countries where all or
most people master the English language with native-level fluency, and might be well aware of the
British culture and current affairs. Registering “The Times” headline in the Genesis block [119-121,
273] hints towards his state of mind and objective for Bitcoin, and possibly towards his cultural
embedding within the realm of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, or the Commonwealth.
This very pattern certainly matches Satoshi Nakamoto’s flawless mastering of the English language
with a preference for British spelling, and European date format DD/MM/YYYY, both being uncommon
for US-natives; yet, systematic timestamp and metadata analysis of his numerous online postings [134,
272, 274] indicate that, assuming rather normal (say midnight to 6 am) sleeping schedules (which is
not necessarily applicable to coders and hackers having daytime college lectures, social activities, or
jobs to pay their way), Satoshi Nakamoto was not residing in Japan, but moving across US (Eastern to
Pacific) or British times zones during his post-2008 interactions with the online fora.
He also appears to have (deliberately?) changed his onboard computer clock between different
American and British / GMT time zones, implying frequent travel within the United States, and
intercontinentally to Europe. Alternatively, the messages might have originated from a geographically
spread company of authors, each of them potentially with their own writing style and spelling
preferences.
Yet, it might well be argued that, as an undoubtedly exceptionally sophisticated computer- and
internet-literate who is evidently proficient in employing advanced privacy technology, Satoshi
Nakamoto might have easily run message texts past spell and grammar checkers set to British English,
write scripts to include double spaces after periods, tune computer clocks and time zone settings of
operating systems, and manipulate sent times and forge metadata in email headers.
Still, if this is not a decoy, an evidently fabricated Japanese identity might be rooted in a link to this
unique, Far-East country, like family, friends, or fondness of the rich, ancient or modern East-Asian
culture; for instance, the CEO of the notorious Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox [79, 275, 276] in 2010, moved
from his native country of France to Japan, as he was fascinated by Manga [277].
There is actually another interesting pointer towards Japan, specifically to its capital city of Tokyo.
Satoshi Nakamoto frequently used, in addition to his account with (Germany-based) provider
gmx.com [101, 278, 279], the email domains anonymousspeech.com [234-236] (shut down on
30/09/2021) and vistomail.com [231-233, 280, 281] (defunct as per time of writing), for instance, on
the “The Cryptography and Cryptography Policy Mailing List” when announcing the release of Bitcoin
v0.1 [282].
These providers offered highly privacy-preserving email services, and anonymousspeech.com tempo-
rarily accepted anonymous payment in e-Gold [283-285], and, anecdotally, later Bitcoin. In a story
published by Business Insider in 2014 [77], several links, e.g., via domain registration addresses for
email providers, bitcoin.org [102, 103, 286] and a Swiss bank account, were construed (via the
American site godaddy.com [287]) via the elusive, (presumably) Swiss internet entrepreneur “Michael
Weber” [280, 281, 288] (wwwmichi@gmx.ch), notably to Sakura House [280, 289, 290] and Lounge
[290]. These places, which are obviously named after the Japanese cherry blossoming, offer
apartments and facilities that are preferentially rented by foreigners. Interestingly, the Sakura House
and Lounge are situated near in the Nakano-sakaue station [291] for the Tokyo districts of Nakano
[292] and Shinjuku [293], which are notorious amusement quarters that are well-known as gay
hotspots (Shinjuku Ni-chōme [294]), and for sex-related establishments (Kabukichō [295]). There was
also several branches of the American fast fashion retailer “Forever 21” at the time in Tokyo and other
parts of Japan [296, 297].
This intriguing plot constitutes one of the very few direct connections that could be quite convincingly
established between Satoshi Nakamoto and Japan. (Other than that one of the founding fathers of
blockchain [3, 298] who co-authored 3/8 papers cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper speaks Japanese.) In
a conceivable scenario, Satoshi Nakamoto had a stint in Tokyo around the year 2006, staying at the
Sakura guest house, possibly for studies, work, fun, or a combination thereof; during this period,
Satoshi Nakamoto (re-)connected to the owner of the highly privacy focused email services
anonymousspeech.com and vistomail.com who resided, or had his web portals registered to these
facilities. Having enjoyed his time, Satoshi Nakamoto got inspired by the locality, i.e., specifically
Sakura, Nakano and Nakano-sakaue, and the “Nakano Sakaue gang” [77] that was anecdotally
reported to have been around in these locations the year 2006, to adopt his pseudonym from the first
syllables of the local ambient.
With all these cues at hand, it can be speculated that Satoshi Nakamoto likely has a Western
educational and cultural background, either British / European or North-American, possibly pertaining
to an ethnic minority, such as Japanese-American. In the years immediately prior to developing Bitcoin
in 2007/2008, Satoshi Nakamoto might have stayed for a certain period, or at least immersed with an
expat community in Tokyo that inspired his alias (possibly in addition to its “intelligence” related
interpretation, see above).
Other Japanese candidates were proposed in a 2017 presentation [83-85]. The senior author, who
published a conference contribution [239, 249] referenced in the Bitcoin whitepaper [101], scrutinizes
a 2001 publication entitled ““The Security Evaluation of Time Stamping Schemes: The Present
Situation and Studies”” [88, 299], which is authored by a Japanese person affiliated with the Institute
for Monetary and Economic Studies (IMES) from the Bank of Japan.
The source finds some stunning overlap between some core technological elements that later entered
Bitcoin, as well as the references cited in their report and the Bitcoin whitepaper [101]. Moreover, the
personal homepage of the author of the report [299] was last updated 09/02/2007, i.e., roughly
around the time when Satoshi Nakamoto must have started building Bitcoin. Another Japanese
candidate was proposed to have created Bitcoin in a rather quirky YouTube video [86] in 2013 by the
American computer scientist and co-inventor of hypertext [257, 258]. However, these leads never
seem to have received significant traction in the community.
Interdisciplinary Skill Set
In addition to his unquestionably outstanding (C++ [300]) programming abilities [137-139], as
exhibited in the first version of the Bitcoin code [123], Satoshi Nakamoto must have, at least, had
some advanced knowledge and passion for a rare combination of techno-scientific fields; this
unusually wide interdisciplinary repertoire encompasses elements of computer science (e.g.,
distributed computing [301], peer-to-peer (P2P) networks [302], decentralization [303]), math (e.g.,
cryptography, probability theory), economics (e.g., game theory, financial systems, banking, monetary
policies, market psychology), and law (e.g., financial regulation, freedom of speech).
Regarding digital currencies, evidence stays inconclusive to which extent Satoshi Nakamoto was
involved (under his real identity or another alias) in the cypherpunk [177, 178] movement that
spawned in the early 1990s from the Bay Area [257] in California; his apparent (or mock) lack of
awareness of (at least part of) related precursor projects [107-111] might be owing to the absence of
a specialized scientific community and publishing scene on this cryptocurrencies at the time, but also
kinked to his (young) age in the 1990s. Furthermore, this apparent unfamiliarity with important prior
art reveals that intellectually, Satoshi Nakamoto may have even independently developed, or re-
invented, key pillars of Bitcoin, while he was cognizant of the foundations of timestamping and
blockchain [240-242, 298, 304, 305].
From a formal, intellectual property perspective, it is widely accepted [1] that Satoshi Nakamoto has
authored the Bitcoin whitepaper [101] in 2008, and was part of Bitcoin’s original reference
implementation. In the course of this, Satoshi Nakamoto devised the first blockchain database,
through which he was the first to solve the double-spending problem for digital currencies using a
peer-to-peer network.
Genius
The various statements [137-139] of independent, highly recognized experts in conjunction with his
spectrum of competences strongly underpin that Satoshi Nakamoto was an intellectual virtuoso, in
particular if he was a fully self-driven individual [306].
Common Traits
While there is no “one-fits-all pattern” for a genius, their outstanding talent is normally confined to a
select area; their major commonality is that they are atypical, their overall character and psychology
[306] regularly falls out-of-the-norm; a genius tends to have a peculiar sense of humor unsuitable for
small-talk, he might be inclined to under- or oversell their sophisticated ideas, he shows major
discontinuities in his private and professional life, with departures from projects that he considers
delivered earlier than others, and may resurface with new, disruptive or unexpected initiatives that
are primarily motivated by their portfolio of ideals; in particular highly gifted cryptographers often
detest races for fame and for showing off their fortune; instead, they frequently have a preference for
privacy, and even complete reclusion. They may have an apathy against testosterone-driven power
games, e.g., within federal agencies, or the corporate world, and get easily frustrated when
discovering the main focus of initiatives they care about is not on factual solutions, but on personal
career objectives.
Why is this relevant? Well, it was clear from the early days that an outstanding genius [306] must have
masterminded the creation of Bitcoin [307]. It is well known, and also shown by various examples,
that many of such extraordinarily intelligent personalities clash with generic societal templates in
terms of common behavioral traits, such as pronounced modesty, rather poor sociability, unusual
sense of humor, and major volatility in their biographies; occasionally, their decision making is widely
perceived as erratic, they may display signs of abnormal psychological conditions, or even a degree of
mental disorder [308-311]. These rare species can intensively work long hours with extreme focus and
persistence on solving extremely challenging problems they feel passionate about. They usually do
not retire in a classical sense, their brain needs to offload its energy, for instance, via in interest-, or
ideals-driven activities in business or leisure.
Strategic (Banking) Games
As a characteristic for his intellectual capabilities, a genius stands out by their undeniable talent,
resolve, and success, but he often does not meet societally widely accepted behavioral schemes.
Furthermore, math-affine geniuses [240-242] are frequently endowed and identified with their
extraordinary talent to quickly recognize patterns in arrangements of numbers, letters or geometries,
and they might enjoy tackling and creating puzzles.
The type of genius exhibiting outstanding mathematics-related talent sometimes tends to have a
penchant for strategic games involving statistics and memory (card counting, pattern recognition,
complex strategies), such as the banking games Poker [312], Blackjack [313-315], as well as the table
and board games Backgammon [316] and Chess [317] (or its Japanese variant Shogi [318]).
For instance, the prodigy chess player Bobby Fischer [195], who blended genius in the game as, for
instance, documented by his world-famous 21-move brilliancy [319], with a rather volatile
professional and private vita, might have been one of Satoshi Nakamoto’s childhood heroes. It is
known that a few such game-affine “superbrains” were banned at some stage from casinos in Atlantic
City or Las Vegas, e.g., the notorious “MIT Blackjack Team” [320], which operated successfully from
about 1980 to the beginning of the 21st century.
Celebrities
There are numerous, historical and present-day ingenious, celebrities, e.g., artists, actors, filmmakers
and scholars, who are (sometimes arguably) reported to have displayed some (episodes of) mental
abnormalities [311, 321], including bipolar disorder [322], schizophrenia [323], Asperger syndrome
[324], and autism [325, 326]. Amongst the most famous personalities in science and technology are
Isaac Newton [327, 328], Charles Darwin [329], Ludwig Boltzmann [330], Albert Einstein [331], Paul
Dirac [332] , Nikola Tesla [333], John Nash [63], Richard Feynman [334], Grigori Perelman [335], Steve
Jobs [6], Terry A. Davis [336], John McAfee [337], and Elon Musk [7, 338].
Financial, Legal and Personal Ambient
For obtaining a glimpse at into Satoshi Nakamoto’s state of mind at the time of developing Bitcoin,
relevant happenings prior to and within the period 2007/2008 ought to be taken into account. Note
that the events mentioned in the following are primarily viewed from a Western / US-American /
British / European angle.
Financial Crisis of 2007-2008
The harbingers of the global financial crisis are ascribed to events that took place in August 2007 in
the world of banking [339], which may well have triggered Satoshi Nakamoto’s work on Bitcoin. The
global financial crisis [340] further escalated during the year 2008 [341], peaking in the public
perception with the filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection [342] by the fourth-largest investment
bank in the United States [343] on 15 September 2008; these dramatic events must have evidently
been on the screen of Satoshi Nakamoto, as impressively recorded by the message he engraved into
the genesis block 0 [119, 120] of the Bitcoin blockchain [119]; issued on January 03, 2009 [344], he
included the headline of the British daily newspaper “The Times” [122]: “Chancellor on the brink of
second bailout for banks” [121] of that very day.
The creation and release of Bitcoin along the years 2007-2009 might have been motivated and
affected by other preceding and concurrent happenings that were less prominent in the mainstream
media, but might have impacted Satoshi Nakamoto on a more personal level. Also developments after
his departure from Bitcoin in 2010/2011, such as Silk Road [78, 345], and whistle-blower cases like
Edward Snowden [80, 346] that evolved post his departure, might have deepened Satoshi Nakamoto’s
choice for silence and anonymity over the years to come until now.
