The Identity of Satoshi Nakamoto

[Heidi Farrell]

He might be a whole bunch of people, or even a she - Truth is, as fun as the Scooby Doo like mystery that surrounds the 'founder' of Bitcoin is no one really knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is and it may not even be one person. Or a male. One thing is for sure; Satoshi Nakamoto does not want the world to find out who they are, for reasons known only to themselves. Still, it is intriguing to try and guess.

[1715004669]

1715004669

[SkyscraperFarms]

It could be Hal, but I think Mike Hearn is more likely to be Satoshi based on what I researched below.

Is Satoshi Nakamoto Mike Hearn?
-
There are many coincidences involving a Mike Hearn and Satoshi Nakamoto connection.   Though many of you will automatically reject the notion because you dislike Mike Hearn, I would suggest you at least entertain the idea’s possibility. I have seen Mike Hearn on the long list of “Satoshi candidates” posted on bitcointalk but I have never seen anyone explore the idea.

Besides Mike being British and Satoshi using British English my first inclination to even consider Mike Hearn as being Satoshi Nakamoto was that Mike’s bitcointalk.org profile was created 1 day after Satoshi last logged in to the forum.

Satoshi’s profile:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3
Mike’s profile:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2700

Mike’s bitcointalk presence began 1 day 53 minutes and 13 seconds after Satoshi’s bitcointalk presence ended. Almost exactly 1 day separating their profiles seemed odd to me especially considering the impact Mike had in development later on.
-
Why would Satoshi Nakamoto hide his real identity?

The people who created the precursors to Bitcoin were not anonymous. Satoshi even referenced multiple influences by name in his whitepaper like Wei Dai, Ralph Merkle, and Adam Back. So why did the person behind Satoshi feel the need to remain anonymous? There doesn’t seem to be any precedent in the small niche of people who attempted to make digital/electronic cash. A lot of people are constantly regurgitating the idea that Satoshi knew how big Bitcoin would become and that Governments or nefarious people would want to hunt him down for his bitcoin holdings or for simply inventing bitcoin.
In reality, Satoshi didn’t even know if his invention would gain traction. Satoshi didn’t know he would be one of a handful of users running bitcoin in the first year which would allow him to mine as many blocks as he did. Satoshi didn’t know how much bitcoin would actually be worth.

So I think the better question is why would Mike Hearn hide is identity?

Mike Hearn in mid August 2006 was hired on by Google as a Site Reliability Engineer (http://web.archive.org/web/20090514053312/http://mikehearn.wordpress.com:80/2006/08/)

Why would an employee of Google secretly develop something? Well, Google themselves sum it up pretty nicely here: “As part of your employment agreement, Google most likely owns intellectual property (IP) you create while at the company. Because Google’s business interests are so wide and varied, this likely applies to any personal project you have. That includes new development on personal projects you created prior to employment at Google.“ (https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ )

Here Mike was indeed fully aware of Google’s policy when he released bitcoinj as a Google copyrighted project under the Apache 2 license: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4236.msg61438#msg61438
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4236.msg61658#msg61658

Then here he is emailing Satoshi (himself ) a few hours after the bitcointalk announcement:

From: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>
Date: Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 2:13 PM
To: Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshin@gmx.com>
 
 
Hi Satoshi,
 
I hope you are doing well. I finally got all the lawyers happy enough
to release BitCoinJ under the Google name using the Apache 2 license:
….

https://pastebin.com/JF3USKFT

I have no idea how long it takes Google to vet an employee project and license it, but combine that with building bitcoinj and doing that all under 3 months seems fast. What do I know, maybe bitcoinj was a pretty simple project.

I wonder what Google would have done with Bitcoin had Satoshi been an employee of Google?

-

Mike claiming he supposedly “coined the term SPV”.  Or, did he?
Here is Peter Todd https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/649413412158599168 and here is the reddit thread to go along with it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3n1ydp/peter_todd_on_twitter_mike_hearn_claiming_he/

The term “SPV” does not appear in the whitepaper but its meaning does. Simplified Payment Verification is section 8 of the whitepaper.  Did Mike slip and just inadvertently hint to him being the real Satoshi? Upon further investigation Mike had claimed months earlier that he coined the term “SPV wallet”.  https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e So he could have meant to say SPV wallet when Peter Todd was calling him out or maybe he did mean to say just “SPV”. Still not the smoking gun but interesting that he would throw that around knowing full well that Simplified Payment Verification was in the Whitepaper.

---
[After writing this up, Mike just released all his private Satoshi Emails through a user named CipherionX. Mike did show up in a reddit thread to confirm that they came from him and are indeed not fake. Bitcointalk link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2080206.0
Reddit link to Mike’s post: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6t2ci2/never_before_seen_mike_hearn_satoshi_nakamoto/dliizv6/ ]
It is very plausible that in order to remain separate from something, that someone would in fact have email conversations between himself and an alias as “proof” that they are completely different independent people. Of course this would only make sense if the emails were made public at some point. Well guess what?  Mike just made them public and Mike also attempted to divulge them to Charles Hoskinson in 2013 who did not release them to the public.

