If you knew the founder of Bitcoin, would you still use it?

[pooya87]

At the moment we think that he is a savior and helps us to gain financial freedom and protect our privacy

Not at all, we know that his creation is doing all that not him.

At the moment, Satoshi has around 1 million bitcoin.

Wrong. That amount is your imagination guess. We have no way of knowing how much bitcoin anybody has, least of all someone who we don't even know their real identity!
In other words you don't even know who Satoshi is, how can you claim to know how much bitcoin he/she owns?!

What if it was created by one of the worst person ever? What if he wants to make us dependent on bitcoin as much as possible and one day he comes, sells all his coins and causes financial catastrophe.
What if it was created by persons like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc. These are the people who don't respect their customers' privacy.

Your problem is that you only know bitcoin as something you invest in and has some price whereas bitcoin is not that at all. Bitcoin is a censorship resistant currency that has been operating globally without any restrictions. What its volatile market does in short term does not affect its nature.

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[South Park]

Honestly, I am very obsessed with this question. We don't know who is behind the bitcoin, at the moment Satoshi Nakamoto is just a made-up thing in our head. At the moment we think that he is a savior and helps us to gain financial freedom and protect our privacy but let's imagine some bad case scenarios for interesting discussion. At the moment, Satoshi has around 1 million bitcoin.

What if it was created by one of the worst person ever? What if he wants to make us dependent on bitcoin as much as possible and one day he comes, sells all his coins and causes financial catastrophe.
What if it was created by persons like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc. These are the people who don't respect their customers' privacy.

What if there is one specific, concrete country behind the scenes? Bitcoin is a mixture of the cyber and financial worlds, this is the greatest power stack to own.

The inspiration for me to create this thread was this video.
P.S. I don't agree with Dan Pena, I would even say that if he knew who was behind the bitcoin, as he says, he couldn't sleep at night or could sleep forever.

One of the most important strengths of bitcoin is that the identity of Satoshi does not matter all, historically it would be important to know his identity as we would like to know who is this person that created something as exceptional as bitcoin, but for bitcoin itself nothing changes, the code of bitcoin is open source so the identity of satoshi is irrelevant and if anything it could be a weakness, as governments could try to use character assassination techniques to try to discredit bitcoin, by hiding his identity Satoshi avoided those attacks against bitcoin, so it is better that we do not know who he is.

[Haunebu]

Your theory is far-fetched and I don't think that Satoshi is someone extremely bad. Instead, I believe that he/she is a person who had good intentions behind creating BTC.

None of us can prove our theories and this will most likely never change in my opinion. This is why I prefer believing in BTC itself which is an extraordinary creation irrespective of whether its creator is good/bad.

Very few investors actually care more about the creator than the creation itself. If this weren't the case, BTC would never have soared to such a high price point over time.

[avikz]

It actually depends on the name of the actual owner. If we come know with irrefutable proof that NIA had created bitcoin, I wouldn't use it. But if the creator is really a Japanese guy called Satoshi Nakamoto, why should I stop using it? We all know the creator of ETH, did we stop uaing ETH? So it all depends on the actual identity of the creator. Otherwise it really doesn't matter at this stage where bitcoin has see a great amount of adoption already.

[Flexystar]

Nah, this does not matter at all.

Let us compare this one with the real world stocks and shares for a moment. There are so many companies out there in which we invest, we buy our shares in the want of profits. We analyse all the data such as who founded it, what's the companies vision and everything. Did you put a step back while investing in Tesla or SpaceX or The Boring company after knowing that Elon is going all shitty on the twitter and making everyone loose their money?

He already took evil place on many peoples mind but this changed nothing. People know that there are no other companies like that with big expression and quality visions in the future.

Think about bitcoin in similar fashion. Lets assume bitcoin was formed by most devil person on the earth because they wanted to take the government banking system, if yes then everyone liked the idea of ownership of bank! It doesn't matter now, I will still continue to invest and be my own bank.

[Leviathan.007]

There can be many possible theories regarding what's going to happen after when recognizing the real identity of the founder of the bitcoin If the founder is an organization or a group of people who are into computer science and they believe in the borderless transaction and economic freedom then we should wait to see the reaction of people regarding this group member and if it's a just a person there will be huge pressure from governments and organization on him and surly this will decrease the interest of people in bitcoin. So in any condition, if people recognize the founder of Bitcoin there will be less demand for bitcoin and I'll try to be much more careful about my bitcoin investments.

[LogitechMouse]

First of all, with many people being linked, saying that they are or telling that this person is Satoshi Nakamoto I don't think that there is anybody who will believe in somebody who claims that they are the creator.
Second, I invested because I want to get involved in the new technology and also profits as well and not because of Satoshi Nakamoto being anonymous.

All of OP's questions will just be some of the questions that will never be answered because Satoshi Nakamoto will remain anonymous for the rest of our lives (unless something unexpected happen in the future ). Overall whoever this creator is, I will still be using Bitcoin and I'm not expecting to know who is the creator of Bitcoin at all.

