Satoshi Nakamoto

The bitcoin.org domain was registered on August 18, 2008; in its judgment in COPA v Wright, the High Court of England and Wales found that Satoshi acquired the domain in August 2008 and used it to establish the bitcoin.org website. Bitcoin.org says the domain was originally registered and owned by Satoshi Nakamoto and Martti Malmi, and that when Satoshi left the project he gave ownership of the domain to additional people separate from the Bitcoin developers.⁠[1][2]

On August 20, 2008, Satoshi emailed cryptographer Adam Back, pointing him to a draft of the white paper hosted on the upload.ae site and asking him to check a reference to his Hashcash paper; Back replied the next day and pointed Satoshi to Wei Dai’s b-money paper, and on August 22 Satoshi wrote to Wei Dai to check that reference. These early emails contain abstracts of the draft paper.⁠[2]

On October 5, 2008, Satoshi registered an account named nakamoto2 at SourceForge and used it to create a project entitled “Bitcoin.”⁠[2]

On October 31, 2008, Satoshi posted to the Cryptography Mailing List (the metzdowd cryptography list), writing “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” and linked to the paper hosted on bitcoin.org.⁠[3][2]

The paper, signed Satoshi Nakamoto and titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” proposed allowing online payments to be sent directly between two parties without going through a financial institution. The features listed in the email included preventing double-spending through a peer-to-peer network, needing no mint or other trusted authority, allowing participants to remain anonymous, and creating new coins and securing the network through Hashcash-style proof-of-work.⁠[4][5]

On December 8 or 9, 2008, Satoshi uploaded the white paper to the SourceForge Bitcoin project.⁠[2]

On January 3, 2009 (January 4 in some time zones), Satoshi created the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain, the genesis block (block 0). Its coinbase transaction, which created 50 bitcoins, embeds the text “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” a front-page headline of the British newspaper The Times on that day.⁠[2][6]

On January 8, 2009, Satoshi uploaded the Bitcoin software (an executable file and its source code) to SourceForge and announced the first release, Bitcoin v0.1, on the Cryptography Mailing List, describing it as “completely decentralized with no server or central authority.” The release was Windows-only at first, and the email described a total supply of 21 million coins.⁠[7][8][2]

On January 9, 2009, Satoshi mined block 1, the first block after the genesis block.⁠[2]

On January 12, 2009, the first transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain was recorded in block 170: Satoshi transferred to Hal Finney 10 bitcoins that Satoshi had mined in block 9.⁠[2]

Finney recalled in 2013 that Satoshi sent him ten coins as a test, making him the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, and said he believed he was the first person besides Satoshi to run Bitcoin.⁠[9]

On February 11, 2009, Satoshi posted “Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency” on the P2P Foundation website, writing “I’ve developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin.” In the post he argued that the root problem with conventional currency is all the trust required to make it work, such as trusting a central bank not to debase the currency, trust he said had often been breached in the history of fiat currencies. He followed up in the same thread on February 15 and February 18.⁠[10][11]

On March 24, 2009, Satoshi uploaded a further version of the white paper to the SourceForge Bitcoin project. On May 2 that year he asked Martti Malmi to create an FAQ for the project, and later in 2009 Malmi helped Satoshi set up forums for it.⁠[2]

On November 22, 2009, Satoshi posted “Welcome to the new Bitcoin forum!” and went on to post regularly in the forum, later known as BitcoinTalk, on software development and releases.⁠[12][11]

On December 12, 2010, Satoshi posted “Added some DoS limits, removed safe mode (0.3.19)” on BitcoinTalk, describing version 0.3.19 with some denial-of-service limits; it is the last of his forum posts archived by the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. The next day, December 13, he sent the announcement “Bitcoin 0.3.19 is released” to the bitcoin-list mailing list, the last list email in the Institute’s archive.⁠[13][11][14]

Around April 2011, Satoshi delegated responsibility for being Bitcoin’s lead core developer to Gavin Andresen, and on April 26 he transferred a file containing the network alert key to Andresen. Satoshi was not publicly active after this; the court treated the pseudonym as in use between 2008 and 2011.⁠[2][15]

On April 17, 2013, researcher Sergio Demian Lerner published an analysis that used patterns in the ExtraNonce field of early coinbase transactions to infer a single entity mining at a steady rate from block 1; he estimated by eye that Satoshi held about 1 million bitcoins and put the related never-spent coinbase outputs at about 1,148,800 BTC, while saying he could not be 100% certain all of the coins belonged to Satoshi.⁠[16]