Bernstein v. United States
The notorious Bernstein v. United States series of court cases (1995-2003) [347] revolved about
publication, and resulting export of cryptography technology from the United States, and the right of
freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment [348] of the United States Constitution [349].
The plaintiff Daniel J. Bernstein has already been a top-notch cryptographer in the 2000s.
The court initially ruled that software source code was speech and that the governmental regulations
preventing its publication were unconstitutional; then the case was reopened, and on October 15,
2003, after almost nine years, the judge eventually dismissed the case and asked Bernstein, who then
represented himself, to return when the government posed a "concrete threat".
Napster & Megaupload
Satoshi Nakamoto also referred to Napster that was founded as an independent peer-to-peer file
sharing service in 1999 [350, 351]. The legal challenges spearheaded by the music industry led to its
shutdown in 2001. Similar legal cases were emerging at the time [352].
Currency & Securities
Satoshi Nakamoto might also have been aware that the issuance of a cryptocurrency might bring
about certain legal matters, for instance, with the (US) Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
[353], and with Article I, Section 8, Clause 5 of the US Constitution on the “Coinage Power of Congress”
[354], or their international analogs.
Wikileaks
In 2006, the whistleblower website WikiLeaks [131] was started, presumedly by Julian Assange [132,
355]. In 2007, the platform published the standard US army protocol at Guantanamo Bay [356]. There
were further releases of classified papers in the pre-Bitcoin period 2006-2008 [357] and beyond, such
as the disclosure of the 2010 "Iraq War Logs" [358] and "Afghan War Diary" [359] leading to
imprisonment of the whistleblower who was assigned as intelligence analyst [360] to an Army unit in
Iraq in 2009.
The financial blockade of WikiLeaks in 2010/2011 triggered a discussion, including whether the Bitcoin
community should promote BTC as alternative for funding in early 2011 (which eventually did not
materialize). The ensuing public exposure and scrutiny of the Bitcoin project at its infant stage
seriously concerned by Satoshi Nakamoto, and might even have prompted Satoshi Nakamoto’s
gradual exit with his final emails in April 2011 [135].
Keccak-SHA-3 Controversy
In November 2007, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) [361] launched a
competition to develop a new hash function called SHA-3 to complement the older SHA-1 and SHA-2
[362]. On October 2, 2012, NIST announced KECCAK [363] as the winning algorithm to be standardized
as the new SHA-3 [364]. In the follow-up, a weakening controversy [365] emerged in the
cryptographer community, even including claims that a backdoor was introduced [366-368] in light of
the documents leaked by the former NSA [157] employee and contractor Edward Snowden [80, 346]
in 2013.
Bobby Fischer
On 17 January 17 2008, the extravagant, world-champion (1972-1975) chess genius Bobby Fischer
passed away [195] in Reykjavik (interestingly, but most likely coincidentally, bitcoin.org [102, 286] is
currently registered to this capital of Iceland [286]). With a passion for games challenging his prodigy
brain in childhood and teenage years, it can arguably be speculated that Bobby Fischer [195] has been
the much-revered idol of an underage superbrain “Satoshi Nakamoto” spending his spare time on
rehearsing Fischer’s chess strategies of the 1950s to 1970s.
The young Satoshi would then have intensively studied “The Game of the Century” [369] of 13-year-
old Bobby Fischer in 1956, and his first major titles in 1957 (which corresponds to the year last of the
last citation [244] in the Bitcoin whitepaper [101]), and admired his “21-move brilliancy” from 1963.
Satoshi Nakamoto was certainly also aware of the abnormalities and tragedies within Bobby Fischer’s
active days and post career, including his refusals to defend his lead in tournaments, his semi-
retirements, forfeiture of title, sudden obscurity, detention, life as an émigré, eventually in Iceland.
So how could Satoshi not have been moved by the demise of his childhood hero Bobby Fischer in early
2008?
Bitcoin Parameters
On their journey into Bitcoin, readers usually stumble across mysteries that they cannot make
immediate sense of. These frequently concern the technical or practical reasoning for the choices of
the (targetted) block time 10 min, the (maximum) block size 1 MB, the halving period of
=210,000 blocks, roughly corresponding to 4 years, the initial coinbase transaction =
50 BTC, and the (resulting, see below) total supply =21 ×10 BTC. Table 1 summarizes the
“ambient”, fixed, free, and resulting design parameters of the Bitcoin blockchain as detailed in the
following sections. The values of these parameters are not fully explained in the Bitcoin whitepaper
[101]; yet, the email correspondence between Satoshi Nakamoto and early adopters [370-372] details
different objectives. The following considerations are unavoidably quite technical and mathematical,
so the reader might fast-forward to the last subsection “Take-Home Messages” if not interested in the
specifics.
Practically “Fixed” Parameters
Block Time
The block time =10 min draws its technical rational from the latency for synchronizing the
common ledger by message propagation time between nodes on an open and decentralized
peer-to-peer (P2P) network [373]; it is already reasoned in optimizing the mining efficiency, i.e., that
the nodes should not spend too much time on futile mining efforts when the next block has already
been found [374].
For instance, with the 1 min =const. propagation time (which might actually not properly
represent current internet and future internet speeds) assumed in Satoshi Nakamoto’s back-of-the-
envelope calculations, about
=10% of the mining efforts would be deterministically ”wasted”
due to delayed notification about the generation new, valid block during the final interval of .
The block time is this a compromise between fast transaction processing on the one hand, and
optimizing power usage favoring longer periods for mining on the other.
There is also a further, important practical aspect of associated with the quasi-finality of
transactions, which are only deemed safely confirmed after a certain number of blocks were mined,
for instance, 60 min for six blocks. Hence, the block time cannot be randomly set when factoring in
the requirements of Bitcoin as a payment system running on a distributed network.
Note that =10 min just constitutes a target value for the average block time measured over many
periods; significant deviations have been recorded for individual block periods in the past [375].
Block Size
A ( 1 MB) block size limit, in conjunction with =10 min, restricts the write speed =
of the Bitcoin blockchain’s distributed ledger to 1 MB/10 min. Hence, with =
(365.25 ×24 ×60) min 52.596
blocks in a year, the storage requirement of the Bitcoin ledger
increases by =×50 GB per annum. Faster write speeds would thus, over the years,
oust a significant portion of non-professional contributors who volunteer to operate (full) Bitcoin
nodes, and consequently, severely undermine Bitcoin’s pivotal concept of decentralization through
prolific and unrestricted participation in the distributed network.
Such de-facto exclusion of contributors to the distributed ledger is averted under the condition that
the storage space of commodity hard drives grows faster than the write speed. This issue constituted
one of the main disputes in the Bitcoin “civil war” in the mid-2010s, associated with the (eventually
unsuccessful) Bitcoin XT [376] fork, and follow ups like Bitcoin SV [377]. At the time of writing (June
2022), i.e., about 13 years after its launch in 2009, the full size of the Bitcoin’s distributed ledger file
ranges in the vicinity of 350 GB.
Transaction Throughput
As the peer-to-peer payment system alluded to in the title of its whitepaper [101], speed, measured
in transactions per second (TPS), is a common benchmark. While each block has a maximum size of
1 MB, as engraved in the code, the storage space for each of its transactions varies, for instance,
as they can contain various amounts of Bitcoin addresses and script commands, called opcodes [378].
Using an average size of 435 Byte, a (= 1 MB) block typically contains about
2300
transactions.
This coarse estimate provides a transaction speed = (
)
4 TPS; the actual transaction
speed is reported to be in the range between 3.3 and 7 TPS [379, 380]. Importantly, the throughput
is not a free variable, but results from the fixed design parameters and , and the space
needed for scripting a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain .
For comparison, the VISA network is capable of 60 ×10 TPS, which might be the reason why
layer-2 solutions, such as the Lightening [381] or Liquid [382-384] networks, are, or have already been,
developed and implemented for Bitcoin as fast, consumer-level payment solutions envisioned in the
very title of its whitepaper [385].
Environmental Parameters
Propagation time (estimate):
= 1 min
Calendar:
1 year 525,960 min
Transaction size (mean):
=435 B
Global M1 in 2008:
=21 ×10
USD
Fixed
Free
Block time (target): =10 min
Initial coinbase transaction: =50 BTC
Adjustment period: 4 years
Transaction “finality" after 6 blocks: 1 hour
In blocks: =
210,000
Mining efficiency:
T
=10%
Adjustment algorithm:
=
2
with
=Integer(
)
Block size (maximum):
= 1 MB
Smallest subunit: 1 Sat =10
BTC
Write speed:
=
50 GB/year
= 2
×
=21 ×10 BTC
(1)
Transactions / block (mean):
2300 =10 cent 10 Sat =
Speed: = (
)4 TPS
= +( + 1)2142 (2)
Inflation at block number : () (3)
Table 1 Overview of Bitcoin design parameters which are reasoned by technical and practical aspects of a payment network
on a decentralized, globally distributed public ledger in a real-world user environment. The values of the fixed parameters
(target) block time =10 min and block size (limit) = 1 MB determine the throughput in terms of transactions per
second (TPS), the write speed in GB per year, and thus the storage needs of full network nodes. The initial coinbase
transaction =50 BTC, the adjustment (halving) method =2
and the period of ×4 years, and the
smallest currency unit that can be captured on the blockchain of 1 Sat =10 BTC are freely chosen to adjust the resulting
total supply of =21 ×10 BTC to the M1 money in 2008 of =21 ×10 USD in terms of their indivisible subunits,
the (theoretical) year of the last mint 2142, and the “inflation rate” as defined in (3).
Halving
Satoshi Nakamoto’s plot for Bitcoin was obviously to issue a finite supply of BTC without pre-launch
mining, which he might have thought to taint its public-good image needed for fostering its wide-scale
acceptance. Mathematically, this somewhat clever and altruistic objective requires a special
distribution function that converges to a fixed number over time. Amongst the many options for the
BTC minting policy, he chose a stepwise adjustment which periodically halves the initial reward for the
miner, called coinbase transaction.
Period
The logic behind the halving interval 4 years is not immediately evident, other than its potential
correspondence to the leap year schedule. This particular period might indicate Satoshi Nakamoto’s
intent to maneuver in the binary domain, given that 4 = 2 × 2 = 2, i.e., doubling, and halving, or
division by 2, relating to the fundamental multiplication operators (left- and right shifting) in the binary
domain.
Block Count
The ratio between the aimed halving period 4 years and the (target) block time 10 min
yields a block count
=210,384, which is roughly represented by the more catchy
number =210,000 blocks, as hardwired in Bitcoin’s design parameters [370].
Initial Coinbase Transaction
For the first, (4 year)- period starting with block 0 [119] and 1 [124] on 03 and 09 of January
2009, respectively, the initial coinbase reward was set to =50 BTC. This particular value of
constitutes, at first glance, a rather arbitrary choice, in a sense that it does not hinge on practical
arguments, like the block time and the (maximum) block size . Given that =50 BTC =
50 ×10 Sat is halved at intervals , a natural choice might have been to express by an amount
to = 2 Sat, with an unsigned integer exponent , so that the final coinbase transaction would
cleanly turn out as 2 Sat = 1 Sat =10 BTC before it drops below 1 Sat, which cannot be
represented by the corresponding integer variable on the Bitcoin blockchain anymore.
Total BTC Supply
Nowadays, the limit of 21 million BTC that will ever be mined is almost religiously cited among Bitcoin
maximalists, and even a membership in the “21 million club” for those owning at least one BTC is
propagated. The reasoning behind this rather mystical choice has rarely been discussed. Figure 1
displays the (approximate) evolution of the total supply available at a specific point in time after
mining commenced in January 2009.
The total BTC supply is calculated by
=() × ×2 = 2 × ×() = 21
×10 BTC
(1)
using the identity 1 2
+ 1 4
+ 1 8
+= 1 [386]; (1) is therefore completely determined by
the product × of the block cycle =210,000 (determined by , and the “fixed” block time
), and =50 BTC. Yet, notice that the sum only converges for , so will actually fall
slightly short of 21 ×10 BTC.
Consequently, and especially given that cannot accurately correspond to full years anyway, it would
have been very straight-forward to alter the total BTC supply from =21 ×10 BTC to a more
catchy number, like 20, 10, or a 100 million, or even 1 million or a billion to comply with the common
scale systems [387].
Figure 1 Total supply (1) in terms of BTC minted as a function of the calendar year, assuming an initial coinbase
transaction of = 50 BTC, a block time =10 min of, and a halving period of =210,000 blocks.
