Bitcoin had a worth of $1000 at the beginning of this year and then it rose as much as $20,000 earlier this month. While Bitcoin’s huge rise has made hundreds of people very rich, it has impacted few people much more than that, especially the creator of the cryptocurrency himself. The anonymous owner and creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, who created the currency in 2009 holds an estimated 980,000 bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto mined the coins in the very early days of the currency and ended up creating almost a million bitcoin in blocks which are associated with him. When he was creating the bitcoin, it was only worth a few cents, but now after 8 years, each of his bitcoin is worth $19,971. The total worth of his coins is $19.4 billion, making him the 44th richest person on the planet.
Nakamoto’s newfound riches are expected to further intensify the speculation over his identity. In 2008, Nakamoto made his first appearance with a paper which described his new invention, Bitcoin. Later in January 2009, he created his first Bitcoin software that launched the network and the first units of bitcoin. Over the next year, he kept participating in online forums and registered the domain bitcoin.org. All this time he only interacted with his online pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto and never revealed his original identity.
In mid-2010, Nakamoto declared that he is giving up the direct involvement in bitcoin project, and handed over control of the source code repository and network alert key to a key member of the bitcoin community. He also transferred control of several related website domains. Nakamoto was true to his word and since his retirement, he has not appeared on any Bitcoin forum and has also not accessed any of his bitcoins which were first mined in 2009. Several attempts were made to discover Nakamoto’s identity but none of them were successful. On bitcoin’s forum, he described himself as a 37 years old living in Tokyo, but it is believed by most of the people that he is not a Japanese since he had written messages in perfect English. And he also never documented his code in Japanese. Some suggest that by the way he wrote, he might be a British. He also used some common Britishisms like “Bloody hard” in his posts. Others have tried to look at the timestamps when he posted and concluded that if he had normal sleeping cycle then he was most likely to be located in North America or Britain.
Despite creating himself a vast fortune, Nakamoto still remains unknown to the world and never gave the world his true identity. His 980,000 bitcoins still lie untouched in his bitcoin address and waiting for their owner to claim them. If that ever happens, Nakamoto will go down in history as one of the most influential people of all time.