If the dates can be trusted, Mike’s email leak serves as proof that he was there early on even if he was corresponding with himself Besides the new email dump the only known public involvement that I could find was here on the sourceforge forum in October 2009: https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-list/thread/f4cd80640910240804m64ba45f1g216905fc9db16a2%40mail.gmail.com/#msg23827020 . 

Why did Mike not use Sourceforge as he posted openly so frequently in other project lists or forums? Are there posts that I haven’t seen from early on?


Mike did produce an email he sent to Satoshi In April of 2009 here in this thread: https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/54-my-first-message-to-satoshi/ which does correspond with the new email dump.  An interesting thing I noticed in the above link is that Mike stated,

Fun. Here's mine, 12th April 2009. Back then the only documentation was the white paper and hardly anyone had explored the code, so a lot of my questions were very newbie-ish. Also I capitalized Bitcoin wrong.

But Mike continued to capitalize Bitcoin as BitCoin not just in that email but until May 14, 2011. Why is that interesting? Well, every thread and post he responded to that mentioned the word bitcoin didn’t capitalize the “C” ever. It would seem like he was almost doing it on purpose to show what a noob he was to the project. Oh then he of course points out the fact that he was a newbie for capitalizing bitcoin that way. It is odd that he continued to use that spelling without regard to how everyone else was spelling it and then later direct people’s attention to the fact that he use to spell it that way early on.
--

Also, what is odd about Mike’s involvement early on is that it doesn’t really parallel with his natural online demeanor. He is very vocal and has an involved online presence yet he just really isn’t vocal during the early stages of Bitcoin. Even his personal blog posts came to a halt in early 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20111130084418/http://mikehearn.wordpress.com:80/ For someone who is  generally very active online before Bitcoin and then after Satoshi’s disappearence, I find it peculiar that there is a dead silence period from Mike Hearn while Satoshi existed online.
Mike went Facebook silent from July 23, 2007 to March 8, 2011 which also coincides with Satoshi’s existence and pre-release development of Bitcoin. https://www.facebook.com/i.am.the.real.mike?lst=662933243%3A61203304%3A1502324015

The next step in my exploration of this idea was to create a calendar of time periods where Satoshi was silent on the forums. For example, Satoshi was silent on the forum from March 24, 2010 until May 16, 2010. I am guessing this is a period when Satoshi was away from his home travelling or vacationing. I was wanting to then correspond them with known dates when Mike was on vacations or at a conference, but as I stated above MIke wasn’t very public during Satoshi’s presence. If anyone knows of any of the potential Satoshis that were vacationing, hospitalized (Hal?), or travelling during that March to May gap in 2010, it would be a good link to the real Satoshi.

-
Hal Finney was also involved at the start only to leave and eventually return. He came back a month before Satoshi departed though.  Hal was the recipient of bitcoins first transaction and helped Satoshi troubleshoot early problems [Suspicious link removed]j.com/public/resources/documents/finneynakamotoemails.pdf

Their correspondence lead me to believe that Satoshi may have had either a rapport or at the least some familiarity with Hal. I decided to search Mike Hearn and Hal Finney together which turned up a nice find. Here, https://sourceforge.net/p/tboot/mailman/tboot-devel/?style=threaded&viewmonth=200807 Mike and Hal are talking about Trusted Computing back in July 2008, just months before the bitcoin whitepaper surfaced. Unfortunately I don’t quite fully understand Trusted Computing and the reason Mike Hearn was inquiring about a trusted web browser or how it would relate to Bitcoin,

- I'd like to launch Firefox in a protected domain and have it usable for
surfing the web. My vague, poorly thought out plan was to let the user pick
a photo from a library as proof of the trusted path, then show it in a tab
at startup. Once you saw the personal photo, you'd know you were interacting
with a copy of the browser that'd be safe to use even on a malware-riddled
machine.

However, I did also find this thread from Mike Hearn that Hal Finney later resurrected about TC: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67508.0 And even more interesting, Hal Finney later wrote in his brief memoir of bitcoin, “Bitcoin and Me”, posted on the bitcointalk forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0)  that he was currently “working on something Mike Hearn suggested, using the security features of modern processors, designed to support "Trusted Computing", to harden Bitcoin wallets.” Was Mike Hearn originally researching a use for trusted computing in Bitcoin but never implemented it only to later pass it on to Hal FInney as a “suggestion”?  Mike on Google+ posted a link to Hal’s TC project when he learned Hal passed away and linked to Hal’s post on BTCtalk (https://plus.google.com/+MikeHearn ; https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=154290.0 )