Only a second source is cited in an email [371, 372] exchanged in January 2011 with an early adopter,
who directly conversed with, and received BTC from Satoshi Nakamoto in spring 2009. It is mentioned
[136, 371, 372] that the 21 million of BTC was inferred from the (global M1) money supply [388] of
fiat currencies , which (reportedly) amounted to 21 trillion USD at the time of releasing the Bitcoin
whitepaper in fall 2008. M1 money comprises of all the currencies and assets that can easily be
converted into cash.
Satoshi Nakamoto is quoted: “I wanted to pick something that would make prices similar to existing
currencies, but without knowing the future, that’s very hard. I ended up picking something in the
middle. If Bitcoin remains a small niche, it’ll be worth less per unit than existing currencies. If you
imagine it being used for some fraction of world commerce, then there’s only going to be 21 million
coins for the whole world, so it would be worth much more per unit.”
From a pure quantitative point of view, this makes sense as the two smallest (integer) units, i.e., cents
(1 ¢ = 10 USD) and 10 BTC = 1 Sat, we mathematically obtain =21 ×10 USD =
21 ×10 ¢, and =21 ×10 BTC =21 ×10 Sat for Bitcoin. However, the correlation
between the two underlying quantities is very fuzzy, and might not align well with the other brilliant
logic and expertise demonstrated by Satoshi Nakamoto. (Another article [389] tabled that a total
supply in the region or 21 million BTC would be favorable towards minimizing rounding errors when
operating in the realm of a 64-bit floating-point arithmetic [390]. The author of this work does not
follow this argument.)
However, in a different email [370], Satoshi Nakamoto disclosed to have played a bit with this number,
initially considering 42: “I thought about 100 BTC = 2 × and 42 ×10 BTC = 2 × , but 42
million seemed high.” The notion “seems high” does not make much sense, if 21 is eventually chosen.
Also note that the adjustment by the factor ½ refers, similar to the halving period, to the binary
system. In fact, following formula (1) for , the first coinbase transaction could have been shifted
over a wide range without compromising the fundamental mechanisms underlying the Bitcoin
blockchain.
In addition, revisiting equation (1), the total supply =21 ×10 BTC could have also been
preserved by a more “intuitive” annual cycle, i.e., = 1 year and (1 year) (4 years)4
=
52,500 blocks, by multiplying by the same factor, i.e., 4 × =200 BTC. Hence, the latter
communication sheds doubt of the exclusivity of the reasoning of by the global M1 money supply
; it rather indicates that there may be (additional) motivations for the prominence of the number
21. This circumstance will be further elaborated in the following sections.
Final Block
Starting with the initial mining reward of =50 BTC =50 ×10 Sat, we can extrapolate the
number of halving periods required to mint (nearly) all BTC, terminating when the coinbase
transaction =× 2 slips below 1 Sat; this final period is obtained by solving
=2
1 Sat = log /Sat
log 2 32.22 (2)
and with a (roughly) (=4-year) halving interval (more accurately =210,000 blocks) starting
with the genesis (or first) block in January of the year =2009, i.e., in the 21st century, we
approximate the final non-vanishing coinbase transaction (note that miners will continue to receive
transaction fees) to be issued in = +× ( + 1) 2141.88 2142, which is in the
same region as quoted elsewhere [391]. Intriguingly, the digits of this iconic year start with a 21, and
ends with a 42 =21 × 2, just like Satoshi Nakamoto’s final choice and initial idea for ,
respectively.
Trivially, choosing a “more natural” annual halving period
= 1 year would have adjusted the final
year to
= +
× ( + 1) 2042, so about a century earlier than with the original Bitcoin
parameter = 4 years. However, retention of the same year for the last coinbase transaction
1 Sat around 2142 could have been arranged by annual halving cycles calculated by +
×( + 1)+=
=132; however, this choice of
= 1 year would have resulted
in a huge number for the adjusted initial coinbase transaction
=
, which would
fall far outside the scope of integer-type variables that are common in computer storage.
Inflation Rate
For several aspects, a classical inflation rate is hard to define. First, Bitcoin started without exclusive
pre-launch mining (except the genesis block) by its creator, i.e., from an initial BTC amount of literally
zero in January 2009. Second, the BTC supply is not continuously increased by a government to
implement certain fiscal policies and to satisfy consumer psychology, but by the need to secure a
decentralized ledger on a blockchain.
Furthermore, it is not clear how the transaction fees, which will likely rise in their fiat value over time,
should be factored in. Finally, with increased minting of new BTC and halving cycles, the inflation rate
decreases until it deterministically merges to zero (i.e., below BTC’s non-divisible subunit of 1 Sat).
Note, however, that fading rewards for participating in the crucial proof-of-work [392] competition
will have to be compensated, to some degree, by transaction fees to still incentivize miners.
Mathematically, we can define an (annual) inflation rate at block number in the halving interval
numbered by (),
()=()×
4.25 year
() (3)
with () minted so far at block number b, starting with ()=× 2 and (= 0)==
50 BTC with the Bitcoin genesis block = 0 (or = 1) in January 2009. This ratio (3) may be
understood as the inflation rate () at block number . The (logarithmic) plot in Figure 2 shows the
development of the Bitcoin “inflation rate” (3) over the (4 years) halving periods, commencing
with =50 BTC. The calculations are based on a constant block time of 10 min; this is just a
target value which deviates in practice from the actual block time [375]. The calendar years on the
horizontal axis are thus not in exact sync with the present state of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Figure 2 BTC inflation rate over calendar time calculated according to the method quantified in (3).
Just as an example, at the time of writing (in 2022), and assuming a constant block time, we are within
the 4th halving period (see vertical line) when about 19 out of the a total (1) of 21 million BTC
have already been issued, and the inflation rate (3) amounts to about 1.75%, dropping below 1% in
the second half of the 2020s, and completely vanishing after the final Sat had been issued around the
year 2142. An alternative choice with an annual adjustment of the coinbase transaction while maintain
the year 2142 for its last, non-vanishing value is displayed in Figure 3.
Figure 3 Evolution of (annual) inflation rate if coinbase transaction was adjusted by a factor 2
each year (=
1 year) with respect to equation (3) and, thus effectively producing a halving every = 4 years as in Figure 2.
Parameter Analysis
The set of Bitcoin parameters is composed of the practically reasoned choices for the (target) block
time and the (maximum) block size = 1 MB, plus a subset where Satoshi Nakamoto had a
greater degree of discretion. A key design decision was to implement “halving”, i.e., a binary right-
shift operation, rather than a floating-point factor for the reduction of the coinbase transaction on an
interval ; nevertheless, the initial value =50 BTC =50 ×10 Sat was not chosen as an integer
power of 2, i.e., =× 2 , leading to rounding errors, and even a slight shortfall of the total BTC
supply (1) often quoted as =21 ×10 BTC.
Assuming the halving operation for periodic adjustment of the coinbase transaction as given, an
alternative annual cycle, i.e.,
= 1 year containing
=/4 blocks, the total BTC supply (1)
could have been preserved by scaling the initial coinbase transaction by the same factor, i.e.,
=
4 × . Yet, if the last non-vanishing coinbase transaction was to be kept around the year 2142, the
annual halving would imply to a tremendous increase of the required initial coinbase transaction
to a huge number outside the storage space reserved for typical integer variables.
Take-Home Messages
The detailed scrutiny of Bitcoin’s design parameters underpins the following hypothesis: The target
values for the block time =10 min and the maximum block size = 1 MB are prescribed by real-
world boundary conditions of a deliberately decentralized peer-to-peer payment system relying on a
distributed public ledger file. The evidence in this section suggests that Satoshi Nakamoto then needed
to find a way to choose a proper finite total supply of his new cryptocurrency, and a commonly
accepted mechanism to deal out for incentivizing widescale participation in Proof-of-Work [393]
mining for securing Bitcoin’s distributed ledger.
A fixed total supply could only be achieved by continuous slashing of the initial coinbase
transaction for which Satoshi Nakamoto wanted a catchy amount of the order of 100 BTC; he
eventually opted for the (generic) binary operation of halving. Satoshi Nakamoto then played around
with the numbers and found that only a (= 4 = 2)-year interval would sufficiently spread out the
distribution of Bitcoin over several generations well into the next century.
Satoshi Nakamoto calculated from the ratio of and that the 4-year period corresponds to
roughly 210,000 blocks, which would have resulted in a total supply of 42 million BTC. He then
compared this to the M1 money supply in 2008 of 21 ×10 USD, and found that halving the
value of his originally planned initial coinbase transaction to =50 BTC produces =
21 ×10 BTC; additionally, the issuance date of the last BTC around the year 2142, which is linked a
final mint of about 1 Sat, remains untouched. By equating 1 BTC =10 Sat, numerical parity between
the M1 money supply and is achieved in their indivisible subunits Cents and Sats, respectively.
In a similar way as shown in the preceding section, Satoshi Nakamoto probably experimented with a
few alternative parameter sets, but was content to have discovered a sweet spot in the parameter
space where the binary system for alluding to his new, computer-based digital currency, and the
legacy monetary system. As we will see in the following, and to the delight of Satoshi Nakamoto, the
resulting, rather “weird” numbers 21 and 42 nicely lent themselves to further analogies; these figures
convey messages reflecting historical and societal happenings as well as a portion of “nerdy” fun
relevant to both, the creator and the creation of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Dates
Release of Whitepaper
The day Satoshi Nakamoto chose for the release the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 was 31 October [394],
i.e., Halloween [395]. This may indicate awareness of this ancient tradition, or superstition. Yet,
depending on the time zone, the publication date is sometimes falls on 01 November [396] (a Christian
holiday [397]), which is only composed of the binary numbers 0 and 1 – the number set of digital
math. Besides, 01/11/2008 [396] was a Saturday, which resonated with “Satoshi”, but might also hint
towards a weekly work schedule.
Initial Blocks 0 & 1
It might also be argued whether the date of the genesis block 0 [119, 120], Saturday, 03 January 2009
(at 06:15 pm GMT) [344] was chosen because of the matching, very likely inspirational headline [121]
in “The Times” [122]. It has also been raised that the inclusion of the title might have served as a proof
that no mining took place prior to the official release. Timestamping by inclusion of a reference to a
newspaper is actually familiar from the early days of blockchain [305].
On this very day in January 2009 [344], also Sir Alan Arthur Walters [398], a prominent British
economist, passed away. He was best known as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher [399], and fought that Britain should maintain strict monetary targets, and that
the money supply should not be manipulated for political reasons. These attitudes of strict fiscal
policies might have appealed to Satoshi Nakamoto. However, given that his Alan Walter’s activities in
his political role date as far back as the 1980s, it is less likely that this gentleman was on Satoshi
Nakamoto’s mind.
Upon seeing these events, Satoshi Nakamoto might have expedited issuing the Genesis block, but then
chose to take more time to mine block 1 [124] only after a 6-day gap on 09/01/2009 (at 2:54 am GMT)
[400]. The historical events on this day do not seem to have particular significance to Bitcoin, except
that its cross sum 0 + 9 + 0 + 1 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 9 yields 21.
Digits & Numeral Systems – Vires in Numeris
By constructing a new persona, Satoshi Nakamoto had a broad range of options in choosing his
pseudonym, age, and nationality. It could be observed that such (widely) self-definable biodata and
dates of Bitcoin, while protecting his privacy, most likely contain messages that fit very well with the
psychogram of a genius, the historic and current events at the time, and his socio-economic attitudes.
It is also quite striking that the “odd” number 21 repeatedly occurs in the rather free design
parameters within the setup of Bitcoin, often without conclusive technical reasoning.
It can be hypothesized that these digits, as well as further peculiarities excavated in the following, may
convey one, or potentially more, messages conceived by the elusive maker of Bitcoin. This section
identifies and delivers potential interpretations of such “suspicious” numbers to eventually extract
some information about Satoshi Nakamoto’s mindset and humor around Bitcoin.
Note that, to the best of the author’s knowledge, Satoshi Nakamoto did not suggest looking for any
hidden stories, they might all be essential artefacts of the mysterious puzzle he left for the world to
unravel.
Why 21?
What strikes most Bitcoin enthusiasts is the choice of the often almost religiously deemed total supply
of 21 million BTC. Following the previous considerations (1), this BTC limit could have been freely
selected, e.g., by adjusting the initial coinbase transaction accordingly; in fact, most would have
either expected a quantity in the decimal system, such as ten, a hundred, or a multiple of 1,000 to
have convenient names like million, billion, trillion [387], or in the binary system , i.e., a power of 2, or
even a byte-based amount, that can be expressed in the commonly used units kB, MB, GB or TB, in
the quasi-decimal, octal domain.
We have already seen that 21 also pops up in other contexts, like the 21 ×10 blocks per halving
interval
, the first two digits of the year the final coinbase transaction is issued, and the
cross sum of the block 1’s (somewhat freely set) date of mining. Further occurrences and potential
meanings of 21 (and 42) will be unveiled in the next sections.
