Satoshi was the author of the Bitcoin whitepaper and was active on cypherpunk mailing lists where like-minded people discuss ways of reclaiming personal privacy in the electronic age. After publishing the original whitepaper, Satoshi continued to participate on Bitcoin forums until December 2013, and then vanished.

Satoshi also owns or controls a significant number of bitcoins, estimated in 2013 by cryptocurrency security consultant Sergio Lerner at 1 million bitcoins. This represents just under 5% of the total 21m bitcoins that will ever be created, if the protocol rules don’t change. At 2018, prices of around $10,000 per Bitcoin, this puts the nominal value of the bitcoins controlled by Satoshi at $10bn. If Satoshi ever moves any bitcoins thought to be associated with him/her, the community would immediately find out. The transactions would be visible on the blockchain and addresses thought to be associated with Satoshi are monitored. This would almost certainly affect the price of Bitcoin.'

Satoshi’s real-world identity matters because, if the real person or group of people were discovered, their views and voice could dominate the future of Bitcoin. However, this centralisation is what they are trying to avoid. They would also have extremely high personal security risk. It is never a good idea for people to know (or even believe) that you have significant amounts of wealth, especially in cryptocurrency.

We have seen a number of high profile cryptocurrency owners publicly state that they have sold all their cryptocurrencies. In Jan 2018, Charlee Lee, founder of Litecoin (LTC) publicly stated that he sold or donated all his LTC. In the same month, Steve Wozniak, founder of Apple, also stated that he had sold all of his Bitcoin. Although they have their reasons, I suspect that the high personal risk of being known owners of high valued cryptocurrencies also feeds into this. I have had conversations with lucky Bitcoin owners who do not disclose their cryptocurrency wealth for precisely this reason.  

There have been a number of high profile attempts at exposing Satoshi’s identity. These are known in the industry as ‘doxxings’: the public revelation of an internet nickname’s real-world identity. It is however highly unlikely that the real truth about Satoshi’s identity is among these doxxings.  

On 14 March 2014, a cover article for Newsweek magazine claimed that Satoshi was a sixty-four-year-old Japanese gentleman named Dorian Nakamoto (birth name Satoshi Nakamoto) living in California.  

The article printed the suburb where Dorian lived and included a photograph of his house. This led to repeated harassment of Dorian and his family over the course of the next few weeks. Of course, Dorian was not Satoshi. To think that the privacy loving cypherpunk creator of a revolutionary unstoppable anonymous digital currency would use his own name as his pseudonym is so far-fetched as to be ludicrous. To identify his home address is unethical. Nevertheless, and despite the best efforts of the journalist concerned, anecdotal evidence suggests that after a period of great distress, Dorian is now enjoying, and I hope monetising, his newfound fame as the real fake Satoshi.  

In December 2015, an article in WIRED Magazine suggested that Dr Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist, could be the mastermind behind Bitcoin. In March 2016, in interviews with GQ magazine, the BBC, and The Economist newspaper, Craig claimed to be the leader of the Satoshi team. He even published his own blog post, now taken offline, with these claims. Craig suggested that he didn’t want to self-doxx, and that there may have been external pressures on him to do so. In June 2016, the London Review of Books published a long form article where the journalist, Andrew O’Hagan, was able to spend an extended amount of time with Craig Wright. 

A few other Satoshi suspects have been cypherpunk and PGP developer Hal Finney, smart contract and Bit gold inventor Nick Szabo, cryptographer and creator of b-money Wei Dai, e-donkey, Mt Gox, and Stellar creator Jed McCaleb, and Dave Kleiman. Coindesk has a more extensive list of those suspected to be Satoshi.  

My bet is that Satoshi Nakamoto is not an individual but a pseudonym for a group of people who have similar political views and who wish to remain anonymous. Craig Wright may have been part of that team. The team may not even know each other’s real-world identities. Some of the team may have died since Bitcoin’s popularisation. We may get another clue in 2020 when the roughly 1 million BTC locked in the Tulip Trust will be accessible. The Tulip Trust is a trust fund supposedly created by Dave Kleiman, an associate of Satoshi. It contains early bitcoins potentially owned by Satoshi.  

If you decide to do some sleuthing, there are a few things to remember that people seem to have forgotten: A digital signature proves possession and use of a private key, but private keys can be shared among multiple people. So you cannot guarantee the mapping of private key to an individual. Private keys can also be lost. An email address can be shared. A whitepaper can be written collaboratively, so grammatical clues simply reveal the habits of the editor, not necessarily those of the author. It is very hard to tie the identity of an individual to the author of a paper.