[m2017]

I also have questions about this ~1 million bitcoin.
As we all know, bitcoin was conceived in the amount of 21 million, of which about 1 million were obtained by Satoshi and are stored in his wallet. I'm curious to know why he didn't give away those bitcoins when it were so cheap? Because these ~1 million bitcoin fall out of the general circulation and there will be only about 20 million in the world (in fact, even less, due to losses. ). And if Nakamoto does not wish to use them, if at all possible.It could be distributed, for example, by arranging various contests or like airdrops.

While writing this, I had an idea. Perhaps Satoshi initially and specifically deprived himself of access to this wallet with ~1 million bitcoin. Just didn't save the seed-phrase so that he's would never have access to those bitcoins.

[stompix]

What if it was created by persons like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc. These are the people who don't respect their customers' privacy.

Raise it up a bit and let's make it more interesting!

What if Craig Wright comes with all the keys and signatures proving he is Satoshi? 
I know is close to impossible but a lot of people will start doing a lot of licking where they previously spit.

Anyhow, it doesn't matter, tor was created by the NRL,  SHA-2 was designed by the NSA, it can't get worse than this.

[Mpamaegbu]

I don't know why people continue to think that Satoshi will be in danger if he makes himself known. Is it because there's an alleged wallet housing 1million Bitcoin belonging to him? I mean, is there anything else? That's the only reason I would be thinking he could be in danger, and that's from greedy and envious people who may want to steal from him. Nothing else. Come to even think of it, Bitcoin isn't the only crypto which has a huge price and whose founder isn't known.

For me, it's immaterial to base investing or not investing in a crypto on whether the owner is known or not. How many cryptos do we even know their owners? Yet we trade and invest in them.

[KaliLinux]

Honestly, I am very obsessed with this question. We don't know who is behind the bitcoin, at the moment Satoshi Nakamoto is just a made-up thing in our head. At the moment we think that he is a savior and helps us to gain financial freedom and protect our privacy but let's imagine some bad case scenarios for interesting discussion. At the moment, Satoshi has around 1 million bitcoin.

What if it was created by one of the worst person ever? What if he wants to make us dependent on bitcoin as much as possible and one day he comes, sells all his coins and causes financial catastrophe.
What if it was created by persons like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc. These are the people who don't respect their customers' privacy.

What if there is one specific, concrete country behind the scenes? Bitcoin is a mixture of the cyber and financial worlds, this is the greatest power stack to own.

The inspiration for me to create this thread was this video.
P.S. I don't agree with Dan Pena, I would even say that if he knew who was behind the bitcoin, as he says, he couldn't sleep at night or could sleep forever.

How many crypto projects do we know the owners and are still good investments and have been used today, BNB, ETH, and many more. Knowing the creator does not take away from what the project stands for IMO, even if we knew who Satoshi was from back then and Bitcoin was adopted like the way it is now I don't think it would have made any difference. What happens if Satoshi had other Bitcoin wallets down the years that people can't associate with him/her/them as the case may be and is been traded to date that we don't know?

[AakZaki]

didn't want to know and kept on using it. Whoever the founder of bitcoin is of course is still a mystery. If the founder of bitcoin was a bad person, of course he would have a negative impact on everyone, but in fact until now with bitcoin, everything is safe. Even bitcoin is able to boost the level of a good and freer economy.
What the OP is talking about is just an opinion that will not happen, Bitcoin will be destroyed if indeed the founder of bitcoin has evil and harmful intentions and goals.
But we will see a good future with bitcoin and the technology in it.

[Desmong]

Your theory is far-fetched and I don't think that Satoshi is someone extremely bad. Instead, I believe that he/she is a person who had good intentions behind creating BTC.

None of us can prove our theories and this will most likely never change in my opinion. This is why I prefer believing in BTC itself which is an extraordinary creation irrespective of whether its creator is good/bad.

Very few investors actually care more about the creator than the creation itself. If this weren't the case, BTC would never have soared to such a high price point over time.

If the creator of Bitcoin is eventually known, it might affect the market because many people will not have to believe in bitcoin again. Satoshi created bitcoin and tend to disappear that no one will see good reason why they should reject it because of  so much value that is placed on it. He had really changed the world and make it a better place. Bitcoin market is a great one that is much volatile to keep things balanced.

[davis196]

Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't have control over the Bitcoin Core blockchain,so your question is irrelevant.He isn't a CEO of a corporation.
The personality of Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't matter.What truly matters is the Bitcoin protocol and the Bitcoin community of developers,miners and regular users.Even if Satoshi sells all his BTC(which is highly unlikely to happen),the Bitcoin price would just drop for a while and recover afterwards.Dan Pena is a ridiculous online "guru" scammer.I couldn't care less about his opinions.I'm pretty sure that he doesn't understand how Bitcoin/blockchain technology works and he thinks that Bitcoin is some kind of weird "high tech" corporation.