As almost any clue derived in this article, each of them might, per se, be fully coincidental, unintended,
and even outrageously overinterpreted. Moreover, it is also very likely that the author has blatantly
overlooked other correlations further supporting or dismissing decisive ingredients of the subsequent
story . But for now, let us take it a step further before making a final judgement.
Binary
Operators
If we play around with the numbers a bit, all revolves about the binary “alphabet” 0,1,2, the number
21, which may also be regarded as compounding the digits 2 and 1, and Satoshi Nakamoto’s indirectly,
by repeatedly stated intention to navigate the binary space by left- and right shifting operators, i.e.,
multiplication by 2 and halving, to produce the numbers 4 = 2 × 2 = 2 and 42 = 2 × 21 within the
base-2 “grammar”.
Patterns
Regularly alternating binary patterns when converting from these decimal numbers:
• 1 = 2: I
• 2 = 2: I0
• 21 = 2+ 2+ 2: I0I0I
• 42 = 2 × 21 = (2+ 2+ 2): I0I0I0
These oscillating sequences might be symbolizing blocks (“I” ■) and their links (“0” ○), i.e.,
inclusion of the previous block hash in the new block, which may be a numeral depiction of a
blockchain ■○■○■○■○■○■.
Decimals
There is also some sprinkle of the decimal system in the block time and the subunits of BTC in the
setup, specifically in Satoshi Nakamoto’s choice of subdividing 1 BTC into 10 atomic subunits of
“Satoshis”, or merely “Sats”. Here, a typical value linked to signed or unsigned integer variable would
lead to ranges between 2,147,483,648 =2 to +2,147,483,647 = 2 12.1 × 10=
21 ×10, and 0 to +4,294,967,295 = 2 14.2 × 10=42 ×10 in common 32-bit systems,
respectively. What strikes most is that the 21 resurfaces again if expressed in units of 10, which is
the same order of magnitude between BTC and Sats.
As previously elaborated, it also surprises that the initial mining reward was set to 50 BTC; which
was initially intended to be 100 BTC [370]. Given its halving cycle, the ”logical” choice for would
have been 2 (Sat), or expressed as something like “I000…0000” (with a long “chain” of “0s”) in the
binary system, so that the last (finite) coinbase transaction would have been exactly 1 Sat.
Other Numeral and Binary-to-Text Systems
The author could not find any evidence of further messages, e.g., be expressing Satoshi Nakamoto in
other encoding systems [401], e.g., hexadecimal [402], or any piece yielding vanity Bitcoin addresses
in its base-58 encoding [401]. Also ASCII code [403] or Roman numerals [404] did not yield any
compelling outcomes.
Bitcoin Keys and Addresses
Maybe one can play around a bit with some elements, like the pseudonym Nakamoto, and applying
Bitcoin’s Elliptic Curve Cryptography [405] (“ECC”, specifically the secp256k standard) for generating
public keys, and then hashing by SHA256 followed by RIPEMD160 algorithms may disclose some
further cues, e.g., when expressed in the common alphanumeric base-58 system [401].
In an email to Hal Finney dated Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 8:41 AM [406, 407], Satoshi Nakamoto observed
that the Bitcoin address ‘1NSwywA5Dvuyw89sfs3oLPvLiDNGf48cPD’ [408] that he had (fortuitously)
generated (but which received its first BTC transaction only on 31/08/2014) contained his initials (in
the reverse Japanese order NS, i.e., last name followed by given name), and elaborated on how users
could intentionally produce such vanity Bitcoin addresses containing words or names through
computational brute force efforts.
Note that the (Japanese ordered) initials N.S. would evidently fit well to a cryptocurrency pioneer [44]
who conceived Bit Gold [107] in the 2000s, deemed the technologically closest precursor to Bitcoin.
While this reclusive person is quite concordantly acknowledged by the expert community as one of
the few candidates to undoubtedly have had the know-how to develop Bitcoin in 2008, he adamantly
denies being Satoshi Nakamoto.
Alphabet
Numbers can be associated with letters according to their ordering in the alphabet, and possibly also
with other meanings in a mathematical context. A few connections may be construed, e.g., 0 0:
Neutral element of addition, 1 A: Algebra, Neutral element of multiplication, 2 B: Bitcoin,
Blockchain, Binary, Bay Area, Berkeley, 4 D: Decentralization, Distributed Ledge Technology (DLT),
21 U: UK, USA. However, the author would rank these correlations to Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin
as rather weak.
Geometrical Symbolism
Dice
Counting the spots on the six faces of a dice 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 yields 21. Also, a common dice is
arranged so that each pair of opposite sides adds up to 7, so offering the alternative calculation
3 × 7 = 21. These geometrical correlations, which a math genius recognizes quasi instantaneously,
allude to “rolling the dice”, which is a common theme in the mathematical discipline of probability
(calculus), which may point to the topic of the 1957-textbook citation [244] in the Bitcoin whitepaper
[101]. This association may further reference the popular table game of Craps [409] in the world of
gambling.
Geometrically, the dice is shaped like a cube or block, which then evokes the notion of blockchain in
the context of Bitcoin. Consequently, there exists a rather astonishing analogy between the number
21, statistics, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) blockchain, and the casino mentality that is often
affiliated with the (investment) banking system that was scorned by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Magic Cube
Even more, if we “left-shift” 21 in the binary space, we arrive at the number 42 = 2 × 21. This
number, at least for a math-driven mind, associates with a (simple) “magic cube” [410, 411]; all its
lines parallel to the faces, and all four triagonals, sum up to (+ 1) 2
; for the case = 3, the
formula results in 42.
Geometrically, a cube can evidently be interpreted as a block. As stated in a personal email [370],
Satoshi Nakamoto originally considered setting a finite supply (1) of 42 million BTC, but this
“seemed high”, so he halved it. Note that, as already stated above, this context also highlights a
contradiction, or another variation of the interpretation, to another source [370] stating that the 21
million BTC limit was pegged to the M1 global money supply measured in USD [371].
Blockchain
By investigating Bitcoin parameters like the total supply of 21 million BTC, i.e., =21 ×10 Sat,
we observe that they contain a long chain of 0s; in contrast, common computer based measurements
are usually expressed in the octal (Byte = by eight or 8 bit) system; for instance, 1 MB = 10 Byte =
1,048,576 Byte, which is only close to 1 (decimal) million (=mega) Byte, but not ending with a longer
sequence of 0s.
Hence, by interpreting 21 (and 42) as standing for “block” denoted by the symbol ■, and the many
zeros as a chain-link (technically speaking, the inclusion of the previous block hash into the next block)
by ○, we may, again, “depict” the number 21 ×10 representing the basic supply of smallest
subunits of Bitcoin as a block ■ chain ○○○○○…○○.
Media, Sports & Games
21
21 (Film)
On 28 March 2008, i.e., presumably during a decisive phase for Satoshi Nakamoto in creating Bitcoin,
the Columbia Pictures heist drama film “21” was released [412]. This movie, as well as others [413],
are based on the book “Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took
Vegas for Millions” [414]. Allegedly spiced with some dramatic exaggerations, this Hollywood
production describes the story the MIT Blackjack Team [320] that was believed to be founded around
1980. In the context of Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin, the following bits might be of interest: MIT
[415], Harvard [416], Las Vegas, financial (tuition) problems, scholarships, casinos, gambling, banking
games, and Blackjack [313], where the number 21 is of central importance.
The movie also features the so-called “Monty Hall Problem” [417], which is a brain teaser, in the form
of a probability puzzle, loosely based on the American television game show “Let's Make a Deal” [418]
and named after its original host [419]. The underlying mathematical problem was originally posed
(and solved) in a 1975 letter [420], and an article [421] submitted to the American Statistician [422].
Born in 1941, the author [423] is a professor emeritus of biostatistics at the University of California,
Berkeley [256] in the San Francisco Bay Area [257], which is known as the birthplace and hotspot of
the cypherpunk [177, 178] movement in the early 1990s. Note that these articles have been published
in 1975 [203], i.e., the same year Satoshi Nakamoto claims to have been born on his P2P Foundation
profile [191].
In the aftermath of its box office success, a racial “whitewashing” controversy emerged over the
decision to star the majority of the characters by white Caucasian Americans, even though the main
players in the book template were Asian-Americans; its only actor from this minority had one-note
designations as the squad's kleptomaniac and a slot-playing loser. Moreover, intra-Asian conflicts
arose as one (former) Chinese-American member of the MIT Blackjack team uttered "I would have
been a lot more insulted if they had chosen someone who was Japanese or Korean, just to have an
Asian playing me."
A Beautiful Mind (Film)
As it most likely attracted a similar audience, it is also noteworthy to look the Universal / Dreamworks
movie “A Beautiful Mind that started screening (in US cinemas) on 21/12/2001 (note the exclusive
composition of the date by the numbers 0,1,2,21) [424]. It is a Hollywood adapted biopic of John Nash
[63] (1928–2015), an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory
[425]. His work shed light onto the factors that govern chance and decision-making inside complex
systems found in everyday life.
In 1994, Nash was co-awarded the Nobel (Memorial) Prize in Economic Sciences [426] "for their
pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games" [427], and the prestigious
Abel Prize [428] in 2015. In 1959, Nash began showing clear signs of mental illness, and spent several
years at psychiatric hospitals being treated for schizophrenia [323]. After 1970, his condition slowly
improved, allowing him to return to academic work by the mid-1980s. The case of John Nash may
exhibit some (partial) overlap with Satoshi Nakamoto, e.g., around the buzz words genius [306], game
theory [425], encryption (ECC [405]), mental disorder [321], MIT [415], and Princeton [270].
Music Album
“Twenty One” [418] is the second studio album by the English indie rock band Mystery Jets [419]. It
was released in the UK on 24 March 2008; explains [420]: “Twenty One is the perfect name for this
album on more than one level. Identities are still being shaped during the first half of most people’s
20s.” Protecting his “identity” evidently also paramount for the staging the “mystery” of Satoshi
Nakamoto.
Note that the “21” [421] by the British artist Adele [422] was world's best-selling album of the year for
both 2011 and 2012, but obviously released post Bitcoin whitepaper [95]. The title refers to her
(approximate) age at the time of composing and recording, so most likely no connection to Bitcoin’s
choices for 21.
42
Due to the role of the binary operators that occurred already in the context of Bitcoin parameters for
doubling and halving, we explore “left-shifting”, i.e., doubling 21, to obtain 42 = 2 × 21. There are a
couple of intriguing correlations between Bitcoin and this number. It can be found in his emails with
an early adopter [370] that the number 21 emerged from halving Satoshi Nakamoto’s initial pitch of
42 million total supply (1) of BTC.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
At least in “nerdy” academic and techie circles around mathematicians, physicists, or computer
scientists, 42 is known as the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”
[429]; this absurdly simple number to a complex philosophical question is calculated after 7.5 million
years by the humanoid supercomputer “Deep Thought” [430] in “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”
[431]; this science-fiction comedy franchise was created by Douglas Adams [432], who died in 2001.
Originally a 1978 radio broadcast on BBC Radio 4, it was later adapted to other formats, including
stage shows, novels, comic books, a 1981 TV series, a 1984 text-based computer game, and a 2005
feature film [431].
Level 42
The “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything” [429-431]; also inspired
the name of the English jazz-funk band “Level 42” [433]. Formed on the Isle of Wight [434] in 1979,
the band disbanded in 1994, and reformed in 2001; they had a number of UK and worldwide hits
during the 1980s and 1990s. One of Level 42’s legendary songs is “Running in the Family” [435] from
their homonymous 1987-album [436].
This circumstance (weakly) implies that Bitcoin might have been developed by a multigeneration
group of relatives; such a peculiar multi-author constellation would explain some conundrums
regarding locations, time zones, spelling, typesetting, competences and historical embedding
Furthermore, strong family bonds offer enhanced cohesion for robust and sustained collusion
compared to a team of fairly independent players merely forged by complementary competences and
joined interests.
Coldplay Song
"42" [437] is a song by the British rock band Coldplay [438] (released on 12 June 2008); it is called "42"
after the favorite amongst some of its composers [439]. Its lyrics go:
Those who are dead are not dead
They're just living in my head
And since I fell for that spell
I am living there as well, oh
Time is so short
And I'm sure
There must be something more
Computer Science School
As a direct reference to this science-fiction franchise, the private, non-profit and tuition-free computer
science school “42” was opened in 2013 [440]. It was created and funded by a French billionaire [441]
with several businesses in the telecommunications and technology industry. This unconventional
name was an explicit reference to “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” [431].
