Did Satoshi Nakamoto create Bitcoin single-handedly? If yes, how?
This question originally appeared on Quora, the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answers below are by Ravinder Deol, Min Park, Steven Hager and Zakaria Grami.
Answered November 2nd, 2017
Discussed this exact topic in a podcast episode which was released today. As Bitcoin had its ninth anniversary this week, what better time to talk about it. To give you a clearer picture on the origins of Bitcoin I want to take you back to 2008, this is when the Bitcoin white paper was released, under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. This is allegedly the name of the founder of Bitcoin, but has never been confirmed! Following which the first version of the Bitcoin Software Client was released in 2009.
Then in 2010 as Bitcoin started to slowly rise in popularity, the mysterious founder started to fade away from the Bitcoin community. Satoshi worked with an open source team, however he was careful to never release too much information about himself to them. Then the last anybody heard of him was in 2011, when it was said he mentioned he’d moved onto other things.
Many assume that Satoshi Nakamoto is Japanese, but it’s best not to assume. The name, Satoshi Nakamoto is itself a cryptic clue.
Satoshi generally means wise. Naka means relationship. Moto means origin. It’s a very clever name! Many assume it’s a single person, but has it ever crossed your mind it could be a group of people operating under one name. We just don’t know!
Over the years there have been a flurry of people who many have thought is Satoshi Nakamoto. But when its gone further into looking into them, it turned out they actually weren’t Satoshi.
All the people thought to have been Satoshi Nakamoto had a common background in Cryptography. Hence they were accused. They all had deep interest and interaction in the world of Cryptography, through various projects. One was even a Cryptography graduate, others were entrepreneurs in the truest sense.
At its core Bitcoin is a successful product of the Cypherpunks movement from the late 80’s, and early 90’s. That’s around about the time the Cypherpunks movement really started to push forward with working on methods in the aim of achieving privacy through the use of cryptography. Just to round this off, many will ask isn’t a bad thing that the founder of bitcoin is anonymous? I like to look at that on the flip side, and say it’s a great thing. The reason being the voice of that person, or persons, can’t heavily change the value of Bitcoin. For example, when the CEO of a Fortune 500 company speaks out in public, that has the power to increase or decrease its share price. Bitcoin doesn’t have that problem as such.
Bitcoin is controlled by all of those connected to the network, any decision that will effect Bitcoin has to be decided by the network of people connected to it. A consensus must be made between all parties, one party can’t decide on a decision for the whole network.
So that’s everything from me, and to this date he has still not been found. We may never find out who he really is, but that’s the mystery of Bitcoin. But just so you’re assured Bitcoin is currently backed by an amazing team of developers, miners, users, and businesses helping push it forward.
Answered November 2nd, 2017
Original question: “Did Satoshi Nakamoto create Bitcoin single-handedly? If yes, how?”
To begin with, Satoshi Nakamoto, individual or a group of individuals behind that alias did not created Bitcoin single-handedly. Yes, Satoshi Nakamoto did open white paper and brought the concept of free digital currency to the world, but the creation of Bitcoin as it is today only started at that point.
Satoshi Nakamoto opened Bitcoin by publishing white paper, but before that he or them, wrote an entire Bitcoin code on which it is based. That happened back in 2008. We can consider that year as the birth year of Bitcoin. The concept of Bitcoin was all about the freedom. From Satoshi’s white paper we can see that even back then he describes Bitcoin as “purely peer-to-peer transaction system that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through financial institution”. Before Bitcoin there have been several attempts to create electronic currency even back in the 1990s. Nakamoto did manage to learn from those attempts and overcome their flaws while designing Bitcoin.
Still, the creation and the development of Bitcoin did not finished then. It has just begun. Opening white paper, Nakamoto allowed every enthusiast of his kind to proceed to develop Bitcoin further. Until this day, there are still hundreds of developers working on the network. Satoshi Nakamoto ceased his participation in the Bitcoin development all the way back in 2010. His last post was about concerns of Bitcoin future where he stated that the future of Bitcoin is in good hands. For the development of the Bitcoin the key factor was the fact that everyone’s opinion is important. That is how blockchain technology works. It is needed consensus between developers on every big step.
So, Satoshi Nakamoto did not create Bitcoin single-handedly, he offered a frame through which people could think and create. Bitcoin was created by hundreds of individuals who had the knowledge, ability and a vision of future. -R
Answered September 13th, 2017
Bitcoin bears a resemblance to Nick Szabo’s Bitgold project (something Nick tried to recruit a coder to help on inside the CypherPunk internet group). So Nick was a major inspiration. Hal Finney worked closely with Satoshi and mined the first bitcoin. Gavin Andresen is the coder Satoshi turned the keys to the kingdom over to. There could be other key players who have decided to remain anonymous.
Updated September 18th, 2017
There is nothing as such. He mined the first blocks using his computer which operated as a miner, same way the mining rigs work nowadays. But back then the difficulty was minimalistic as they were few to no bitcoins in circulation so the logic implies he mined thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands..
Who knows?!