So,

here is Satoshi stating he started working on bitcoin in 2007 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1617#msg1617,
here Satoshi said he was done writing Bitcoin by July 2008 because that is when Google protocol buffers was made public”I looked at Google protocol buffers when they were released last year, but I had already written everything by then.” https://pastebin.com/Na5FwkQ4
and then above Mike Hearn in July 2008 is seeking guidance from Hal about trusted computing and then Hal working on trusted computing application on the suggestion of Mike for bitcoin. Ok why? Well bitcoin was done by July 2007 when Mike was inquiring about TC and Hal was working on a TC application later, meaning that TC has some application not related to the core of bitcoin but rather to a peripheral of bitcoin.
-
[Weak] Searching for more clues about Satoshi I came across a colloquial/slang term that he used. “Hack on” was used by Satoshi in the context of “work on”. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1034.msg13206#msg13206
I found multiple instances where Mike Hearn used the same exact term in the same context: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-April/007779.html
http://bitcoin-development.narkive.com/hczWIAby/bitcoin-development-cartographer
https://web.archive.org/web/20170628004052/http://www.advogato.org/person/mikehearn/
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-March/msg00031.html
I do admit the “hack on” argument is lame evidence as it is somewhat common term. However, not everyone used it in that context (like Hal Finney didn’t) and it does add to the list of coincidences.
-
[Warning: Reaching] Another super weak semi-coincidence is Mike Hearns birthday. Mike’s birthday is April 17th, 1984. Satoshi’s birthday was chosen as April 5th, 1975. I don’t know about you, but a lot of times when I have to enter a birthday in a service where I don’t want them knowing the truth, I usually always use my real birth month with fake day and year. [More reaching] adding 1975’s digits equal adding 1984’s digits/ 7+5=12 and 8+4=12.

-
According to Mike Hearn, Satoshi “communicated with a few of the core developers before leaving. He told myself and Gavin that he had moved on to other things and that the project was in good hands.“ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145850.msg1558053#msg1558053 This is also backed up by the new email release here:
https://pastebin.com/syrmi3ET   
Mike- “I had a few other things on my mind (as always). One is, are you planning on rejoining the community at some point (eg for code reviews), or is your plan to permanently step back from the limelight?”
Satoshi- “I've moved on to other things.  It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
The above communication is supposedly the first time anyone heard that Satoshi was leaving for good and it was none other than Mike Hearn as the recipient. Then a few days later Satoshi told Gavin the same thing.

None of these things points or alludes to Mike being Satoshi by themselves. But I do think that all these things together do paint a possible connection. Mike denied being Satoshi when I emailed him and also didn’t seem to care that I would post these things online attempting to connect him to Satoshi.

[Ahimoth]

It could be Hal, but I think Mike Hearn is more likely to be Satoshi based on what I researched below.

Is Satoshi Nakamoto Mike Hearn?
-
There are many coincidences involving a Mike Hearn and Satoshi Nakamoto connection.   Though many of you will automatically reject the notion because you dislike Mike Hearn, I would suggest you at least entertain the idea’s possibility. I have seen Mike Hearn on the long list of “Satoshi candidates” posted on bitcointalk but I have never seen anyone explore the idea.

Besides Mike being British and Satoshi using British English my first inclination to even consider Mike Hearn as being Satoshi Nakamoto was that Mike’s bitcointalk.org profile was created 1 day after Satoshi last logged in to the forum.

Satoshi’s profile:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3
Mike’s profile:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2700

Mike’s bitcointalk presence began 1 day 53 minutes and 13 seconds after Satoshi’s bitcointalk presence ended. Almost exactly 1 day separating their profiles seemed odd to me especially considering the impact Mike had in development later on.
-
Why would Satoshi Nakamoto hide his real identity?

The people who created the precursors to Bitcoin were not anonymous. Satoshi even referenced multiple influences by name in his whitepaper like Wei Dai, Ralph Merkle, and Adam Back. So why did the person behind Satoshi feel the need to remain anonymous? There doesn’t seem to be any precedent in the small niche of people who attempted to make digital/electronic cash. A lot of people are constantly regurgitating the idea that Satoshi knew how big Bitcoin would become and that Governments or nefarious people would want to hunt him down for his bitcoin holdings or for simply inventing bitcoin.
In reality, Satoshi didn’t even know if his invention would gain traction. Satoshi didn’t know he would be one of a handful of users running bitcoin in the first year which would allow him to mine as many blocks as he did. Satoshi didn’t know how much bitcoin would actually be worth.

So I think the better question is why would Mike Hearn hide is identity?

Mike Hearn in mid August 2006 was hired on by Google as a Site Reliability Engineer (http://web.archive.org/web/20090514053312/http://mikehearn.wordpress.com:80/2006/08/)

Why would an employee of Google secretly develop something? Well, Google themselves sum it up pretty nicely here: “As part of your employment agreement, Google most likely owns intellectual property (IP) you create while at the company. Because Google’s business interests are so wide and varied, this likely applies to any personal project you have. That includes new development on personal projects you created prior to employment at Google.“ (https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ )

Here Mike was indeed fully aware of Google’s policy when he released bitcoinj as a Google copyrighted project under the Apache 2 license: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4236.msg61438#msg61438
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4236.msg61658#msg61658

Then here he is emailing Satoshi (himself ) a few hours after the bitcointalk announcement:

From: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>
Date: Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 2:13 PM
To: Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshin@gmx.com>
 
 
Hi Satoshi,
 
I hope you are doing well. I finally got all the lawyers happy enough
to release BitCoinJ under the Google name using the Apache 2 license:
….

https://pastebin.com/JF3USKFT

I have no idea how long it takes Google to vet an employee project and license it, but combine that with building bitcoinj and doing that all under 3 months seems fast. What do I know, maybe bitcoinj was a pretty simple project.