42 Laws of Cricket
The beginnings of the of the sport of cricket [442] date back to the beginning in the late 16th century
in south-east England. Its rules are specified in a code called The Laws of Cricket which has a global
remit [443]. There are 42 Laws (always written with a capital "L"). The version of the code has been
owned and maintained by its custodian, the London-based Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) since 1788.
While it has significantly moved on by now as an open international sport including female
competitions, cricket still strongly roots in a deep tradition of a “Gentlemen” sport, with an air of
upper class and elite education in its home country England.
Cricket is predominantly popular in the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland,
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, West Indies, Bangladesh, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. These countries are all
affiliated with the former British Empire and the Commonwealth, where English, with a preference for
British spelling, is either the native language, or acts as lingua franca.
Texas 42
There is also a trick-taking domino game known as Texas 42 [444]. It is played with a standard set of
double six dominoes. 42 is often referred to as the "national game of Texas", where it was designated
the official “State Domino Game”.
Jackie Robinson
The number 42 is tightly affiliated with the legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson (1919 – 1972)
[445], the first black athlete to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) during the modern era. Robinson
played for the Brooklyn [446]. Since 1977, his famous jersey number 42 has been retired by his alma
mater UCLA, and by all MLB teams since 1977; commencing in 2004, each MLB player wears No. 42
on "Jackie Robinson Day” [447], which is celebrated on April 15.
Robinson’s outstanding role for sports and society is underpinned by the 2013 (i.e., after the 2008-
release of the Bitcoin whitepaper [101]) American biographical film “42” [448]. His story may give cues
to racial discrimination, for instance, felt by Satoshi Nakamoto as member of a (possibly Japanese-
American) minority, and to locations like New York (Brooklyn) and Los Angeles (UCLA [449], Dodgers,
who were, much controversially, moved to Los Angeles in 1957 [446, 450]), the metropolitan area
where a cypherpunk and strong “Satoshi Nakamoto candidate” [43, 141, 142] (and a Japanese-
American person accidentally sharing the name with Satoshi Nakamoto [141, 142]) resided at the time
of the release of Bitcoin.
Science Trivia
Geography
The possible meaning of the numbers 21 and 42 might also be scrutinized from a geographical
perspective. Yet, neither the 21st nor 42nd meridians east and west provided any locations that related
to Bitcoin, nor did their corresponding latitudes on the Southern hemisphere. In the North, the 21st
latitude [451] crosses Hawaii, and the 42nd parallel [452] Massachusetts (Boston), Connecticut, New
York, and Illinois (Chicago) – nothing super compelling overall, with the potential exception of
Massachusetts hosting MIT [415] and Harvard [416], as related to the film “21” [412], and the
University of Illinois Chicago [81, 453]. At the 42nd parallel, the rotational speed of the earth
approximately matches the speed of sound.
Biology
As one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in humans [454], chromosome 21 is both the smallest human
autosome and chromosome. Most people have two copies, while those with three copies of
chromosome 21 have Down syndrome, also called "trisomy 21". Chromosome 21 is associated with
diseases, disorders and conditions, such as cancers, intellectual disability, or early onset familial
Alzheimer's disease. A likely connection of chromosome 21 to Satoshi Nakamoto could not be spotted.
Sorting Circumstantial Evidence
Numbers and Numeral Systems
21
The most striking pointers gather around the number 21, which occurs in the rather free Bitcoin design
parameters: the total BTC supply capped to =21 ×10 BTC =21 ×10 Sat each halving
period 4 years corresponding to =21 ×10 blocks. Reportedly [136], this quantity, as
expressed in the smallest BTC unit of Sats, is derived from the 2008 global M1 money supply, as
expressed in cents.
On top of the rather weakly, copious other contexts indicate that the choice of 21 may have had
additional, non-exclusive interpretations that may have been encoded by Satoshi Nakamoto. 21 also
equals the cross sums of the “free digits” in his self-issued date of birth (05/04/75), and the time stamp
of block 1 (09/01/2009) [124] after his self-set mining gap to the genesis block [119, 120]. As a
reference to “block” – possibly the most frequent non-trivial word in the Bitcoin whitepaper [101], 21
also corresponds to the sum over the faces of a dice, which is the geometrical equivalent of a cube or
block. When expressing the supply limit of 21 ×10 BTC =2100000000000000 Sat in the decimal
space, the series of 0s certainly resembles a chain, thus depicting a blockchain.
Bitcoin was also launched in the 21st century, when his potential chess idol Bobby Fischer [195], who
conceived the famous “21-move brilliancy” [319], passed away (in January 2008). In March of 2008,
the film “21” was released, names after the central relevance of this number in the casino banking
game Blackjack.
0,1,2,4
The decimal number 21 yields an alternating “I0I0I” in the binary space, which might be deemed as
the elements (0) and links (I) constituting a (block-)chain. The 21 is also composed of the digits 2 and
1 of the base-2 system, which has the neutral element 0, and right- and left-shifting bits implementing
division by 2 (i.e., × 2) and doubling (i.e., × 2); these binary operators directly occur in the halving
period for the value of the initial mining reward, and 4 = 2 × 2 as the approximate period .
Somewhat surprising, the initial mining reward of 50 BTC was not chosen as a power of 2, but, in the
same way as the total supply (1) and the (target) block time =10 min, in a quantity complying
best with the decimal system. This also holds for =210,000 =21 ×10 blocks. Evidently
×4 years, which then leads to a last coinbase transaction awarded in a year starting with
21, theoretically around 2142. The octal system which is common to express digital storage size
utilized by Satoshi Nakamoto to express the (maximum) block size of 1 MB for the Bitcoin blockchain.
42
Doubling, or binary (left-shifting) of 21, yields the number 42 =21 × 2, again corresponding the to a
regularly alternating binary “chain” pattern “I0I0I0”. The number 42 also defines a (simple) magic cube
[410], which evokes the symbolism of blockchain. Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned that 42 million BTC
was his initial consideration for its total supply (1), so this notorious number was definitely on his
agenda.
Even more, the 42 constitites the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and
Everything” [429] as calculated and checked by the supercomputer “Deep Thought” [430] according
to the “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” [455], an entertaining comedy story that is very popular
amongst techies. Even the name of the British band “Level 42” [433] and a French computer science
school [440] was inspired by this multi-layered figure.
The 42 is also a sacred number in the historic Laws of Cricket [443], and the domino game Texas 42
[444, 448]. Moreover, 42 is associated with the jersey number of the famous baseballer Jackie
Robinson [445, 448], who broke the race boundaries in professional sport; the number 42 is retired to
all Major League Baseball franchises, and all players wear the number 42 once per season on “Jackie
Robinson day” [447]. The Northern latitude of 42 [445] cuts through the state of the New England
state of Massachusetts (latitude) [452], which occurs in the 2008-movie featuring the MIT Blackjack
[320] team and Harvard University [416].
While the occurrence of the number 42 is less prominent than 21 in the final version of the Bitcoin
implementation, the sheer fact that a supply of 42 million was Satoshi Nakamoto’s initial choice for
the total supply BTC highlights that this number was well on Satoshi Nakamoto’s radar. Therefore, the
numerous associations brought forward in this work on 42 ought to be considered for drafting his
mindset.
Pseudonym
The choice of his pseudonym and the nationality in his (mock) birth certificate clearly articulate Satoshi
Nakamoto’s anchoring to Japan. While this provenance is, most likely, a decoy, his particular choice of
a rather common Japanese name without reference to a celebrity, hints that Satoshi Nakamoto
wanted to convey a message. He might have been inspired by his connection to the Sakura House
[289, 290], a popular residence for foreigners in Tokyo, the nearby Nakano district [292] and Nakano-
sakaue station [291], and the “Nakano Sakaue gang” [77].
The choice his first name [144] is often translated as “intelligent history”, possibly indicating a stint,
e.g., as employee or contractor, in a national intelligence agency, or a corporate enterprise in the
context of cryptography and cybersecurity. The syllables Naka- [149] and -moto [150] are widespread
in Japanese last names. The entirety of his pseudonym might be creatively interpreted as “a genius
focused on a project”, or “the wise one of Chinese currency” in Chinese. The initials, in their Japanese
ordering NS, were even highlighted by Satoshi Nakamoto in an email to one of the early Bitcoin
adopters [406-408].
Calendar
Birth on 05 April 1975
Satoshi Nakamoto could evidently not change history to comply, so we should also consider the wider
context of the components of his self-fabricated date of birth. The departure of Bobby Fischer and
from the match for the World-Chess title [195] and the foundation of Microsoft [197] preceded his
birthday. In that year 1975 [203] saw the outskirts the Watergate scandal [204] which featured the
abuse of government agencies the FBI [159], the CIA [155], and the IRS [456] as political weapons. On
05 April 1933, private ownership of gold was declared illegal in the USA [217, 218]. Also in 1975, the
so-called Monty-Hall problem [417] was solved biostatistician Steve Selvin [457] from the University
of California, Berkeley [256]. Finally, the number 1957 results from swapping the last two digits on
the publication date of the final citation [244] in the Bitcoin whitepaper [101].
Bitcoin Whitepaper on 31 October 2008
The year 2008 say a train of happenings building towards the release of the Bitcoin whitepaper [101].
In January, Satoshi Nakamoto’s potential chess hero Bobby Fischer [195] who was famous for his “21-
move brilliancy” [319] passed away, the movie “21” [412] and the Mystery-Jets [458] album “Twenty-
One” [459, 460] were released in March, and the song “42” [437, 439] by Coldplay [438] in June. The
global financial crisis [340, 461] had its first doomsday with the collapse of one of the largest US
investment banks [343] on September 15 that year, i.e., just a few weeks prior to the release of the
Bitcoin whitepaper [101].
Saturday
There is also a markedly high frequency of Saturdays in the events that Satoshi Nakamoto had some
room to maneuver with. These are his date of birth on Saturday, 05/04/1975 [193], and the Genesis
block 0 [120] mined on Saturday, 03/01/2009 [344]. In Japanese time zone, also the release of the
seminal Bitcoin whitepaper was dated on Saturday, 01/11/2008 [396]. Note that in GMT / UTC or US
time zones, the announcement of Bitcoin v0.1 [123] was on Thursday, 08/01/2009 [462], and the
mining block 1 on 09/01/2009, or the publication of the Bitcoin whitepaper on 31/10,2008 fell on
Fridays. So, in general, a build-up of outcomes can be observed towards the end of the work week.
Locations
Pinning Satoshi Nakamoto to a fixed location has so far proven to be extremely difficult. While his self-
defined pseudonym and birth certificate point to Japan, few other evidence advocates Japanese
nationality. Instead, a chain of evidence [77, 289-292, 463, 464] mainly gained from the similarity of
his name to places in Tokyo, and the registration of the privacy-focused email domains [231-235]
Satoshi Nakamoto selected as part of his well-orchestrated effort to conceal his identity and
whereabouts, indicate that he might have had a spell in Tokyo, and an attraction to the culture, in
advance of creating Bitcoin.
However, time zone analysis of his postings after the release of the Bitcoin whitepaper reveals some
stays across various zones in the continental USA, which is supported by the role places like California
with the greater Los Angeles [258, 449, 450] and the Bay Area [257] / Silicon Valley, the state of
Massachusetts with the Boston area [415, 416], and Great Britain / The Commonwealth , which is
further supported by Satoshi Nakamoto’s spelling preference, and the citation of the London-based
“The Times” [122] newspaper in Bitcoin’s 2009-genesis block [119, 121].
Sport & Games
The various contexts disclosed some relevance of strategic games that are known to appeal to
mathematically highly gifted “brainiacs”, like Blackjack [313, 314], the Monty-Hall problem [417-419],
or chess [195, 319]. In addition, connections to athletic sports Baseball [445] and Cricket [442, 443]
are shown up, which enjoy particular (but not exclusive) popularity in North America, and in the
former colonies of the British Empire, respectively.
Ethnicity
The evidence collected so far also points at minority issues, such as the whitewashing of Asian-
Americans in the cast of the 2008-movie “21” [412], and the racial discrimination as epitomized by the
case of the African-American baseball legend Jackie Robinson [445, 448] and his iconic jersey number
42 [447].
Exposure to Intelligence Organizations
As a high-caliber cryptography expert, Satoshi Nakamoto was certainly also well aware of legal issues
around cryptography, like the perpetually smoldering conflict between freedom-of-speech [347] for
citizens on the one side, and crime-prevention and national security interests on the other.
