There is lots of circumstantial evidence--although no direct evidence--that "Satoshi" was a person or team working within the US government.
Today I came across this paper, which was created in 1996 by employees at the NSA including
Satoshi Nakamoto Tatsuaki Okamoto:
How To Make A Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash(While I don't think Mr. Okamoto himself was Satoshi, I think it would be a fitting tribute name to give the "author" of Bitcoin a name that recalled his).
My circumstantial evidence of "Satoshi" being a person or team within a US agency is as follows:
1. The US government has thousands of employees who do research and have the
time and opportunity to do a project like Bitcoin.
2. Various US government agencies i.e. the NSA, CIA and DARPA, have the expertise to pull off the necessary
tradecraft to hide the identity of Satoshi. It's doubtful that a mere amateur individual could pull stay anonymous under such intense scrutiny as Satoshi has undergone.
3. US government employees, especially ones working for spy agencies like the CIA and the NSA, and
especially those whom are not field agents are
not ideological. Moreover, they don't all operate as part of a coordinated strategic plan. The idea that "the US would never create Bitcoin because it hates Bitcoin" is utterly ignorant. The two million employees of the US government don't operate that way, and the CIA/NSA
definitely doesn't operate that way.
4.
Satoshi never spent a single sat. This fact is simply impossible to overlook, and there is only one reasonable explanation for it: that he/she/they couldn't spend their Bitcoin--even a dollar's worth to try it out--because to do so would create a massive paperwork shit storm within the US government. Then as Bitcoin got bigger, the problem got bigger. (And only the US government is big enough to ignore $hundreds of billions just to keep a state secret).
I continue to solicit comments that will disprove this theory. So far I have heard nothing even remotely compelling. All I have gotten so far is:
1. Satoshi was just a nice guy who didn't want any money. Besides being against everything we know about human nature going back thousands of years, it also doesn't explain how "some guy" could maintain the tradecraft necessary to keep himself hidden like this.
2. Satoshi died before he could spend anything. This doesn't explain why he didn't spend even a single sat, and doesn't explain why he formally said goodbye before he stopped posting, which goes against the idea that he died suddenly.
Excellent, great research...
Maybe it was a group inside a US government agency who wanted to act against the
corruption, manipulation and lies and decided to do something for the people? We can
creat endless assumptions and speculations.
And now, what can anyone do with any sort of information like this?
It really doesnt matter who Satoshi was/is or who created the entity.
Bitcoin is what matters now, not the identity of the creator(s) was/is/are. The genie is out
of the bottle and there is no putting it back in - thankfully.
Can we move on please?