I wonder what Google would have done with Bitcoin had Satoshi been an employee of Google?

-

Mike claiming he supposedly “coined the term SPV”.  Or, did he?
Here is Peter Todd https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/649413412158599168 and here is the reddit thread to go along with it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3n1ydp/peter_todd_on_twitter_mike_hearn_claiming_he/

The term “SPV” does not appear in the whitepaper but its meaning does. Simplified Payment Verification is section 8 of the whitepaper.  Did Mike slip and just inadvertently hint to him being the real Satoshi? Upon further investigation Mike had claimed months earlier that he coined the term “SPV wallet”.  https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e So he could have meant to say SPV wallet when Peter Todd was calling him out or maybe he did mean to say just “SPV”. Still not the smoking gun but interesting that he would throw that around knowing full well that Simplified Payment Verification was in the Whitepaper.

---
[After writing this up, Mike just released all his private Satoshi Emails through a user named CipherionX. Mike did show up in a reddit thread to confirm that they came from him and are indeed not fake. Bitcointalk link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2080206.0
Reddit link to Mike’s post: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6t2ci2/never_before_seen_mike_hearn_satoshi_nakamoto/dliizv6/ ]
It is very plausible that in order to remain separate from something, that someone would in fact have email conversations between himself and an alias as “proof” that they are completely different independent people. Of course this would only make sense if the emails were made public at some point. Well guess what?  Mike just made them public and Mike also attempted to divulge them to Charles Hoskinson in 2013 who did not release them to the public.

If the dates can be trusted, Mike’s email leak serves as proof that he was there early on even if he was corresponding with himself Besides the new email dump the only known public involvement that I could find was here on the sourceforge forum in October 2009: https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-list/thread/f4cd80640910240804m64ba45f1g216905fc9db16a2%40mail.gmail.com/#msg23827020 .  

Why did Mike not use Sourceforge as he posted openly so frequently in other project lists or forums? Are there posts that I haven’t seen from early on?


Mike did produce an email he sent to Satoshi In April of 2009 here in this thread: https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/54-my-first-message-to-satoshi/ which does correspond with the new email dump.  An interesting thing I noticed in the above link is that Mike stated,

Fun. Here's mine, 12th April 2009. Back then the only documentation was the white paper and hardly anyone had explored the code, so a lot of my questions were very newbie-ish. Also I capitalized Bitcoin wrong.

But Mike continued to capitalize Bitcoin as BitCoin not just in that email but until May 14, 2011. Why is that interesting? Well, every thread and post he responded to that mentioned the word bitcoin didn’t capitalize the “C” ever. It would seem like he was almost doing it on purpose to show what a noob he was to the project. Oh then he of course points out the fact that he was a newbie for capitalizing bitcoin that way. It is odd that he continued to use that spelling without regard to how everyone else was spelling it and then later direct people’s attention to the fact that he use to spell it that way early on.
--

Also, what is odd about Mike’s involvement early on is that it doesn’t really parallel with his natural online demeanor. He is very vocal and has an involved online presence yet he just really isn’t vocal during the early stages of Bitcoin. Even his personal blog posts came to a halt in early 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20111130084418/http://mikehearn.wordpress.com:80/ For someone who is  generally very active online before Bitcoin and then after Satoshi’s disappearence, I find it peculiar that there is a dead silence period from Mike Hearn while Satoshi existed online.
Mike went Facebook silent from July 23, 2007 to March 8, 2011 which also coincides with Satoshi’s existence and pre-release development of Bitcoin. https://www.facebook.com/i.am.the.real.mike?lst=662933243%3A61203304%3A1502324015

The next step in my exploration of this idea was to create a calendar of time periods where Satoshi was silent on the forums. For example, Satoshi was silent on the forum from March 24, 2010 until May 16, 2010. I am guessing this is a period when Satoshi was away from his home travelling or vacationing. I was wanting to then correspond them with known dates when Mike was on vacations or at a conference, but as I stated above MIke wasn’t very public during Satoshi’s presence. If anyone knows of any of the potential Satoshis that were vacationing, hospitalized (Hal?), or travelling during that March to May gap in 2010, it would be a good link to the real Satoshi.

-
Hal Finney was also involved at the start only to leave and eventually return. He came back a month before Satoshi departed though.  Hal was the recipient of bitcoins first transaction and helped Satoshi troubleshoot early problems [Suspicious link removed]j.com/public/resources/documents/finneynakamotoemails.pdf

Their correspondence lead me to believe that Satoshi may have had either a rapport or at the least some familiarity with Hal. I decided to search Mike Hearn and Hal Finney together which turned up a nice find. Here, https://sourceforge.net/p/tboot/mailman/tboot-devel/?style=threaded&viewmonth=200807 Mike and Hal are talking about Trusted Computing back in July 2008, just months before the bitcoin whitepaper surfaced. Unfortunately I don’t quite fully understand Trusted Computing and the reason Mike Hearn was inquiring about a trusted web browser or how it would relate to Bitcoin,

- I'd like to launch Firefox in a protected domain and have it usable for
surfing the web. My vague, poorly thought out plan was to let the user pick
a photo from a library as proof of the trusted path, then show it in a tab
at startup. Once you saw the personal photo, you'd know you were interacting
with a copy of the browser that'd be safe to use even on a malware-riddled
machine.