Professionals in this highly demanding field are eagerly coveted by departments in federal three-letter
agencies as well as the corporate sector. It is also not uncommon that cryptographers in academia are
approached by intelligence institutions.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s unique mixture of interdisciplinary skills might roots from a designated training
in such organizations, who would have committed him to long-term confidentiality on information,
and to refrain from utilizing intelligence techniques acquired through them in external projects. Cases
like the Wikileaks [131, 357-360] disclosures, Silk Road [78, 345] and SEC [353, 465, 466] challenges to
the legitimacy of issuing cryptocurrencies before, during his brief online life, and even after his
unexpected exit from the Bitcoin scene might have distinctly sharpened his very pronounced
sensitivity for public exposure of himself, and his masterpiece.
Biographical Cues
Competences and Motivation
Without doubt, Satoshi Nakamoto, especially if assuming him to represent an individual, must cover
an extraordinarily broad spectrum of techno-scientific and economical competences. His amazing C++
programming skills are supplemented by a deeper understanding of distributed computing,
mathematics, game theory, the monetary system, banking, and law. Satoshi Nakamoto’s unusually
wide spectrum of relevant knowledge was paired with his outstanding ingenuity, creativity, resolve
and dedication, probably rooting in a very pronounced libertarian streak in his ideology.
Such staunch determination may have grown out of a substantial immersion in the cypherpunk
movement, and an irreconcilable personal aversion towards the legacy banking system; this
characteristic would be untypical for a person much younger than – say – the age of 25-30, and would
thus never have been personally exposed, and significantly delusioned by real-world professional
environments and financial matters. Satoshi Nakamoto’s work on Bitcoin may well have commenced
around August 2007 with the forerunners of the upcoming financial crisis [339], which has motivated
him to crack, for the first time in history, the very desirable goal of inventing “ultrasound digital
money”.
The tremendous intellectual and creative effort of creating Bitcoin certainly involved unstinted
commitment to long daily working hours without (project-related) technical or social communication
of the project to avoid compromising the shroud over his identity; managing such a rather extreme
social and psychological situation might imply a genius with some (mild) level of mental condition.
Such an extravagant, exceptionally talented individual must definitely have left highly visible marks
along his private life, as well as his educational and professional career.
Education & Career
With all this, Satoshi Nakamoto must still have had money to pay his everyday bills. Given his
frequently stated, pronounced despise for the banking establishment, it is unlikely that he was coming
from a wealthy background in 2007/2008 that let him live from inherited assets and passive income.
While there are examples of geniuses living a purposely austere lifestyle, e.g., by still living at advanced
age and deliberately jobless with their parents [335], such extreme modesty seems to clash with
Satoshi Nakamoto’s evident interest in monetary systems.
The previously used analysis of the work hours (on Bitcoin) and time zones when he submitted
postings and committed to the code repository in 2009/2010 [272, 274] indicates some interstate
travel in the USA or Canada, and some stints in Britain / Europe, the latter is also corroborated by the
preferred date format DD/MM/YYYY, and his (dominant) British spelling. Overall, it is likely that
Satoshi Nakamoto was commuting between the US and Europe.
His Bitcoin-related activity pattern peaked in February, followed by a valley until resuming again
towards the summer, resuming around June. Such monthly schedules would suggest an alignment
with typical college schedules, for instance, as a student, postdoc, or as a member of academic staff;
an experience in scientific publication is further backed by his use of (old-style) double-spacing after
the period.
However, other facts, like the unusual brevity and composition of references in his Bitcoin whitepaper,
or his first name meaning “intelligent history”, direct towards a designated training and job experience
in a three-letter secret service agency, which must have strictly obliged him towards high levels of
long-term secrecy on classified information and methods taught. This assumption was shared by
insiders that advised this work.
A personal connection to the 2008-film “21” taking place within East-coast elite-college environments
(MIT, Harvard) also fits well into this framework. The “Saturday” / end -of-the-week culture revealed
earlier might not specifically underpin his academic embedding, as it is rather common in many
professional environments, like external consultants who often work from their homebase on Fridays.
Genius
This document revealed compounding evidence that, in addition to practical or logical explanations,
Satoshi Nakamoto has encoded a mixture of information and pun into a set of “free” variables, like
select Bitcoin parameters, certain dates, and his alias. It is important to note that these messages do
not (directly) interfere with his pronounced quest for obfuscating his identity and whereabouts;
instead, these witty riddles reflect the signature of a genius who cannot resist putting his mind to work
to create jokes that, at least instantaneously, only resonate with similarly endows superbrains.
In a more creative interpretation, these messages tell about a genius who, while being capable of
doing amazing things, also has a normal life, with plenty of personal frustrations, and possibly even
suffering from social isolation, minority discrimination, and a (mild) form of mental disorder, which
has been reported for many other famous inventors and scientists.
Biography and Psychogram – An Attempt
After a deep dive the substantial amount of existing research, and a set of new circumstantial evidence
exposed in this work, it becomes clear that Satoshi Nakamoto used his unquestionable ingenuity,
multidisciplinary competences, and stout resolve to create Bitcoin and, likewise, to systematically
obscure his identity and whereabouts since 2008, i.e., for far more than a decade by now. The author
agrees with the vast majority of the Bitcoin community that we should be very grateful to Satoshi
Nakamoto for his priceless gift of inventing and implementing the first practically functional and
globally inclusive cryptocurrency based on a decentralized, public, and distributed ledger to the world.
Yet, from a history of science and technology perspective, as well as to anticipate possible fallout for
the future of Bitcoin, it is worthwhile elucidating the story, character, motivation, and mentality of its
enigmatic inventor. Satoshi Nakamoto’s pivotal masterwork was formed under the impact of the
happenings in history prior to, and at the time of launching the whitepaper.
Just only a few years after its birth, Bitcoin has swiftly turned into a seminal disruptor of the 21st-
century technology, and has laid the foundation for adding a native value layer to the present Web2.0.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s emerging bio sketch is just to be regarded as a best attempt, as it is largely
anchored in an undoubtedly ever evolving collection of circumstantial evidence and its resulting, often
unavoidably subjective and possibly overinterpreted conclusions. Still, here is how the available pieces
of the unavoidably incomplete puzzle might optimally assemble.
General Profile
The author would consider Satoshi Nakamoto a male individual who was raised, or has spent formative
years, in a British cultural background. He resided, and / or regularly travelled to and within the United
States, and had some fondness of (elements of) the Japanese culture. The ingenious creator of Bitcoin
most likely belongs to the (extended) Generation X age group, so he might have been around 30 ± 5
years old in the later 2000s.
Satoshi Nakamoto must have had excellent formal or autodidactic, fast-tracked and award-decorated
education in a rather rare portfolio of disciplines, plus a creative mind for thinking outside the box,
and an unsettled resolve for implementation. This all perfectly converged for pulling off Bitcoin in
2007/2008.
His interest in “sound money” may well have been accompanied or sparked by events around the turn
of the millennium, such as the start of the Eurozone [467] in 1999, or the burst of the dot-com bubble
[468] in the early 2000s, when Satoshi Nakamoto discovered cryptocurrencies as a means to
implement his libertarian ideals; since then, he might have (possibly anonymously or via another alias)
followed, posted and interacted with the cypherpunk and cryptographer scenes.
Satoshi Nakamoto may have had some disappointing experiences, such as bullying by peers or
teachers as a prodigy child, for instance, as a (Commonwealth) expatriate, or pertaining to an ethnic
minority, e.g., as a Japanese (American). Possibly treated as a maverick geek, Satoshi Nakamoto might
have been ridiculed by envious fellow students who were sent by their wealthy family to elite colleges,
and showed off by a rich-kid lifestyle with prestigious cars and high-fly lifestyle, while he was socially
somewhat isolated, and just getting along on a rather tight scholarship budget.
Satoshi might have found consolation in computer and internet technologies, strategy (banking or
board) games like Blackjack, Poker or Chess, following idols with similar mental and social issues
accompanying their genius, like the extravagant world chess champion Bobby Fischer, or the game
theorist John Nash, whom he could intellectually and emotionally emphasize with.
His exuberant motivation for a working extended periods with immense time and emotional
commitment on a cryptocurrency must have been rooted from a deep frustration with the traditional
banking system, paired with a distinct libertarian attitude, as prevalent throughout the cypherpunk
movement. However, possibly due to his age, he might only have discovered and become thoroughly
familiarized with this rather niche scene and predecessor cryptocurrencies at the time when he began
pondering and working on Bitcoin in the send half of the 2000s.
Around the year 2006, Satoshi Nakamoto had a longer stay in the Tokyo where he enjoyed the local
culture and socialized with a similar-minded community; these circles may have been comprised of
Japanophiles, digital nomads, free-speech advocates, and privacy-oriented internet natives, which
helped him to systematically cover his identity from an early stage, and, in parallel, to decisively
enhance his interest in the economically quite radical objectives promoted by the cypherpunk scene.
Under the impact of these circumstances, Satoshi Nakamoto gradually developed an increasing,
eventually quasi-obsessive passion for cryptocurrencies, which offered a path to address severe issues
he affiliated with the corrupt banking system by leveraging his outstanding intellectual capabilities
and unstinted work attitude.
Though the interplay of these experiences and capabilities, he decided to devote himself to the Bitcoin
project in the second half of 2007, when first signs of the upcoming financial crisis already
materialized. Considering his accelerated education, a dedicated training in cryptography or
cybersecurity, e.g., in the corporate arena or a three-letter agency, Satoshi Nakamoto entered his self-
chosen loneliness within a 1.5-year Bitcoin development tunnel, possibly as an intensive, after-work
until midnight pastime.
During this decisive period, Satoshi Nakamoto was getting even more motivated by the continuing
concurrently escalating financial crisis, and his concerns about free speech that he was familiar with
from the preceding or emerging cases, such as Bernstein v. USA, Napster, Megaupload, or Wikileaks,
were amplified.
He might have been emotionally touched by the death of Bobby Fischer, and inspired by the movie 21
elaborating on “breaking the bank” in the first quarter of 2008, and the related 2001-title “A Beautiful
Mind”, which were both featuring priority issues of his own life. With a fondness for pattern
recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto has also enjoyed multifold overlap of his Bitcoin parameters with fun
and coincidental interpretations of the number 21 in relation to math, geometry, history, politics,
media and sports, and the decentralized Bitcoin “chain of blocks” he invented. Similarly entertaining
correlations also hold for the number 42, like the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the “Magic
Cube”, the Laws of Cricket, and Jackie Robinson in Baseball.
Around August 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto had most of the Bitcoin package wrapped up; however, not
having been a seasoned member of the cypherpunk and academic research community, he was
somewhat unsure whether he properly accounted for prior art, which was very hard to pinpoint and
retrieve with the traditional instruments of used in scientific publishing; in fact, he eventually left out
some major work and included some rather “odd” citations to the references of the Bitcoin
whitepaper, to an extent that his document would have likely been returned for major revision after
peer review by a classical journal; in hindsight, Satoshi Nakamoto might have been flabbergasted that
he (independently) reinvented major elements of Bitcoin’s precursors that displayed technical or
motivational overlap.
Satoshi Nakamoto seemed to be strong to endure the initial silence, and the mixed, mostly critical and
dismissive echo in the cryptographer mailing list to the publication of the whitepaper on 31 October
2008. After the discussion picked up, he initiated a designated Bitcoin mailing list in December 2008.
While finalizing his work on Bitcoin v0.1, Satoshi Nakamoto came across the now legendary “The
Times” headline; this unique opportunity to express his motivation and dislike of the monetary system
prompted him to expedite the mining of the Genesis block 0 on 03 January 2009, even though he still
wanted to perform some polishing before uploading the code to a public repository almost a week
later.
Over the next about two years, Satoshi Nakamoto interacted at fluctuating intensity with the
continuously growing Bitcoin community. He seemed to have been quite appreciative of
contributions, but also showed traits of a benevolent dictator, and notable peaks of his positing and
commitment to the code over the course of the years.
While nowadays the Bitcoin community tends to perceive him akin to a divine entity, the level of
respect towards Satoshi Nakamoto in these early days in the online fora was occasionally appallingly
low, and his natural authority even occasionally challenged. Over the course of time, he began
transferring the stewardship of Bitcoin development and mailing lists to trusted stakeholders. Satoshi
Nakamoto never met, at least not under his pseudonym, in any form, neither by voice, video nor face-
to-face, nor in person, with other members of the Bitcoin community, a practice that is quite common
in online interest groups.
