1.4 Who invented, owns and controls the various Blockchains?

At BlockUno, our favourite fact about Blockchain is that no one owns/controls it, whilst no one knows who invented it. We have discussed this topic briefly in an earlier blog post, but now we are going to take you into the details and hopefully get you hooked on the curiosity about who is behind this advanced technology.

Introducing Satoshi Nakamoto

‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ is the name used by the person/group of people who developed the ever-famous Bitcoin (the first use of Blockchain presented to the nation in 2009), and they authored the white paper for Bitcoin using this name. When creating Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, created the first Blockchain database and consequently solved the double-spending issue that had been apparent for digital currencies using this peer-to-peer network. 

What do we know about Satoshi Nakamoto?

In short, not a lot! Majority of the information we have about Satoshi Nakamoto actually comes from people investigating and digging for clues. The only information we have from Satoshi Nakamoto themselves, is their P2P Foundation profile stated in 2012 that he was a 37-year-old male, who lived in Japan. Even this information has already been questioned, because it has been speculated that even though it states he lives in Japan, he isn’t actually Japanese, because none of the Bitcoin documents were labelled in Japanese and the person behind the identity makes use of English as their native language. 

What other hints have we been given?

Intrigued to know more and potentially unlock the unknown? Below are a couple of other hints that have been shared over the years, maybe they can help you with your investigation and lead you to your own conclusions:

• English (UK) spelling and terminology is heavily used in both source code comments and forum posts. Phrases such as “bloody hard” have been recognised and lead individuals to speculate further that Satoshi Nakamoto is definitely of Commonwealth origin. 
• Furthermore, the first block in the Bitcoin Blockchain (created by Satoshi Nakamoto themselves), contains the encoded text “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”, suggesting whoever is behind the identity, must have been reading London’s The Times newspaper around the time of Bitcoin launching. 

What speculations have others shared?

A very interesting speculation that is worth considering, is that fact some people have shared they believe Satoshi Nakamoto is actually a group of people. Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher who read the bitcoin code, stated that the people/person behind Bitcoin had to be either a ‘team of people’ or a ‘genius’. Whilst Laszlo Hanyecz, a developer who had emailed Nakamoto, felt the code was too well designed for one person and there must have been an additional people involved in the creation. All of this complicates the investigation further, as now it seems we are searching for more than one individual.

Stefan Thomas Investigation

Many people have investigated the unknown, and Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and active community member, is one of them. Stefan Thomas completed a time-consuming study and concluded that Satoshi Nakamoto can’t have been living in Japan (unless he had an unusual sleeping pattern). In order to calculate this conclusion, Stefan Thomas graphed the time stamps for each of Nakamoto’s bitcoin forum posts (more than 500) and created a chart from the data which showed the steep decline and almost no posts between the hours of 5am and 11am (GMT), which is Japan would be 2pm – 8pm, the core part of the day where you would expect most people to be awake and anticipate large amounts of activity. Furthermore, this pattern was evidenced even at the weekend, which suggested the person behind the identity was definitely sleeping at these hours. 

So, who do we believe is hiding behind the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto?

Until we complete further investigations and receive additional information, there isn’t a confident answer that allows us to state who is hiding behind the identity of ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, and who knows if we will ever be in a position to explicitly say who it is. But amongst the current speculations from the information we do have, we can focus in on cryptography and computer science experts, who are not Japanese and could be living in the US and/or various European countries, which doesn’t exactly narrow anything down for us. But we will leave you with the following list of people, who are just a few candidates that are thought to be ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo & Craig Wright.

Finally, who actually owns the Blockchain technology?

When both Blockchain and Bitcoin launched in 2009, it was basically handed over to the world as a gift, due to the open source code. Meaning it is free for anyone to use and you can also customise it to suit your needs, as long as you have the technological knowhow and skills to be able to do so. But in answer to our question and we have mentioned this before, no one owns Blockchain and technically no one ever can own it.

Remember, both Blockchain and Bitcoin are a gift from the unknown ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ that is free for anyone and everyone to use.

BlockUno, 2020

Looking for more information about Blockchain?

It’s like a game of guess who that no one has won, but maybe it can be an investigation you want to get involved in and research further to see if you can get to the bottom of it? However, if you would rather learn more about the Blockchain itself, join us in 1.5 What can Blockchains do? (Released 13/04/2020) And uncover the capabilities this technology offers to you, us and the rest of the world.