However, I did also find this thread from Mike Hearn that Hal Finney later resurrected about TC: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67508.0 And even more interesting, Hal Finney later wrote in his brief memoir of bitcoin, “Bitcoin and Me”, posted on the bitcointalk forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0)  that he was currently “working on something Mike Hearn suggested, using the security features of modern processors, designed to support "Trusted Computing", to harden Bitcoin wallets.” Was Mike Hearn originally researching a use for trusted computing in Bitcoin but never implemented it only to later pass it on to Hal FInney as a “suggestion”?  Mike on Google+ posted a link to Hal’s TC project when he learned Hal passed away and linked to Hal’s post on BTCtalk (https://plus.google.com/+MikeHearn ; https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=154290.0 )

So,

here is Satoshi stating he started working on bitcoin in 2007 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1617#msg1617,
here Satoshi said he was done writing Bitcoin by July 2008 because that is when Google protocol buffers was made public”I looked at Google protocol buffers when they were released last year, but I had already written everything by then.” https://pastebin.com/Na5FwkQ4
and then above Mike Hearn in July 2008 is seeking guidance from Hal about trusted computing and then Hal working on trusted computing application on the suggestion of Mike for bitcoin. Ok why? Well bitcoin was done by July 2007 when Mike was inquiring about TC and Hal was working on a TC application later, meaning that TC has some application not related to the core of bitcoin but rather to a peripheral of bitcoin.
-
[Weak] Searching for more clues about Satoshi I came across a colloquial/slang term that he used. “Hack on” was used by Satoshi in the context of “work on”. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1034.msg13206#msg13206
I found multiple instances where Mike Hearn used the same exact term in the same context: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-April/007779.html
http://bitcoin-development.narkive.com/hczWIAby/bitcoin-development-cartographer
https://web.archive.org/web/20170628004052/http://www.advogato.org/person/mikehearn/
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-March/msg00031.html
I do admit the “hack on” argument is lame evidence as it is somewhat common term. However, not everyone used it in that context (like Hal Finney didn’t) and it does add to the list of coincidences.
-
[Warning: Reaching] Another super weak semi-coincidence is Mike Hearns birthday. Mike’s birthday is April 17th, 1984. Satoshi’s birthday was chosen as April 5th, 1975. I don’t know about you, but a lot of times when I have to enter a birthday in a service where I don’t want them knowing the truth, I usually always use my real birth month with fake day and year. [More reaching] adding 1975’s digits equal adding 1984’s digits/ 7+5=12 and 8+4=12.

-
According to Mike Hearn, Satoshi “communicated with a few of the core developers before leaving. He told myself and Gavin that he had moved on to other things and that the project was in good hands.“ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145850.msg1558053#msg1558053 This is also backed up by the new email release here:
https://pastebin.com/syrmi3ET  
Mike- “I had a few other things on my mind (as always). One is, are you planning on rejoining the community at some point (eg for code reviews), or is your plan to permanently step back from the limelight?”
Satoshi- “I've moved on to other things.  It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
The above communication is supposedly the first time anyone heard that Satoshi was leaving for good and it was none other than Mike Hearn as the recipient. Then a few days later Satoshi told Gavin the same thing.

None of these things points or alludes to Mike being Satoshi by themselves. But I do think that all these things together do paint a possible connection. Mike denied being Satoshi when I emailed him and also didn’t seem to care that I would post these things online attempting to connect him to Satoshi.

If you search his name lot of article you can read about his information and many more. But the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is still questionable because many people say that he is man, some other people she is woman while the others they are group. So I think nobody knows who is really he/she or them is because not all the information you read in an internet is correct. Although many article that Satoshi Nakamoto has identity now that he connected to Mike Hearn but still we don't know if its true.

[julzcoinbit]

Hal Finney is Satoshi Nakamoto. Here are my findings and explanations on to as why.

Many people speculate that either an individual no one has ever heard of or Nick Szabo created Bitcoin. One of the main priorities of Satoshi Nakamoto was to remain as anonymous as possible and he was absolutely on point with his OPSEC. If Nick Szabo created Bitcoin, he would know he’d be the first person suspected of creating Bitcoin due to his Bitgold research. Satoshi would never put himself into this position. I do think Nick Szabo is the biggest influencer of Bitcoin and without his Bitgold research, Bitcoin may have never existed. However, he is not Satoshi Nakamoto and had absolutely nothing to do with Bitcoin at any point. Now that were past why Nick Szabo is not Satoshi, let’s get onto who is.

The man that is Satoshi Nakamoto is none other than Hal Finney. The man who was the first person to work on Bitcoin besides Satoshi and received the first ever Bitcoin transaction. While this will always be speculation, there is honestly no doubt in my mind, and it will probably leave not much doubt in your mind either.

Let’s start with the obvious.

