Who Created Bitcoin? The Evidence We Start With

PREV_HASHthe Satoshi investigation

Block #000 · genesis

What Bitcoin is, and why we are looking for its creator

Document on file: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, 9 pages, PDF

Before we start looking for the author, we must establish exactly what he created. The later history of Bitcoin does not interest us — the exchanges, the price, the culture that grew around it. What interests us is only the system described by the author in 2008, in the form in which it left his hands. This is the zero point of the investigation. We define the object, define the evidence, and write down what we do not yet know — so that a hundred episodes from now it can be checked whether we kept our word.

Artifact 000-A · the whitepaper’s title page

        Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
        [1]          [2]              [3]

                     Satoshi Nakamoto            [4]
                   satoshin@gmx.com
                    www.bitcoin.org

[1]Bitcoin — from the very first line the author gives the system its own name. Not a “project”, not a working label: a finished brand.
[2]Peer-to-Peer — decentralisation is already in the title. It is not a later addition or an interpretation by supporters.
[3]Electronic Cash System — not an “investment”, not “digital gold”. The author presents it as money meant for paying.
[4]Satoshi Nakamoto — the only identity the author ever presented publicly. Everything we are looking for begins on this line.

The author ran the project for two years, then wrote in 2011 that he had “moved on to other things” — and vanished. Blockchain analyses have attributed a large body of early-mined bitcoins to a single early miner sometimes associated with Satoshi; that attribution is disputed and is not treated as identity evidence in this investigation. What is not disputed is the text he left: the whitepaper, correspondence, forum posts, code. That is our evidence. It is public, countable and — most importantly — every one of you can verify every step we take.

The object of the investigation

what exactly was created

electronic payment sent directly between parties no trusted third party proof-of-work as the consensus mechanism a public, immutable transaction history new coins issued to the block’s maker, with fees taking over once a predetermined number of coins is reached an open implementation anyone can inspect

What building it required

the range of skills to be tested

cryptography — hash functions, digital signatures distributed systems — consensus without a centre computer networks — propagation across a P2P network software engineering — a working client, not a prototype economics — incentives that keep participants honest

A methodological note: this is not evidence of who Satoshi was. It is the list of competences the investigation will have to test in anyone who ever appears in this file.

What is known at the zero point

T₀ · 31 Oct 2008

Known

author: Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym) document: whitepaper, 9 pages publication: 31 October 2008 implementation: announced, public identity: unverified

Not assumed

nationality: unknown location: unknown age: unknown profession: unknown individual or group: undetermined

Corpus definition

where the ~600 comes from

Satoshi’s public emails forum posts (chiefly bitcointalk.org) the whitepaper and accompanying documents mailing-list messages public code fragments and comments within them other material attributable to the author from primary sources

~600 is a working figure. It may change after deduplication and source verification — every correction will be recorded publicly, together with the reason.

Finding #0 — pinned to the board The case corpus is finite and public: 1 whitepaper, email correspondence, ~575 forum posts, the client’s source code. We define it once and will not step outside it without a note.

What this investigation does not do

limits of the method

it does not begin with a list of candidates it does not treat media claims as evidence it does not infer identity from bitcoin ownership unless independently attributable it does not assume in advance that Satoshi was one person

Block sources (originals): bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf · satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org

Next · Block #001

The first email

On 31 October 2008 the system leaves the author’s computer and enters the public record. For the first time we get a timestamp, an email address, a specific audience, and Satoshi’s natural prose.

→ read block #001

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