On the modern Internet there are many outstanding personalities who amaze the imagination with their own deeds or surprise with their achievements. Such a person, or rather, such an individual, is Satoshi Nakamoto - a secret person who gave an active start to the cryptocurrency industry. He created Bitcoin (digital gold), the first virtual currency operating in the Bitcoin system. He is considered the creator of cryptocurrencies, although digital coins already existed before Bitcoin.
The great merit of S. Nakamoto is the absolute popularization, promotion and scaling of cryptocurrencies with blockchain technologies, since the fantastic era of cryptographic money began with the BTC coin.
The magnitude of the intrigue is determined by the anonymity of Nakamoto’s personality. It is not possible to find anything reliable about him, and the rare appearances of publications signed as Satoshi Nakamoto often turn out to be PR campaigns or deceptive tricks. Probably, the name Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym for an intelligent individualist or group of specialists. Some see here the insidious participation of Artificial Intelligence, because the formation of a unique blockchain technology with the launch of cryptocurrencies is a great mega-discovery that can soon change the previous reality. But this aspect has been covered more than once in science fiction films.
Wikipedia about Satoshi Nakamoto
A lot has changed since the introduction of Bitcoin - cryptocurrencies began to be actively introduced into reality, capturing the minds of investors, traders, ordinary money lovers and scammers. Now Mr. S. Nakamoto owns the largest volume of BTC coins, since he began mining Bitcoins from the starting genesis block.
Let's make a detailed analysis of the probable fortune of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Considering the available information, let’s calculate the most realistic number of BTC coins in his cryptocurrency Bitcoin wallets.
How many crypto coins did Nakamoto mine?
The current number of crypto coins from Satoshi N. is discussed more intensely than the disclosure of the real name of the creator of the most popular virtual currency. There are known interesting studies regarding the number of BTC mined by the secretive personality Nakamoto, however, no one has provided actual evidence or refutations. There is an interesting version that claims that Nakamoto mined over a million Bitcoins through mining.
The famous scientific engineer Sergio Lerner proved his own conclusions using the field gain technique, known as ExtraNonce. It analyzes the stage-by-stage profitability of Bitcoin mining from the initial genesis block to today's parts of the Bitcoin system blockchain.
Lerner was able to identify and confirm the most important nuance - at first, the first blocks of the distributed ledger chain of the Bitcoin network were generated by one device. That is, cryptocurrency mining was carried out on a single computer. From the genesis block to element #36288, only the computing power of one machine was used to create blocks. This study mostly proves the previous versions of the analysis, which also argues for using one PC to mine the first Bitcoin coins in the amount of 1 million 148 thousand 800 pieces.
Timestamp Server
Let's start describing our solution with a timestamp server. Its job is to hash the block of data to be tagged and publicly publish this hash, as in a newspaper or Usenet post [2-5]. A timestamp indicates that specific data existed at that moment and was therefore included in the block hash. Each hash includes the previous tag: this is how a chain is built, where the next link strengthens all the previous ones.
What is Nakamoto's condition now?
The fiat equivalent of S. Nakamoto’s cryptocurrency capital is of great importance for interested members of the crypto community. Naturally, the exact types of decentralized coins in which the creator of Bitcoin invested are unknown, as well as the number of cryptocurrency wallets the hiding programmer Satoshi has.
It is possible to hypothetically assume that Nakamoto actually mined the first 1.148000 million Bitcoins. Let's add contributions to the crypto wallet from well-wishers - these are regular donations, which have accumulated +16.7 BTC. In fiat (dollars) the Bitcoin capital is now somewhere around $11,876,294,400.75. You should add the Bitcoin Cash coins received at the Bitcoin hard fork stage - it comes out to about $12,121,382,573.43. This does not include other Bitcoin forks that apply to BTC owners. The amount is considerable.
We count Bitcoin hard forks from Nakamoto
Since Satoshi N. is not a stupid person, he contains the mined “crypto market gold” in Bitcoin-wallet and had access to private keys. This circumstance automatically determines the increase in his cryptocurrency capital with each Bitcoin fork.