Satoshi Nakamoto created the Bitcointalk Forum in December of 2009. Hal had been helping Satoshi with Bitcoin since January of 2009 (as emails indicate). Hal Finney registered on the Bitcointalk forum in November 2010. A full year after the creation of the forum. Why would Bitcoins biggest supporter, Hal Finney, wait one full year after the forum was created to register on it? Also, he registered two weeks before Satoshi Nakamotos final post on the forum. Coincidence? I doubt it. He knew he was retiring the Satoshi account and would no longer work on the project due to being diagnosed with ALS in October 2009. Yes, he was diagnosed with ALS two months before Satoshi disappeared.

Another interesting point some need to consider is that all timestamps on the forum point to Satoshi being a man in the western part of the United States in either California, Oregon, or Nevada. Hal Finney was in California. Which brings me to my next point. There was only one man in California named Satoshi Nakamoto. This man lived two streets over from Hal Finney. Let that sink in for a second. No, this man had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of Bitcoin. He’s not a computer programmer in any way. I don’t even believe Hal Finney and Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto even met. Hal Finney saw that Satoshi Nakamotos house was being foreclosed two streets away and thought it would be the ultimate symbol to the Bitcoin project and an example of banks mistreating people. A problem Bitcoin can solve. That, and he had a cool name.

Another point to be made here and another piece of compelling evidence is that Satoshi Nakamoto presumably mined blocks 1-77 of Bitcoin, Hal mined block 78, and Satoshi mined blocks 79-125. Hal claims to have mined Block 78 but not blocks 72-77. However, blocks 72-78 were more than likely (in my opinion, 95%) mined on the same extraNonce slope by the same person. If you do not know what an extraNonce slope is, please click the link below for reference:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2346992.0

People will always point to the email conversations between Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney in January 2009 and onwards. Those mean absolutely nothing. Hal Finney was a very intelligent man and thought literally every detail about his project through. He was more than likely scared of past digital currency founders and operators getting arrested without technically breaking the law. Please google Liberty Dollar and/or Liberty Currency. This and Hal thought Bitcoin would succeed more so without a face and creator. Although I think it more has to do with the legal aspect. So Hal knew he had to have a fictional character create Bitcoin to avoid any issues. Now why Email himself? Easy. 1) He knew he would be one of the first people suspected of creating Bitcoin and wanted an Alibi. 2) He probably eventually wanted to work on the project himself and retire Satoshi. Mostly, #1. And no, E-Mailing himself does not mean he had multiple personality disorder in any way. It just means he carefully planned his alibi from the start of the project.
 
Another point is Hal Finney received the first ever Bitcoin Transaction. This is not hard evidence by any means but if I’m working on a project like Bitcoin, I’m sending myself the first ever transaction to see if it works.

This one is purely speculation but I thought I’d add it in. Hal and Satoshi both had @gmx email addresses as one of the emails they used. Not a super common email service (at least to my knowledge).

Another piece, Hal Finney Article on Double Spending:

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/detecting-double-spending/

There you have my findings and thoughts on Hal Finney being Satoshi Nakamoto. This is obviously only speculation on my part but there is not much doubt in my own mind that Hal and Satoshi are the same person.

Hal Finney created Bitcoin.

I will be creating a video on this, basically saying what I have said in this post. I will post the link in the first post when I do make it.

Its still a speculation but I after I read this, I almost believed the sotry behind satishi nakamoto. I guess the only lack of this story when you say you're the neighborhood of this bith man who suspected created bitcoin technology.

[leetcoiner]

Hal Finney is Satoshi Nakamoto. Here are my findings and explanations on to as why.

Many people speculate that either an individual no one has ever heard of or Nick Szabo created Bitcoin. One of the main priorities of Satoshi Nakamoto was to remain as anonymous as possible and he was absolutely on point with his OPSEC. If Nick Szabo created Bitcoin, he would know he’d be the first person suspected of creating Bitcoin due to his Bitgold research. Satoshi would never put himself into this position. I do think Nick Szabo is the biggest influencer of Bitcoin and without his Bitgold research, Bitcoin may have never existed. However, he is not Satoshi Nakamoto and had absolutely nothing to do with Bitcoin at any point. Now that were past why Nick Szabo is not Satoshi, let’s get onto who is.

The man that is Satoshi Nakamoto is none other than Hal Finney. The man who was the first person to work on Bitcoin besides Satoshi and received the first ever Bitcoin transaction. While this will always be speculation, there is honestly no doubt in my mind, and it will probably leave not much doubt in your mind either.

Let’s start with the obvious.

Satoshi Nakamoto created the Bitcointalk Forum in December of 2009. Hal had been helping Satoshi with Bitcoin since January of 2009 (as emails indicate). Hal Finney registered on the Bitcointalk forum in November 2010. A full year after the creation of the forum. Why would Bitcoins biggest supporter, Hal Finney, wait one full year after the forum was created to register on it? Also, he registered two weeks before Satoshi Nakamotos final post on the forum. Coincidence? I doubt it. He knew he was retiring the Satoshi account and would no longer work on the project due to being diagnosed with ALS in October 2009. Yes, he was diagnosed with ALS two months before Satoshi disappeared.

