On April 26, 2011, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto allegedly abandoned the nascent cryptocurrency community to work on other projects. Nobody has managed to track them down ever since.
Bitcoin (BTC) creator Satoshi Nakamoto left the cryptocurrency community using a parting message exactly one decade ago now:”I have moved on to other things.”
In the years since, Bitcoin has evolved from an obscure and esoteric project to a trillion-dollar financial advantage drawing attention from governments, financial institutions, investors and corporations.
With a current BTC cost of around $54,000, Nakamoto’s projected fortune is roughly $54 billion. As Cointelegraph recently speculated, a BTC price of $182,000 — believed probable by most crypto enthusiasts — would create Nakamoto the world’s richest individual . The Bitcoin price peaked over $64,000 before this month before correcting lower.
The puzzle surrounding Nakamoto was the subject of a March 2021 Cointelegraph Brasil meeting with Dustin. D. Trammell, among the first cypherpunks to mine that the digital currency. In that interview, Trammell speculated that it was improbable Nakamoto functioned on an e-cash protocol before Bitcoin given their”lack of bias” in implementing new technologies.
He explained:
“In hindsight, Satoshi didn’t appear to be trying to address a technical problem, but rather a societal problem. A systemic issue with the legacy financial system. At the time though, they were very focused on the technology, so some of the philosophical points may have been overlooked or downplayed by people not paying close enough attention.”
Although Bitcoin has to live up with the tenants of Nakamoto’s original 2008 whitepaper, its recognized fiscal policy has made it an increasingly attractive store of value.
It is not completely clear whether Satoshi Nakamoto will ever resurface — or if they are still living, for that matter — but the cryptocurrency community comes to terms with the creator’s anonymity. Nakamoto’s work triggered the widespread adoption of blockchain technologies under a new ethos of decentralization. This ethos was on display in the Cointelegraph Top 100, with crypto’s strongest person being”all of us” who are contributing to a more decentralized world:
“In these networks, in which we often participate pseudonymously, we sense the chance to recover some of what we’ve lost to progressively centralized entities that catch our information, invade our privacy, dictate the conditions under which we could exchange value, and specify the degree of fiscal risk to which we should be exposed.”