Accordingly, Satoshi Nakamoto received the following additions from the main branches of the Bitcoin base code:
- $245,088,172.68 from the allocated Bitcoin Cash (the cost of 1 BCH according to CoinMarketCap.com is $309.6);
- $32,757,863.43 from Bitcoin Gold;
- $1,364,003.74 from Bitcoin Diamond;
- $1,154,492 from Lighting Bitcoin;
- further including Super Bitcoin, Bitcoinx, Bitcoin God, Bitcoin Platinum and Bitcoin SV.
Nuance! Surprisingly, the trend of soft forks and hard forks of Bitcoin is only growing. In 2018 alone, about 19 successful blockchain projects were released with a modified Bitcoin code chain. Many cryptocurrency enthusiasts have become rich solely from payments from hard forks!
Satoshi may be Gavin Andresen
People then began to use stylometry to link texts created by Satoshi to the name of a real person.
However, following this approach has already led to a conclusion: the most likely candidate would be Gavin Andresen, a developer currently working on the Bitcoin Cash project, who, however, denied being Satoshi.
The point is that stylometry is not an exact science and, more importantly, identifying one name is not enough.
Instead, it serves to compare the writing style of famous people with Satoshi's, producing results that are neither accurate nor at all specific.
In fact, it is possible that there may be several people with similar writing styles.
In this regard, however, Ethereum co-founder and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson suggests an option that could provide more accurate results.
Will Nakamoto be the richest man on Earth?
The current ranking of the world's richest people is dominated by Jeff Bezos ($131 billion). He is being pursued by Bill Gates ($96.51 billion) and Warren Buffett ($82.52 billion). The actively hiding Satoshi Nakamoto is now in no way able to squeeze even into the TOP 1000 richest people, as a Forbes study shows.
For S. Nakamoto to overtake D. Bezos in terms of total wealth, the Bitcoin quote needs to rise above $60,001.
Main versions
Thanks to the results obtained, several main and minor versions of who is hiding behind Nakamoto’s personality have emerged. Some of them themselves denied these rumors, others still do not deny the information.
Nick Szabo
According to a widespread version, the creation of Bitcoin was based on Nick Szabo’s idea of decentralization of electronic money, which he had been developing since 1998. This man is an American economics professor, George Washington University researcher, and cryptographer. This is what the assumption is based on that he and Nakamoto are one person:
- some documents on Nick Szabo's website about a cryptocurrency that is highly similar to Bitcoin in terms of algorithm structure were originally released in 2005, but then the date was changed to 2008 to make them appear to be behind the times;
- the professor's style of cryptography is very similar to that used by Nakamoto;
- when Bitcoin was introduced, Nick did not react publicly, although this was based on his ten years of research;
- a couple of months before the announcement of the new cryptocurrency, Szabo was looking for employees for his Bit Gold project with a similar structure, which soon closed without continuation;
- Satoshi periodically cited various cryptography projects of even lesser-known figures, but never mentioned Nick Szabo, which seems logical if he was him.
What will happen to BTC coins S. Nakamoto
Since the identity of Comrade Satoshi is unknown, there is no certainty of his real existence, absolutely no one is aware of the future of the cryptographic coins available in his crypto wallets. So far, the most important fact is known - Nakamoto’s Bitcoins have not yet been used anywhere, maintaining the purity of their transaction histories in the blockchain. Colossal accumulations of crypto coins worry investors working with virtual currencies and young blockchain projects. There will probably be a collapse of the cryptocurrency market if S. Nakamoto decides to sell off his savings.
Crypto industry analysts predict a total decline in the prices of all crypto assets within 40-50 minutes. Professor Matt Grinne, in his own research, explained in detail what awaits the instruments of the cryptocurrency market when such a volume of top cryptocurrencies is released. Satoshi’s influence has not yet been traced, so there is the usual volatility of cryptocurrencies, the rise/fall of altcoins and the constancy of stablecoin quotes.