Another interesting point some need to consider is that all timestamps on the forum point to Satoshi being a man in the western part of the United States in either California, Oregon, or Nevada. Hal Finney was in California. Which brings me to my next point. There was only one man in California named Satoshi Nakamoto. This man lived two streets over from Hal Finney. Let that sink in for a second. No, this man had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of Bitcoin. He’s not a computer programmer in any way. I don’t even believe Hal Finney and Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto even met. Hal Finney saw that Satoshi Nakamotos house was being foreclosed two streets away and thought it would be the ultimate symbol to the Bitcoin project and an example of banks mistreating people. A problem Bitcoin can solve. That, and he had a cool name.

Another point to be made here and another piece of compelling evidence is that Satoshi Nakamoto presumably mined blocks 1-77 of Bitcoin, Hal mined block 78, and Satoshi mined blocks 79-125. Hal claims to have mined Block 78 but not blocks 72-77. However, blocks 72-78 were more than likely (in my opinion, 95%) mined on the same extraNonce slope by the same person. If you do not know what an extraNonce slope is, please click the link below for reference:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2346992.0

People will always point to the email conversations between Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney in January 2009 and onwards. Those mean absolutely nothing. Hal Finney was a very intelligent man and thought literally every detail about his project through. He was more than likely scared of past digital currency founders and operators getting arrested without technically breaking the law. Please google Liberty Dollar and/or Liberty Currency. This and Hal thought Bitcoin would succeed more so without a face and creator. Although I think it more has to do with the legal aspect. So Hal knew he had to have a fictional character create Bitcoin to avoid any issues. Now why Email himself? Easy. 1) He knew he would be one of the first people suspected of creating Bitcoin and wanted an Alibi. 2) He probably eventually wanted to work on the project himself and retire Satoshi. Mostly, #1. And no, E-Mailing himself does not mean he had multiple personality disorder in any way. It just means he carefully planned his alibi from the start of the project.
 
Another point is Hal Finney received the first ever Bitcoin Transaction. This is not hard evidence by any means but if I’m working on a project like Bitcoin, I’m sending myself the first ever transaction to see if it works.

This one is purely speculation but I thought I’d add it in. Hal and Satoshi both had @gmx email addresses as one of the emails they used. Not a super common email service (at least to my knowledge).

Another piece, Hal Finney Article on Double Spending:

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/detecting-double-spending/

There you have my findings and thoughts on Hal Finney being Satoshi Nakamoto. This is obviously only speculation on my part but there is not much doubt in my own mind that Hal and Satoshi are the same person.

Hal Finney created Bitcoin.

I will be creating a video on this, basically saying what I have said in this post. I will post the link in the first post when I do make it.

Interesting thoughts, but I think that doesn't make much sense. That will give us the knowledge of the name of the Creator? Of course, this is interesting from the point of view of studying personality. Such people as Steve Jobs are always interested in their history of formation, but the practical benefits for bitcoin owners, as well as the entire blockchain technology in General, are useless information. The network has a lot of investigations and guesses about who created bitcoin, but I think that the truth we will not know. Where is the proof?

[Furious 7]

No matter who it is, he brings us bitcoin and blockchain technology. For humans, it is a very good technology. Thank you!!

that's true, what I believe satoshi is not someone's name but the name of the group of scientists. this is a big question and they keep hiding. I hope that someday I will present a comment so that this polemic will end. at least we will get to know new heroes in the modern era.

[btc_angela]

No matter who it is, he brings us bitcoin and blockchain technology. For humans, it is a very good technology. Thank you!!

that's true, what I believe satoshi is not someone's name but the name of the group of scientists. this is a big question and they keep hiding. I hope that someday I will present a comment so that this polemic will end. at least we will get to know new heroes in the modern era.

Right, we should stop searching for the real satoshi because its a forgone conclusion that the he/she/group of individuals doesn't want to be discovered. I'm sure that Satoshi is not hiding, perhaps his looking at this forum very often and just have a good chuckle on the innovation that he brought us.

[boty]

I think this Satoshi Nakamoto will be very difficult to be able to find and it is uncertain that its existence is not just one person. I am sure Satoshi Nakamoto is an abbreviation of a group of names consisting of various kinds of people who are in it. who's behind the original inventor of bitcoin is still very mysterious.

[raymond013]

The identity of Mr.Namamoto Satoshi has long been a controversial issue since the founding of bitcoin innovation over 9 years ago. No one knows who he is and it does not matter but his name will always be remembered for introducing blockchain technology to us. Some say nakamoto satoshi is just a theory to start with bitcoin. But I think until now, the identity of satoshi nakamoto has been hidden for a purpose, perhaps because of his safety as one of the richest people in the world. Do not you think Satoshi Nakamoto is the biggest scam all of the times? Simply a group of people can nicknamed Nakamoto.

[Bytem3]

Today is the 10th anniversary of Bitcoin Whitepaper. 10 years ago Satoshi Nakamoto published Bitcoin whitepaper:

https://coincodex.com/article/2563/today-is-the-10th-anniversary-of-the-bitcoin-whitepaper/

[nuraziaaziz]

No one knows who is Satoshi Nakamoto. It can a he, she or even they. As what people knows, he might be a Japanese person.  Many have been named that they are Satoshi however a lot of them denied. Satoshi believe and stated that it is not about his identity that is important, it is about the Bitcoin that he created. Up till now, no one knows who is Satoshi Nakamoto.