Towards the end of 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto might have gotten increasingly alienated from the
budding early-adopter community, discouraged about the attitude they showed towards him,
disillusioned about the feasibility of his initial objectives; furthermore, Satoshi Nakamoto might have
considered his creative part in setting up Bitcoin delivered, faced issues balancing his personal
commitments between Bitcoin and his private life and job, which was needed to pay his bills, or look
after his newly founded family. Moreover, Satoshi Nakamoto might have, as per his last online posting
in December 2010, indeed gone on to new challenges that his exceptionally gifted mind could play
with and solve.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s gradual exit from Bitcoin towards April 2011 was also spurred by the arrival of
Bitcoin in mainstream media, and in particular through discussions about Bitcoin adoption in
circumventing the financial blockade of Wikileaks, and an upcoming hearing called for by the CIA. He
definitely wanted to strictly maintain his own privacy and keep the nascent Bitcoin project out of the
limelight and scrutiny by the press and federal agencies. This hyper-cautious attitude might have
resulted from professional commitments on strict, and long-term confidentiality he signed with three-
letter agencies or industry; their potential breach might lead to seriously sanctions, such as
imprisonment; Satoshi Nakamoto was certainly aware of related cases, e.g., from peers, colleagues,
or in the public media outlets.
After he completely vanished from the cyberspace, he did still not want to jeopardize his brainchild
and felt a profound moral obligation to desist pushing certain buttons. Satoshi Nakamoto believed it
was unfair to move the BTC he rather easily mined in 2009, as a lion share of them would be attributed
to him. Also, the fear of legal prosecution, e.g., by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), due
unauthorized issuance of Bitcoin as a security might have led to a firm pledge to not touch or even
burn about 1 million BTC, e.g., by locking up or even destroying the private keys. (In principle, the
private keys might have also been deleted or lost by mistake, but this is unlikely for a computer-versed
cryptographer.)
Satoshi Nakamoto might still enjoy operating in an unnoticed “God-mode” in the Bitcoin community,
or even participating under his real name, or another mock identity. After all, Satoshi Nakamoto just
retired his pseudonym, possibly with a self-imposed pledge to only resurface in emergency situations,
such as in the resolution of the civil war about Bitcoin XT, or for relieving a name-alike Japanese-
American from unwanted public exposure as the (wrong) person behind Bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto might nowadays be very wealthy, profiting from the Bitcoin he mined in a more
competitive environment post 2010, and lucrative follow-on businesses. While his focus might have
shifted to other exciting, possibly even diametrically different projects, Satoshi Nakamoto still
remains, like any parent, very proud of the breath-taking success of his now adolescent masterpiece
Bitcoin. In public, Satoshi Nakamoto would surely exude the aura of a genius, but otherwise be a
normal human with his repertoire of strengths, weaknesses, concerns, flaws and vices in his character.
Example
Just to note that this article does not want to dox a particular person (or group) as “Satoshi
Nakamoto”, also because the author simply does not know. This section is mainly intended to
demonstrate how the rather comprehensive collection of initially unrelated sources compiled in this
article can make sense in terms of matching a person in the real world. Satoshi Nakamoto can well be
portrayed as a strongly ideals-driven, legally well versed, very privacy-conscious, inter-continentally
engaged, highly gifted and productive modern-age cryptologist [469] and polymath Daniel J. Bernstein
[81, 82]. His name was very rarely mentioned in the context of Bitcoin [61, 470, 471].
Bernstein’s core research focus has not been on cryptocurrency [2], but he might have suddenly been
drawn into a rabbit hole when, out of sheer curiosity, he was taking a glance at the state-of-the-art in
the mid-2000s. So, while staying active in his main daytime job academia, he created Bitcoin as a
transient “hobby” excursion to challenge his brilliant intellect. Preferring to stay in incognito mode,
he filed under a stage name “Satoshi Nakamoto”. After his exodus, Bernstein successfully “moved on”
to advance exciting new ideas revolving about his mainstay interests in cryptography [472].
As a student in University of California, Berkeley [256], and later as a professor at the University of
Illinois [453], he wanted to publish a paper and associated source code on his “Snuffle” [473]
encryption system. Starting in 1995, and later even representing himself, Bernstein ran a multi-year,
multi-stage series of court cases on whether software source code was protected by the First
Amendment of the US Constitution [348]; these cases addressed whether that the government's
regulations preventing his publication, and thus the export of cryptography from the United States,
were unconstitutional [347].
Born in 1971, the extraordinary American-German researcher was already high-ranked at young age
in prestigious talent competitions, awarded a M.A. in mathematics from New York University [474] in
1991, and a PhD in 1995 from the University of California, Berkeley [256], i.e., in the Bay Area [257],
the birthplace of the cypherpunk [177, 178] movement in the first half of the 1990s.
His graduate studies were supervised by Hendrik Lenstra [246], who worked principally in
computational number theory and is well known as the discoverer of the elliptic curve factorization
method, later at Leiden University [475], in the Netherlands [189], i.e., Benelux [190]. Elliptic Curve
Cryptography (ECC) [405] methods are used in Bitcoin, and Lenstra was even briefly suggested as
“Satoshi Nakamoto” [25] based on the Dutch IP address as the origin of the previously mentioned,
mysterious postings of “X” titled “Virtual peer to peer banking” on the Usenet [181] groups
alt.internet.p2p and uk.finance [182]. Could “Satoshi Nakamoto” be embodied by a junior-senior
academic dream team?
Bernstein is a visiting professor at CASA (“Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries”) [476]
of the Ruhr University Bochum [477], Germany, and a research professor of Computer Science at the
University of Illinois Chicago [453], USA. (Note that Chicago is on the 42nd parallel North [452].) Before
this, he was a professor in, and still closely collaborates [478-480] with the department of
mathematics and computer science at the Eindhoven University of Technology [481] in the
Netherlands [189].
Hence, there is a tangible link to the “odd” second citation [239] from a “networking” meeting in
Benelux [190] region (which seemed to have also been presented only days later [249] at Stanford
[250]) in the Bitcoin whitepaper [101]. For the last three decades, Bernstein has been giving talks all
over the planet [482], including in 2006 on “High-speed cryptographic functions” [464] at Chuo [483],
a private flagship research university in Tokyo, Japan. His densely packed travel schedule might also
explain his comment on temporary loss of online connectivity in his communication.
His name also surfaced in the context of the above-described Keccak-SHA-3 controversy [363-367]. In
its aftermath, an article on “Sakura tree coding” was published [463], acknowledging him, and the
NIST [361, 362] hash team, for ”useful discussions”. Note the astonishing relation of his day of birth
around the Japanese cherry blossom, the striking name matching with the previously occurring
“Sakura House” [289-291] accommodation and its Tokyo neighborhoods [292, 293], and the
registration of the privacy web services [77, 231-236] registered to the same facility.
Remarkably, Bernstein’s Google Scholar profile [472] displays one 2012-publication [484] in Japanese
kanji [485] writing; its senior author is the accomplished Kouichi Sakurai [486], a professor of
mathematical informatics at Kyushu University [487] in Fukuoka [488], Japan. Surprisingly, the
generation-X [198] cryptologist is not listed as an author, but only cited with his 2009 book entitled
“Post Quantum Cryptography” [489, 490]. This may underpin his high academic reputation and
possible links to Japan.
Certainly, a whole bunch of open questions remain, e.g., on the riddles and puns elaborated in this
article, but, arguably, there are no hard contradictions either. Yet, an interest or direct link to
blockchain and cryptocurrencies is clearly missing. Again, the author does not contend to have found
the real Satoshi Nakamoto, he merely wanted to exemplify how a large stack of systematically
categorized circumstantial and direct evidence may produce a lead, or potentially dismiss a “Satoshi
Nakamoto” claim.
Summary & Outlook
This paper has identified several somewhat free parameters that define in the design of the Bitcoin
blockchain, his stage name, and the dates set by its creator to extract. Even though Satoshi Nakamoto
never seems to have deposited directions to search for puzzles, which actually fits his enigmatic
character and baffling twist and turns, copious evidence was discovered along this article to draft
biography. Such compounding of cues strongly suggests that they were deliberately enclosed by
Satoshi Nakamoto.
While each piece of the puzzle and its “exegesis” might justifiably be challenged on an individual level,
the striking accumulation of evidence around his pseudonym, the numbers 21 and 42, the binary
system, and symbolism match well with a likely personality, as well as locations, dates and happenings
that unfolded in politics, the economy, history, media and sports related to Satoshi Nakamoto and
Bitcoin; this large stack of diverse circumstantial evidence unveils a very privacy conscious, reclusive,
quite omniscient, multi-facetted and creative tech genius.
Dovetailing these discoveries with the swath of preceding research on Satoshi Nakamoto
amalgamates to a still hypothetical, but consistent partial biography and psychogram of an
intellectually abundantly endowed, altruistic, sensitive and, at least in the eyes of the general public,
erratic person that is, by embodying this unique spectrum of traits, unprecedented in the history of
science and technology.
Even though not pursued in this work, the diversity and inconsistency of certain information might
also be attributed to a confined group, e.g., with a shared history in a federal or corporate
cryptography department, or even a family combo, e.g., a father-son duo, that conspired for the
development of Bitcoin, possibly coordinated by a designated leader. The assumption of an expert
squad might also explain the unusual blend of US-American and British artefacts attributed to Satoshi
Nakamoto.
This work refrained from fielding new or supporting existing names, or from infringing with the privacy
of the real person(s) that has (so far) successfully perched behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
Unsurprisingly, as the evidence discovered in the fabric of Bitcoin were deployed by himself, Satoshi
Nakamoto would have hardly included anything that unwraps his highly refined disguise of identity.
His encrypted messages were mostly providing a peek into important happenings, his witty humor,
and possibly exposing certain sentiments.
However, the compiled evidence might serve to probe the list of past or upcoming nominations, or to
debunk self-appointed fake “Satoshis”; while the story drafted here will certainly not hold in all its
detail, good arguments would have to be presented for deviations, and convincing alternatives would
have to be presented in order to support any “Satoshi” hypothesis. For now, the choice to apply the
catalogue of characteristics excavated in this work to “Satoshi Nakamoto candidates” is up to the
reader. Rather than being driven by selling names, matches to the profile proposed here, with rather
moderate and reclusive characters, should be considered, while honoring their preference for privacy.
It is to be expected that such individuals would bluntly deny their involvement in the creation of
Bitcoin.
After all, true finality of Satoshi Nakamoto’s real identity and aliveness might not be achievable, given
that his private keys may have been, whether intentionally or forcefully, burned, shared or transferred
within a cohort of creators, their entourage, or to externals. At the end of the day, the Bitcoin
blockchain is only equipped with a native value, but not an identity layer that next-generation
blockchains aspire to integrate. The author believes that the Bitcoin mastermind would nowadays be
more than happy to chime in with the motto “We are all Satoshi!”.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to some of the grands of cryptography and blockchain I got the opportunity to have quite
revealing and inspiring communication with. I also enjoyed help of various the readers of my drafts,
whether experts of the topic, and those with non-blockchain backgrounds.
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Appendix
Request for Comment to “Satoshi Nakamoto”
The present work produced a hypothetical biography, psychogram and mindset of Satoshi Nakamoto
at the time of conceiving, developing, releasing, improving and departing from his brainchild Bitcoin.
Table 2 lists a diverse collection of items that a Satoshi Nakamoto candidate could be asked to
comment on, including suggest impact weighting. As many items are derived from circumstantial
evidence, it is to be expected that candidates would not be able to have any meaningful comment on
them, and may then be “allowed” to just delete a certain number of them.
Table 2 ‘Request for comment’ catalogue for proposed or self-appointed Satoshi Nakamoto candidates. Each entry has an
impact factor between 0 (lowest) and 5; columns with a threshold with a score, and a weighted result (impact × score) may
be appended. Moreover, a certain number – say 10 – of less-relevant lines, e.g., possessing an impact of less than 3, may be
deleted from this compilation.
Historical Excerpts related to Satoshi Nakamoto & Bitcoin
Events that possibly impacted Satoshi Nakamoto for conceiving Bitcoin in 2007 [491], the publication
of the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 [341], containing an unusual reference to 1957 [265], the launch of
the Bitcoin blockchain in 2009 [492], and his active years of Bitcoin development 2009 [492] and 2010
[493], and his final email messages in 2011 [494].
Year 1957 [265]
• March 4 – Standard & Poor's first publishes the S&P 500 Index in the United States.
• April – IBM sells the first compiler for the Fortran scientific programming language.
• May 3 – Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley agrees to move the team from Brooklyn,
New York, to Los Angeles.
• September 9 – The Civil Rights Act of 1957 is enacted, establishing the United States
Commission on Civil Rights.