[DaNNy001]

The beauty of Bitcoin is that you don't have to trust the people behind it. It works independent of them.

I trust math/cryptography because it works. Bitcoin is based on it, so therefore there's no need to trust whoever invented it.

It's all open source and verifiable, so there's no need to trust the founder.

It's usually the people that know very little of how Bitcoin works that start talking about those trust issues.

 
 Well am a newbie but this particular topic has been troubling me too... it's just that Bitcoin as whole is just like a fantasy too good to be continuous without any financial catastrophe.. well it's Said to have been created by Satoshi Nakamoto(human) with which we all know can still do alterations to this his creation.. because for me a creator always has an insight to his creation no matter how advance the creation may be..so I can't blame anybody who is curious about this particular question

[Argoo]

Satoshi created Bitcoin, but he's not the only one who was developing it. Since the release and Satoshi's disappearance, lots and lots of other people were working and are still working on this project. And Bitcoin is an open source project, no one found any malicious backdoors that could be used to suddenly take full control over the protocol or something. So, from a technical point of view, it doesn't matter who Satoshi is.

The worst thing that can happen is a severe reputation damage that wound hinder the prospects of adoption and price growth.

It seems to me that no matter who Satoshi Nakamoto is, this cannot affect our attitude towards bitcoin. We value bitcoin not because of the personality of its creator, but because of the benefits that it gives ordinary people when using it. Even if Satoshi Nakamoto turns out to be a bad person, which I doubt, it doesn't change anything. Moreover, what we know about him does not give us any grounds for making such a statement.
Given that it was he who created bitcoin, I don’t think that by some of his actions he can intentionally harm bitcoin, including by simultaneously selling all his bitcoins. In addition, such an act only for a while will lead to its price drop.

[Kasabus]

Regardless of who founded BItcoin, although this might be a group I believe that is we would still use it, let take for instant, right now we are made to believe that the founder and originator of bitcoin is an unknown man names which are satoshi nakamoto, although many of us don’t even know who this satoshi nakamoto is we have already believed in what he has created and it has really proven to be more than amazing, I believe if this originator which we were meant to believe wasn’t true then we would still be using Bitcoin

I guess it does not matter of who founded bitcoin, what matters the most is the real use of bitcoin in our daily lives. It can be a great asset and a good currency in the future, so what more can i ask for? And besides, if Satoshi or let's say a group founded bitcoin, if they really want to sell their bitcoins and causes financial catastrophe, then they had made it already when bitcoin was still at its very high peak.

[TimeTeller]

Regardless of who founded BItcoin, although this might be a group I believe that is we would still use it, let take for instant, right now we are made to believe that the founder and originator of bitcoin is an unknown man names which are satoshi nakamoto, although many of us don’t even know who this satoshi nakamoto is we have already believed in what he has created and it has really proven to be more than amazing, I believe if this originator which we were meant to believe wasn’t true then we would still be using Bitcoin

I guess it does not matter of who founded bitcoin, what matters the most is the real use of bitcoin in our daily lives. It can be a great asset and a good currency in the future, so what more can i ask for? And besides, if Satoshi or let's say a group founded bitcoin, if they really want to sell their bitcoins and causes financial catastrophe, then they had made it already when bitcoin was still at its very high peak.

I guess by now, most of us don't care who was the creator of bitcoin.
Because what has been achieved in this market is already more than enough to be grateful about this creation.
If Satoshi preferred to be anonymous, let's respect his privacy.
And if he does really want to ruin his creation, he should have done this a long time ago.

[Captain Corporate]

I would still use it, the point is not "knowing" him or not, it's about him not being able to have any connection to bitcoin anymore. So if we knew who he was, but he has absolutely no power over it, then why would I care? Look at Vitalik and ETH, sure we know who he is, and sure he is trying to do something, but he has absolutely no power over it if we do not want him to have any power. This is what we should be focusing on. If he was someone who still had some control, like some projects these days have teams, and if bitcoin had a team like that, then I would never considered investing into it ever.

[coolcoinz]

What if it was created by persons like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc. These are the people who don't respect their customers' privacy.

Raise it up a bit and let's make it more interesting!

What if Craig Wright comes with all the keys and signatures proving he is Satoshi?  
I know is close to impossible but a lot of people will start doing a lot of licking where they previously spit.

Anyhow, it doesn't matter, tor was created by the NRL,  SHA-2 was designed by the NSA, it can't get worse than this.

I'd probably dump some of my coins in fear of bitcoin being smeared in the media for being associated with Craig and people like him. It wouldn't be to protest against CSW, but to protect my money from a possible panic coming from, for example, an attack on Satoshi. Imagine seeing a headline in the media "Bitcoin founder kidnapped". People would freak out thinking that they're going extort his coins from him and crash the market. Even if I we were to stay calm, others would not.

Finding out Satoshi's identity wouldn't have to be a bad thing, but we're talking about a huge negative combo of Satoshi being discovered, alive and being someone who is, to say the least, not respected by the community.