Combining and splitting amounts
Although it is possible to operate on individual coins, creating a special transaction for each cent would be too inconvenient. To support dividing and combining amounts, transactions contain multiple inputs and outputs. A typical transaction would look like this: either one input from a previous large payment, or several inputs accumulating small amounts, and no more than two outputs: one is the actual payment, and the other, if necessary, returns “change” back to the sender.
It should be noted that the increase in connections, when a transaction depends on several, which in turn depend on even more, is not a problem, since there is no need to obtain a complete and independent copy of the transaction history.
Interesting transactions to the genesis crypto wallet address
An interesting trend can be seen in Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin wallet. The cryptocurrency account of this coin store continues to increase due to various transactions sent by ordinary enthusiasts. For example, in 2016, the user Mt.Gox made a transaction of 1.23 Bitcoin to the Nakamoto crypto storage address. So far, over 700 such donations have been recorded, amounting to a total capital of 16.7 BTC.
The genesis wallet of S. Nakamoto has cryptographic encoding that prohibits any use of donated crypto coins. Therefore, such a genesis address is called block No. 0 due to the impossibility of its inclusion in the blockchain chain. These obscure crypto transactions sent to Satoshi's Bitcoin wallet address disappear into thin air.
Satoshi's net worth
Satoshi is believed to own 1 million Bitcoins (or more), making his current net worth, as of this writing, $2.6 billion.
In January 2009, Satoshi created the Genesis block, and in 2010 he officially stopped all communication with anyone. Between this period, Bitcoins appeared on the blockchain ledger, but they were not used. This shows how much Satoshi owns.
1 million BTC is a huge amount that, if suddenly dumped on exchanges, could wreak havoc on the cryptocurrency market. This is why Bitcoin has also earned the title of "Ponzi scheme" - because the speculative founder owns a significant share of the first cryptocurrency.
Secret billionaire
The exact identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, his gender, profession, place of residence, age and, in general, the reality of existence as a person are unknown. This is probably an anonymous group of developers. In any case, S. Nakamoto deserves a standing ovation. Many are trying to unravel the mystery of the creator of Bitcoin. Authorities in various countries are also searching in vain for Nakamoto.
Occasionally, publications of reports of ongoing investigations regarding Satoshi’s personality pop up, however, there are no specifics or evidence. Someone is trying to lure visitors to thematic websites or cryptocurrency portals. As long as the mystery remains relevant, interest in comrade Satoshi Nakamoto will not fade away.
What if Satoshi returns?
Of course, the big question arises: what if Satoshi returns? It has become an article of faith in the Bitcoin community that Satoshi is gone for good and that the gigantic supply of Bitcoin he mined is locked away forever.
If Satoshi returns, it could have serious consequences for Bitcoin. First, they will need to verify their identity; perhaps by moving Bitcoin from an address verified as belonging to him.
Then comes the realization that more than a million Bitcoins, previously thought to be lost forever, have suddenly become active again, which could affect the price and volatility of Bitcoin. In previous cases, when Satoshi-era Bitcoin suddenly became active, it caused sell-offs and panic in the market.
Once Satoshi pays off his truly massive tax bill, the question becomes what his return will mean for the community and the development of Bitcoin. Suddenly, Satoshi's old posts on the bitcointalk.org forum will no longer be the only source of information about his intentions; the man (or woman, or group) behind the mask will be able to make public statements about the current state of Bitcoin and where it should go next.
However, Satoshi continues to be an inspiration to the Bitcoin community. In 2022, when crypto company Coinbase went public, it symbolically sent a copy of its public filing to Satoshi's Bitcoin address and encoded its own message with a link to a newspaper headline on the Bitcoin blockchain.
There will even be a statue of Satoshi erected in Budapest, Hungary. The creator of Bitcoin will be depicted with an anonymous mirror face that will reflect the viewer's face on it. It seems that Satoshi is all of us.
