Why did Satoshi Nakamoto disappear?

Why did Satoshi Nakamoto disappear? Before the birth of Bitcoin, he was an extremely mysterious person – a cryptographer and computer science professor, and one of the anonymous founders behind many cryptocurrency projects. On January 13, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper titled “Zero-knowledge Proof Technology.” This was the first technology solution called “zero,” introducing a new open-source architecture into the internet and providing a secure, scalable, and decentralized network infrastructure for people. This paper has received warm welcome since a public speech in 2008. “Satoshi Nakamoto mystery” spread online in early March 2020. After the alleged death of Satoshi Nakamoto in early 2010, another wave of the “Satoshi Nakamoto saga” occurred, involving many people including Satoshi Nakamoto himself, in this controversial story. (Image source from the internet)

Shortly after Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2014, his company released a report showing that they had created over $2 billion worth of new digital assets since 2013. According to the data released by the organization, the company’s revenue reached a record $4 billion from the end of 2017 to the beginning of 2018, and this number exceeded 8 billion RMB in June 2019. On October 12, 2019, when the price of Bitcoin surpassed $20,000, he stated that he was not surprised and said, “I think everything we’re doing now is to fulfill our vision,” but at the same time, he also pointed out, “If we didn’t have this idea, we would see more wealth attribution in the future.” Until the end of 2015, shortly after the official publication of “Bitcoin,” a large number of token trading platforms appeared in the market, which accepted transactions in BTC form, including Bitfinex and various exchanges. Although some websites even claimed that these tokens were not real currency but virtual commodities. However, despite this, the Bitcoin development team insisted on using the underlying infrastructure of Bitcoin to run the code, namely the Bitcoin script language C++. But due to the lack of corresponding tools, many people misunderstood C++. In late August 2018, when the Bitcoin browser application Blockstream launched a marketplace named Liquid, many people in the Bitcoin community suspected that Satoshi Nakamoto might be doing something to dissatisfy users. However, soon after, there were reports indicating that Satoshi Nakamoto seemed not to care about this issue. Earlier this year, Bitcoin supporter Roger Ver tweeted, “If you ask me who I am, I’ll say ‘You are Satoshi Nakamoto!'” Later, Rogerverse also retweeted a letter asking whether the engineer should continue to work because they didn’t know what problem Satoshi Nakamoto was trying to solve.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s Identity

Editor’s note: This article is from Caiyun Blockchain (ID: cybtc_com), author: irishash, and authorized by Odaily Star Daily for reprint. Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, is a “libertarian” and a crypto punk. He is someone who has a certain amount of research on cryptocurrency and is a programmer who is very interested in cryptography. When asked if he ever held any form of digital asset, this computer science PhD replied, “I am part of the creator of Bitcoin.” However, this mysterious figure also raised many questions – such as his belief that he may have some non-fungible tokens (NFTs). According to Forbes, Forbes claimed that he and Satoshi Nakamoto jointly created a new cryptocurrency called Scrypt-Bitcoin.org, claiming that the project could serve hundreds of thousands of people around the world. “We are building a new platform based on Ethereum, Solana, and other blockchains, and these on-chain activities will use encryption technology to solve scalability issues without the need for any other middleware or protocols to support it.” However, this did not stop those who wanted to understand the Bitcoin codebase from questioning, because wasn’t this the first time they heard someone mention the Bitcoin whitepaper? In fact, Satoshi Nakamoto had announced the existence of Bitcoin as early as 2017. On January 3, 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued a notice banning the public sale of Bitcoin ETF, and there has been no update since then. At that time, people speculated that if regulatory agencies did not take action, Bitcoin might disappear. (Note: According to a Coindesk article analysis, there is currently no evidence that Satoshi Nakamoto did release their Bitcoin whitepaper on GitHub; in fact, despite this, there are signs that it seems not to conform to the standards). At the end of December 2017, Craig Wright (CSW) was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $500,000 in Florida for alleged involvement in a money laundering case. Although this statement sounds like a joke, the perception began to slowly change from that point on.