Satoshi Nakamoto.

The white paper

Satoshi’s first known step was to register the website address bitcoin.orgbitcoin.orgThe website Satoshi Nakamoto registered in August 2008. It published the Bitcoin white paper and still hosts it. Volunteers run it today., on 18 August 2008. Within days Satoshi wrote to two cryptographers whose work the design built on: Adam Back, who had invented hashcash, a kind of proof of work, and Wei Dai, who had proposed a digital currency called b-money. Satoshi told Dai of a paper “that expands on your ideas into a complete working system”.⁠^[7][8]

On 31 October 2008 Satoshi announced the paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, on a cryptography mailing list: “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.” Its nine pages described how people could pay each other online without a bank, with a shared record that computing power keeps honest.⁠^[1][2]

Most of the first replies were objections. James A. Donald wrote that the system “does not seem to scale to the required size”. When John Levine pointed out that criminals control networks of 100,000 hijacked computers, Satoshi answered that “the good guys collectively have more CPU power than any single attacker”. Hal Finney, a cryptographer who would soon receive the first bitcoin payment, called it “a very promising idea”.⁠^{[9][10][11][12]}

Launching Bitcoin

Satoshi started the network on 3 January 2009 with its first block, the genesis block. Its only transaction carries a line of text, “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”, a headline from that day’s edition of The Times, a British newspaper. On 8 January Satoshi announced the first version of the software, “Windows only for now”, and set the total that would ever exist: “Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins.”⁠^[3][47][4]

On 12 January 2009, in block 170, Satoshi sent Finney 10 bitcoins that Satoshi had mined, the first payment from one person to another. The security researcher Sergio Demian Lerner later traced a pattern in how the early blocks were mined. He calls the miner behind it Patoshi, believes it was Satoshi, and estimates that it made about 22,000 blocks and collected about 1.1 million bitcoins. By his count “99.9% of all Patoshi blocks are unspent”, and CoinDesk reported in 2025 that the coins still hadn’t moved.⁠^{[23][24][25][46]}

Building it in the open

In November 2009 Satoshi opened a forum for Bitcoin, which continues today as bitcointalk.orgBitcointalkThe Bitcoin forum Satoshi Nakamoto opened in November 2009. Much of Bitcoin’s early history, from the pizza offer to Satoshi’s last post, happened there., and wrote more than 500 posts there, answering questions, explaining the design and announcing new versions. Writers who studied them found clues but no answers. The New Yorker noted British spellings such as “colour” and the phrase “bloody hard”, and the developer Stefan Thomas, charting the times of Satoshi’s posts for Wired in 2011, found almost none “between the hours of 5 am and 11 am Greenwich Mean Time”.⁠^{[13][14][15][16]}

The forum also recorded Satoshi’s biggest repair. On 15 August 2010 someone exploited a bug to create about 184 billion bitcoins in a single block, number 74,638. Within hours Satoshi had written a fix and released a corrected version: “Version 0.3.10 patches the block 74638 overflow bug.” By the next morning the network had replaced the bad block, and the coins no longer existed.⁠^[17][18]

Stepping away

In December 2010 some forum members suggested that WikiLeaks could take donations in bitcoin. Satoshi objected: “I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin”, because “the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage”. Six days later, in a thread about a PC World article on Bitcoin, Satoshi wrote: “WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.”⁠^[19][20]

The next day, 12 December 2010, Satoshi posted on the forum for the last time, releasing a version with new defences against attempts to overload the network. By then Gavin Andresen, a developer Satoshi had chosen as a successor, was running the project. On 23 April 2011 Satoshi wrote to the developer Mike Hearn: “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.” Three days later Satoshi sent Andresen the key used to broadcast alerts to the network, with a request: “I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure.” It is the last email widely accepted as Satoshi’s.⁠^{[21][5][22][7][35][6]}

Who is Satoshi?

Nobody knows. Andresen, who worked with Satoshi for months but never met them, told MIT Technology Review in 2014: “Nobody knows who he is, I think.”⁠^[5]

The first well-known guesses came in 2013 and 2014. A blogger’s analysis of writing styles, and then a study by linguists at Aston University, pointed to Nick Szabo, a computer scientist who had designed a digital currency called bit gold. Szabo replied on Twitter: “Not Satoshi, but thank you.”⁠^[31][32][33]

In March 2014 Newsweek named Dorian Nakamoto, a man in Temple City, California, whose birth name was Satoshi. He told the Associated Press that he was “no longer in engineering”, and: “I got nothing to do with it.” Within a day, Satoshi’s old account on the P2P Foundation website, where Satoshi had posted about Bitcoin in 2009, posted a single line: “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.” The account was taken over by hackers later that year, but researchers at BitMEX found no sign it had been by then. Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a Bitcoin author, started a fundraiser for Dorian Nakamoto, and in April handed him 48 bitcoins from nearly 2,000 donors, the Daily Dot reported. Weeks after Newsweek’s story, Forbes looked at Hal Finney, who had lived a few blocks from Dorian Nakamoto’s family, and Finney denied it too.⁠^{[26][27][28][29][48][30]}

Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist, went further: named by Gizmodo and Wired in December 2015, he claimed in May 2016 to be Satoshi. In 2024, in a case brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, a US non-profit set up to promote cryptocurrency technology, the High Court in London declared that Wright is not Satoshi and did not write the white paper. The judge found that he had “lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly” and forged documents “on a grand scale”. Wright was refused permission to appeal, and later received a suspended prison sentence for contempt of court.⁠^{[34][7][35][36][37]}

Others have been named since. In October 2024 HBO’s documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, by the director Cullen Hoback, pointed to the Bitcoin developer Peter Todd, who told CNN: “For the record, I’m not Satoshi.” In April 2026 a New York Times investigation by John Carreyrou named Adam Back, who replied: “I’m not satoshi.” Two weeks later the documentary Finding Satoshi argued that Satoshi was two people, Finney and the cryptographer Len Sassaman, who died in 2011.⁠^{[38][39][40][41][42][43]}

The name today

The smallest unit of bitcoin, a hundred-millionth of a coin, is called a satoshi. In Budapest a bronze bust unveiled in 2021 shows a figure in a hooded top whose face is reflective, so that visitors see themselves; the idea, Bitcoin Magazine reported, was that “we are all Satoshi”. A statue in Lugano, Switzerland, unveiled in 2024, shows a seated figure that seems to disappear from some angles. In 2025 vandals threw it into the lake, and divers pulled it out the next day.⁠^[44][45]