Has there ever been another Satoshi type of person?

[cafucafucafu]

I am thinking about a person who made a huge intellectual contribution to humanity but his identity is unknown. Is this a first in history? His contribution is like that of the great scientists (e.g. Louis Pasteur, Edwin Hubble and Avicenna).

[Q7]

I was thinking who invented smartphone and made a break though to redesign our conventional voice-only function limited mobile to become what it is today.

[UsernameBitcoin]

Vincent Durham, the founder of Namecoin, the first alt coin, is also unknown and 'disappeared'. I wouldn't be surprised if he's the same guy as Satoshi anyway.

[herzmeister]

The humans who discovered fire or the wheel. No one knows their names either.

[kelsey]

I am thinking about a person who made a huge intellectual contribution to humanity but his identity is unknown. Is this a first in history? His contribution is like that of the great scientists (e.g. Louis Pasteur, Edwin Hubble and Avicenna).

what huge intellectual contribution to humanity did satoshi make? is anything in bitcoin a huge intellectual contribution? and even if it was seriously nothing in bitcoin is actually original and its even far from being the first cryptocurrency.

[Daniel91]

I am thinking about a person who made a huge intellectual contribution to humanity but his identity is unknown. Is this a first in history? His contribution is like that of the great scientists (e.g. Louis Pasteur, Edwin Hubble and Avicenna).

You may be right that  Satoshi made great contribution to humanity, but in my opinion more in financial way than intellectual.
Also, we still don't know is Satoshi is single man or women or maybe whole organization.
In fact, bitcoin is not first such project, as UsernameBitcoin  stated, and surely not last such contribution.
In 50 or 100 years bitcoin can become insignificant and some other crypto currency can become more popular, so we will talk then about a huge intellectual contribution to humanity from someone else, not Satoshi.
It's to early to make such statement, only time can tell.

[Blazr]

I wouldn't say he made a huge intellectual contribution, his work was based off the research of many others who were trying to come up with ways to make a cryptocurrency. What made Satoshi's contributions unique is that he was the first person to publish a fully working implementation of his idea. The first version of Bitcoin was more or less complete.

There have been many great contributions from anonymous developers that worked on cryptography projects. One good example would be Truecrypt. The author(s) of Truecrypt were also anonymous and very mysterious and one day they suddenly disappeared much like Satoshi did.

[Finchy]

This is actually an interesting question. I can't think of anyone at all. I guess most people want the glory the most probably need to promote their idea in some capacity.

Vincent Durham, the founder of Namecoin, the first alt coin, is also unknown and 'disappeared'. I wouldn't be surprised if he's the same guy as Satoshi anyway.

Another crappy alt dev doesn't count. These are just copycats.

[franky1]

The humans who discovered fire or the wheel. No one knows their names either.

+100,000bc

completely agree

[R2D221]

If Bitcoin was not the first cryptocurrency, then which one was? I'm curious.

[herzmeister]

If Bitcoin was not the first cryptocurrency, then which one was? I'm curious.

e-cash. It just wasn't decentralized.
Or Hashcash. Which just wasn't inflation-proof.

[Blazr]

If Bitcoin was not the first cryptocurrency, then which one was? I'm curious.

Digicash coined the term cryptocurrency.

[bitllionaire]

we still don't know the magnitude ot this,however in the future we will be able to comparte bitcoi with other great inventions

[R2D221]

So, what Satoshi made right (even if he didn't invent it) was a decentralized protocol, right?

And, to be on topic, I don't think I've heard of another “pseudonymous” inventor in my life. But then again, I never met the real ones, so they might as well also be pseudonymous to me.

[ChuckBuck]

This is a bit of an exaggeration to say the least, although we all love ourselves some Satoshi and Bitcoin, he's not quite in the same company of Louis Pasteur.  Not even in the same zip code as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, even.

That said, we can comprise that if Bitcoin is here to stay, it won't be knocking off fiat any day soon, but can play a role in the way money works in the future.

Satoshi isn't the first to come up with a digital form of money.  There's been ecash, hashcash, and even PayPal before Bitcoin.  The closest logical peer to Satoshi is probably Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux.  Since Satoshi is simply building a better system on top of Hashcash, this makes the most logical sense, since Linus Torvalds simply created a better version of Unix.

Satoshi is like Linus Torvalds.

[Blazr]

And, to be on topic, I don't think I've heard of another “pseudonymous” inventor in my life.

Who invented the wheel?

[R2D221]

And, to be on topic, I don't think I've heard of another “pseudonymous” inventor in my life.

Who invented the wheel?

There's a difference between pseudonymous and anonymous. Satoshi is a pseudonym, but we have a name, and we can talk about him. The creator(s) of the wheel are unknown and so we can't talk about them as individual(s). Actually, it's more than likely that different cultures developed the wheel independently.

[CIYAM]

Satoshi isn't the first to come up with a digital form of money.  There's been ecash, hashcash, and even PayPal before Bitcoin.  The closest logical peer to Satoshi is probably Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux.  Since Satoshi is simply building a better system on top of Hashcash, this makes the most logical sense, since Linus Torvalds simply created a better version of Unix.

Although I agree 100% that Satoshi did not invent digital money he did create a working implementation of the "blockchain" concept which is actually a far more significant thing (whether or not he was the originator of the blockchain concept I am not sure as I've read that it might have been proposed before by others known in this area).

Prior to this creation there was no P2P way of achieving "consensus" that could be trusted enough to solve the "double-spending problem".

My guess is that the significance of this creation will only be understood completely many years down the track (but my gut feel is that it is one of the most important creations in the last 50 years).

[ChuckBuck]

Satoshi isn't the first to come up with a digital form of money.  There's been ecash, hashcash, and even PayPal before Bitcoin.  The closest logical peer to Satoshi is probably Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux.  Since Satoshi is simply building a better system on top of Hashcash, this makes the most logical sense, since Linus Torvalds simply created a better version of Unix.

Although I agree 100% that Satoshi did not invent digital money he did create a working implementation of the "blockchain" concept which is actually a far more significant thing (whether or not he was the originator of the blockchain concept I am not sure as I've read that it might have been proposed before by others known in this area).

Prior to this creation there was no P2P way of achieving "consensus" that could be trusted enough to solve the "double-spending problem".

Great point, CIYAM, as you correctly pointed out, Satoshi is the inventor of the "Blockchain", which so many financial companies are trying to get at right now.  This in itself is definitely a brilliant concept, that no one had conceived before.  To have a consensus, public ledger, that solves the "Byzantine General's Problem", using Proof of work to have one general/CPU agree to broadcast the solution to the entire Bitcoin network, once a block is solved to move onto the next block.

I guess my point was just comparing to another historically similar person, and just the digital money aspect of Bitcoin.  That and Satoshi and Linus both worked on open source projects, both originally from overseas, both had possible NSA ties, etc..

[LiteCoinGuy]

The humans who discovered fire or the wheel. No one knows their names either.

i guess it was David "The Hoff" Hasselhoff.