On March 6, 2014, Newsweek published a cover story by Leah McGrath Goodman, “The Face Behind Bitcoin,” identifying Dorian S. Nakamoto, a 64-year-old Japanese-American living in Temple City, California, as the likely inventor of Bitcoin on the basis of his technical and career background, writing style and timing. The article did not confirm his involvement.⁠[17][18]

Dorian Nakamoto denied any connection to Bitcoin, repeatedly saying “I got nothing to do with it,” and said he had never heard of Bitcoin until his son mentioned that a reporter had contacted him. In a later written statement he said, “I did not create, invent or otherwise work on Bitcoin.”⁠[19][18][17]

On March 7, 2014 (UTC), Satoshi’s P2P Foundation account posted a single sentence in the 2009 thread: “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.” The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute notes in its archive that the post came years after Satoshi’s disappearance and that its authenticity warrants scrutiny; the account was compromised in a September 2014 email hack, though there is no clear indication it was compromised when this post was made.⁠[20]

In 2016, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright first publicly claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto but quickly backed away, saying he lacked the courage to provide more proof. He maintained the claim for years afterward, asserting that he wrote the white paper and the first Bitcoin source code.⁠[15][2]

On April 16, 2019, Lerner published a post calling the single miner behind a distinctive pattern in early block data “Patoshi,” attributing about 22,000 blocks to that set and arguing that Satoshi mined close to 1.1 million coins; the post also noted a BitMEX Research estimate of about 700,000 coins for 2009–2010.⁠[21]

On April 9, 2021, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a non-profit group of technology and cryptocurrency firms, brought proceedings against Wright in the High Court of England and Wales, seeking a ruling on whether he is Satoshi Nakamoto.⁠[2][15]

On September 16, 2021, a bronze bust honoring Satoshi Nakamoto was unveiled at Graphisoft Park in Budapest. It was designed and made by Hungarian sculptors Réka Gergely and Tamás Gilly in a project led by András Györfi of Kripto Akadémia; the face is made of mirror-finish aluminum composite so viewers see their own reflection, reflecting Satoshi’s anonymity.⁠[22]

The COPA v Wright trial opened in the High Court on February 5, 2024. At its close on March 14, Justice James Mellor announced from the bench that the evidence was “overwhelming” and that Wright was not the author of the white paper, not the person who operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto between 2008 and 2011, and not the creator of the Bitcoin system, saying a written judgment would follow.⁠[15][23][2]

On May 20, 2024, Justice Mellor handed down his written judgment ([2024] EWHC 1198 (Ch)), making four declarations: Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper; he is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto between 2008 and 2011; he is not the person who created the Bitcoin system; and he is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin software.⁠[2]

The judgment found that Wright “lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly” and that documents had been “forged on a grand scale” by him.⁠[2]

On October 8, 2024, HBO aired “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” directed by Cullen Hoback, which named Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd as Bitcoin’s creator, relying mainly on a 2010 bitcointalk.org post by Todd that Hoback believes Satoshi actually wrote. Todd said in a statement, “For the record, I’m not Satoshi,” and called the film “irresponsible.”⁠[24]

On February 5, 2025, blockchain analytics company Arkham said it had added 22,000 addresses to its Satoshi Nakamoto entity based on a clustering pattern known as the Patoshi Pattern, raising the estimated balance to about 1.096 million BTC; they include addresses from which Satoshi was known to have spent bitcoin.⁠[25]

In April 2026, The New York Times published a lengthy investigation by John Carreyrou arguing that British cryptographer Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto, pointing to linguistic parallels between the two and to Back’s silence from late 2008 through mid-2011, while Satoshi was active, followed by his public reappearance about six weeks after Satoshi vanished. Back denied it; when Carreyrou laid out his evidence to him at a Bitcoin conference in El Salvador in 2025, Back replied, “Clearly I’m not Satoshi, that’s my position,” and he denied it again on X after the article appeared.⁠[26]

On September 29, 2026, Arkham published a ranking of individual on-chain holders based on its data, placing Satoshi Nakamoto first, holding bitcoin mined in 2009 and 2010 spread across 22,000 addresses, and Justin Sun second, with on-chain holdings Arkham put at roughly $2.2 billion. On October 20, Arkham’s research team said Justin Sun was the second-largest “Individual” entity on Arkham, behind only Satoshi Nakamoto, with verifiable on-chain holdings of about $2.3 billion.⁠[27][28]

Bitcoin: Official website: https://bitcoin.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]