[Soots]

Satoshi's identity remains very elusive and I don't think that this person has any plans of revealing himself/herself in the public. The decision is all up to him/her when he/she's going to introduce himself/herself. However, despite this puzzling controversies, I think what's important is that he/she invented Bitcoin that's very beneficial and profitable. It brings a quality of life and helps a lot of people from all walks of life. I think instead of keep on asking  who this person is we must be very thankful to him for the opportunities Bitcoin has offered by being a responsible bitcoiner and be a good exemplary to others.

[Danish Mohiuddin]

I wish and pray he stays anonymous as he is its good for the overall development of the ecosystem and people tends to get motivated with their version of satoshi vision which mobiles them to step up and deliver which is very imporatant for this nascent industry.

[happytakhana]

The fact is that nobody knows about Satoshi Nakamoto correctly , because if  you look at its history, you will know that Satoshi Nakamoto, may be a person, or it may be that he is a group of some people . But, of course, that he must have been a great person who thought of such a large platform and came to implement it.

[abhi777]

There is nobody who is most likely the inventor. There are countless of people who could be, but it’s all debunked so that we can’t say. Also, many believe it’s not just one person. This is how I see it anyway.
Satoshi Nakamoto is a symbol. Everyone with piece of Bitcoin is Satoshi in a sense. The original inventor would be irrelevant if we are talking about truly decentralized currency.

in my opinion Satoshi Nakamoto is the person who discovered bitcoin for the first time. he discovered bitcoin in 2009. if you read Digoogle articles maybe a lot.

[dreamax25]

Definitely not Craig Wright

https://coincodex.com/article/2780/who-is-craig-wright-the-man-who-claims-to-be-satoshi-nakamoto/

[CraigWrong]

Hello to everyone
It is good to see you all on here.  This is a new screen name so i dont expect too much from peoples replied to me at this moment but the factor is in here i just want simple answers and ideas if you can make its would be good.
I have read many articles over the years about the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto founder of Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology and it is quite fun to see all the different theories and some have the very good explanations but not correct.  My questions is very simple and will invite much debate and participate.  What does every person thinks will happen to Satoshi Nakamoto inventor of Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology if they knows who he is? Do people think the NSA are interested in him and other agencies?  My second questions to you is what do you think will happen to Bitcoin?  Why does everyone speak that BTC will crash.  This is nonesense and i do not understand why people thinks this will be the outcome.  The factor is that thousand of new corporate investor suddenly put their money into Bitcoin, what do you think will happen to the price? Bitcoin will never go down and will eventually going to the moon but this is not my questions.  I want to know what everyone thinks will happen if Satoshi Nakamoto who invented the Bitcoin and blockchain technology suddenly is revealed in press conference or other kinds of meeting? If he wants to release his new system and if it is linked to the current system (which was just an experiment small branch of the main Master Ledger) it will be difficult to stay anonymous for the second time but my questions to you is what will happen to Satoshi Nakamoto Inventor of the bitcoin and blockchain technology and why do people want to find him so much? I mean what will they do if they do find him? Thank you to respond this questions is important for me at the moment for research.

[Rufsilf]

No matter who it is, he brings us bitcoin and blockchain technology. For humans, it is a very good technology. Thank you!!

That's right, no matter who Satoshi Nakamoto is we should thankful that he was able to come up with a currency and a technology that helped a lot of people like us. Being said that, I think it is only rightful to let Satoshi enjoy his private life away from controversies so being thankful is enough and as respect for him let's not dig down who he really is.

[Ryan Dugan]

No matter who it is, he brings us bitcoin and blockchain technology. For humans, it is a very good technology. Thank you!!

that's true, what I believe satoshi is not someone's name but the name of the group of scientists. this is a big question and they keep hiding. I hope that someday I will present a comment so that this polemic will end. at least we will get to know new heroes in the modern era.

We going to simply keep guessing and speculating since it is something we probably will never get the answer to. Like the meaning of life or what happens when we die. We just won't know.
Even if someone "finds" Satoshi then how will they prove it? Satoshi is probably a project name. I don't know why people talk about Satoshi as if it was the person's name.

[coin-investor]

My dear friend you are wrong  Craig Steven Wright is believed to be the real creator of bitcoins .Craig is an Australian computer scientist and business personality. In a conference conducted with the press media he declared himself to be the real satoshi and later he was asked to prove that he is the real then he did not do so as he himself has made a fortune out of it and he even gave demonstration on how he did it to prove that it he has done and it was shown on several media  like the BBC channel also witnessed his demonstration and i also believe him to be the real creator.No matter who created btc it is the best investment of this current scenario.

He was never able to prove that he controls the original genesis bitcoin address (https://blockchain.info/address/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa) that was used to mine the genesis block as he was not able to sign a message from it. Stop spreading fud.

Unless someone comes here and signed those addresses and login in here and post all these people coming are imposter, we should stop relying on theory when we can verify this in an easy and right way, they cannot do an alibi that they lose passwords on this forum, or lost their private key, it's unacceptable.