Impact
Born around mid-1970s 4
Formati ve cultures: UK & North America 4
English: (quasi) native fluency 4
Temporarily without internet connection 3
Ethnic minority / ex patri ate 1
Interest for cypherpunk movement in 2000s 3
Time for creati ng Bi tcoin i n 2007/2008 4
The Times headline in Genesis bl ock 0 4
Gap between blocks 0 and 1 in January 2009 4
Desi gn paramete rs: 21, 42 & binary operators 3
Citation [2]: Benelux meeting 3
Ci tation [8] : 1957 boo k 3
Adding hashcash, b-money post-scriptum 3
Leaving out: Chaum's work, Szabo's Bit Gold 3
USA / Britain (Europe) 3
Stay in North-American or GMT time zones 3
Bay Area, Los Angeles, Boston 3
Tokyo / Japan
Genius 4
Creati ve 3
Reclusive 3
Privacy consciou s 5
Passi onate about i deals 4
Resolve for working extremely hard 3
Seemingly erratic decision making at times 1
Falling out of the norm 2
Mental condition 1
Cypherpunk 3
Libe rtarian 3
Aversion against legacy banking system 4
Ultrasound money 4
Bio
Bitcoin
Location
Character
Ideals
Whitepaper
Impact
Cryptography 4
Cryptocurrency 4
Computer science 3
C++ programming skills 5
Mathematics / STEM 3
Distribute d systems 3
Network computing 3
Game theory 2
Financial systems 3
Law: Freedom of speech & financial regulation 2
Fast-tracked e ducation 3
Scholarships & awards 2
Brief exposure to scientific publishing 2
Not highly accomplished, academic researcher 2
Experience with intelligence service 3
Experience with corporate cybersecurity 2
British spelling 4
Two spaces after period 4
Initials "NS" in Bitcoin address 4
Strategic games (e .g., Chess, Blackjack) 3
Pattern recognition, symbolism 3
Link to Japan, e.g., travel, culture, language 2
Link toSakura House, Nakano-sakaue 2
Connection to Michael Weber 1
Striking frequency of "Saturdays" 2
Benelux meeting in 1999 in citations 3
1957-edition of tex tbook in citations 3
Reason for not coming out 5
Not sending on- or off-chain messages 5
Resi sting t o touch 2009- BTC 5
Continued involvement in Bitcoin / crypto 1
Involvement in new, exciting projects 1
Education & Academia
Job History
Pecularities
Post departure
Competences
• October 04 - Space Age – Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1, the first
artificial satellite to orbit the earth.
• October 10 - U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower apologizes to the finance minister of Ghana,
Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, after he was refused service in a Dover, Delaware, restaurant.
• October 31 – Toyota begins exporting vehicles to the United States, beginning with the Toyota
Crown and the Toyota Land Cruiser.
• November 3 – Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 2, with the first animal to
orbit the Earth (a dog named Laika) on board; there is no technology available to return it to
Earth.
Year 1975 [203]
• January 1 – Watergate scandal (United States): John N. Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman and John
Ehrlichman are found guilty of the Watergate cover-up.
• January 8 – U.S. President Gerald Ford appoints Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to head a
special commission looking into alleged domestic abuses by the CIA.
• February 21 – Watergate scandal: Former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell,
and former White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, are sentenced to
between 30 months and 8 years in prison.
• April 3 – Bobby Fischer refuses to play in a chess match against Anatoly Karpov, giving Karpov
the title.
• April 4 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
• April 5 – Satoshi Nakamoto is “born” [191, 192].
• June 10 – In Washington, D.C., the Rockefeller Commission issues its report on CIA abuses,
recommending a joint congressional oversight committee on intelligence.
• October 1 – Thrilla in Manila: Muhammad Ali defeats Joe Frazier in a boxing match in Manila,
Philippines.
• October 31 – The Queen single "Bohemian Rhapsody" is released. It later becomes one of their
most popular songs.
• November 29 – The name "Micro-soft" (for microcomputer software) is used by Bill Gates in
a letter to Paul Allen for the first time (Microsoft becomes a registered trademark on
November 26, 1976).
• December 8 – New York City is approved for bailout of 2.3 billion each year through 1978 –
6.9 billion total.
Year 2007 [491]
• May – Forerunners of financial crisis [340, 461]
• 29/06/2007 The iPhone, the first modern smartphone, is released in the United States. It
was later released in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland
and Austria in November 2007.
• 07/11/2007 Whistle-blower website WikiLeaks leaks the standard US army protocol at
Guantanamo Bay.
Year 2008 [341]
• 01/01/2008 Cyprus and Malta adopt the euro currency.
• 21/01/2008 Stock markets around the world plunge amid growing fears of a U.S. Great
Recession, fueled by the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis.
• 21/01/2008 Online activist group Anonymous initiates Project Chanology, after a leaked
interview of Tom Cruise by the Church of Scientology is published on YouTube, and the Church
of Scientology issued a "copyright infringement" claim. In response, Anonymous sympathizers
took to the streets to protest outside the church (after February 10), while the church's
websites and centers were getting DoS attacks, phone line nukes, and black faxes.
• 18/02/2008 WikiLeaks releases allegations of illegal activities carried out by the Cayman
Islands branch of Swiss banking corporation Julius Baer; a subsequent lawsuit against
WikiLeaks prompts a temporary suspension of the website, but uproar about violations of
freedom of speech causes WikiLeaks to be brought back online.
• 09/15/2008 Stocks fall sharply Monday on a triptych of Wall Street woe: Lehman Brothers'
bankruptcy filing, Merrill Lynch's acquisition by Bank of America, and AIG's unprecedented
request for short-term financing from the Federal Reserve.
• 29/09/2008 Following the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, The
Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 777.68 points, hitherto the largest single-day point loss in
its history.
• 03/10/2008 Global financial crisis : U.S. President George W. Bush signs the revised
Emergency Economic Stabilization Act into law, creating a 700-billion-dollar Treasury fund to
purchase failing bank assets.
• 31/10/2008 Satoshi Nakamoto releases Bitcoin whitepaper
• 04/11/2008 Democratic U.S. Senator Barack Obama is elected the 44th President of the
United States, making him the first African-American president.
• Beijing Olympics (08-24 August 2008 [495])
o Olympics were big mainstream news these weeks of August 2008
o Satoshi Nakamoto was evidently not much interested in following sports
o Registering domain bitcoin.org [102, 103] on 18/08/2008 [496]
o Communication with Adam Back and Wei Dai
o Final stages of authoring whitepaper and coding Bitcoin
Year 2009 [492]
• January 28 – WikiLeaks releases 86 intercepted telephone recordings of politicians and
businessmen involved in the 2008 Peru oil scandal
• June 25 – The death of American pop star Michael Jackson triggers an outpouring of
worldwide grief. Online, reactions to the event cripple several major websites and services, as
the abundance of people accessing the web addresses pushes internet traffic to
unprecedented and historic levels.
• July 22 – The longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, lasting up to 6 minutes and 38.86
seconds (0.14 seconds shorter than 6 minutes and 39 seconds), occurs over parts of Asia and
the Pacific Ocean.
• September 22 – WikiLeaks exposes the contents of Kaupthing Bank's internal documents prior
to the Icelandic Financial Crisis. These documents showed suspicious amounts of money were
loaned to bank owners, and debts being written off.
• WikiLeaks leaked the membership listing of a radical political group known as the British
National Party.
Year 2010 [493]
• April 3 – The first iPad was released.
• April 5 - Julian Assange leaks footage of a 2007 airstrike in Iraq titled "Collateral Murder" on
the website WikiLeaks.
• May 2 – The eurozone and the International Monetary Fund agree to a €110 billion bailout
package for Greece. The package involves sharp Greek austerity measures.
• May 6 – The 2010 Flash Crash, a trillion-dollar stock market crash, occurs over 36 minutes,
initiated by a series of automated trading programs in a feedback loop.
• July 13 – Microsoft ends extended support for Windows 2000.
• October 6 – Instagram was launched.
• October 23 – In preparation for the Seoul summit, finance ministers of the G-20 agree to
reform the International Monetary Fund and shift 6% of the voting shares to developing
nations and countries with emerging markets.
• November 17 – Researchers at CERN trap 38 antihydrogen atoms for a sixth of a second,
marking the first time in history that humans have trapped antimatter.
• November 21 – Eurozone countries agree to a rescue package for the Republic of Ireland from
the European Financial Stability Facility in response to the country's financial crisis.
• November 28 – WikiLeaks releases a collection of more than 250,000 American diplomatic
cables, including 100,000 marked "secret" or "confidential".
• November 29 – The European Union agree to an €85 billion rescue deal for Ireland from the
European Financial Stability Facility, the International Monetary Fund and bilateral loans from
the United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden.
Year 2011 [494]
• 01/01 Estonia officially adopts the Euro currency and becomes the 17th Eurozone country.
• April 24 – The 2011 Guantanamo Bay files leak occurs, WikiLeaks and other organisations
publishing 779 classified documents about Guantanamo Bay detainees, and it had been
exposed 150 innocent citizens from Afghanistan and Pakistan were held in the camp without
trial and detainees being as young as 14 years old.
• May 1 – U.S. President Barack Obama announces that Osama bin Laden, the founder and
leader of the militant group Al-Qaeda, was killed on May 2, 2011 (PKT, UTC+05) during an
American military operation in Pakistan.
• May 16 – The European Union agrees to a €78 billion rescue deal for Portugal. The bailout
loan will be equally split between the European Financial Stabilization Mechanism, the
European Financial Stability Facility, and the International Monetary Fund.
• August – Stock exchanges worldwide suffer heavy losses due to the fears of contagion of the
European sovereign debt crisis and the credit rating downgraded as a result of the debt-ceiling
crisis of the United States.
• September 17 – Occupy Wall Street protests begin in the United States. This develops into the
Occupy movement which spreads to 82 countries by October.
• October 27 – After an emergency meeting in Brussels, the European Union announces an
agreement to tackle the European sovereign debt crisis which includes a writedown of 50% of
Greek bonds, a recapitalization of European banks and an increase of the bailout fund of the
European Financial Stability Facility totaling to €1 trillion.
Sum Fun Facts
21 [497, 498]
• 21 is the name of an ancient card game (s. Movie “21”), with its most modern variant played
in casinos all over the world. This more commonly known version is the American game
Blackjack.
• 21 is the atomic number of the chemical element scandium. Discovered in 1879, it is classified
as a rare-earth element.
• The 21st amendment of the US constitution actually negated the effects of the 18th
amendment, which was originally put in place to prohibit alcohol on a national scale.
• According to the Bible there were 21 acts of rebellion committed by the Israelites to break
free from Egyptian control.
• In Tarot, the number 21 is related to the card The World. One of the many meanings of this
card is to have the world at your feet!
• There were 21 shillings in a guinea, a form of currency used by Great Britain from 1663 all
the way until 1816, when they were replaced by the pound.
• During the First World War the Japanese Empire sent a list of 21 demands to the Chinese
government. These demands were related to the control of the region of Manchuria, and were
opposed by the UK and the US [499].
• 21 guns are fired to honor heads of state, such as royalty in the UK, and the President of the
USA. Known as the 21-gun salute, this tradition goes all the way back to the times when the
navies of the world still shot cannonballs.
• The summer and winter solstices take place (usually) on June 21 and December 21
respectively.
• There is a lake in the US state of Minnesota called Twentyone Lake.
• 21 is a triangle number – it is the sum of the first six whole numbers (1+2+3+4+5+6=21).
• A game of badminton ends when a player reaches 21 points.
• Three-on-three basketball, aka 3x3, is a single period of 10 minutes, with the winner the first
team to score 21 points (or be closest to 21 at the end of 10 minutes).
• 21 in Roman numerals is XXI.
• Forever 21 in Tokyo, Japan (closed 2019) [296]
4 and 44
• 4 sounds like “death” in Chinese, making it an unlucky number
• Now, at least two new spires in Boston are skipping the 44th floor (and one the fourth floor)
in deference to the superstitions of expected buyers from East Asia, particularly China
Numerology
Possibly just for the fun of it, Satoshi Nakamoto might also resorted to numerology [500], which is the
pseudoscientific belief in a divine or mystical relationship between a number, and one or more
attributes. It is also the study of the numerical value of the letters in words, names, and ideas.
Numerology is often associated with the paranormal, alongside astrology and similar to divinatory
arts.
While this connection is highly speculative, it is still interesting, or at least entertaining, to look at a
rather abstruse article in advance of 11th anniversary of the registration of bitcoin.org on 18/08/2008
[501]. This publication establishes a relationship between Bitcoin and the (undocumented)
numerology [502] of the Chaldean or Neo-Babylonian Empire [503]: “The compound number of 21/3
means that one wants to crack the code into gaining ultimate success that will be ever ongoing
throughout one’s entire life. However, if it is unbalanced, one will have the feeling of often being close
to the total success, but the success seems further away than initially anticipated. Therefore, if it’s
unbalanced, one’s life might feel like walking through a tunnel of a constant learning process.”
