8 things about alleged Bitcoin founder Dorian Nakamoto

MANILA, Philippines – Much has been said about Bitcoin, the pioneering digital currency that has been in the media spotlight recently due to its extreme volatility and the recent bankruptcy of Mt. Gox, one of the world’s largest online Bitcoin exchanges.

However, what has escaped the spotlight is the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s reclusive founder who has not been heard from since the spring of 2011. That is, until today.

In an exposé published by Newsweek on March 6, journalist Leah McGrath Goodman alleges that the man behind Bitcoin is no other than a 64-year-old Californian engineer Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto. The revelation sparked a flurry of speculation and outrage among various circles in the Bitcoin community, out of respect for the founder’s wishes to remain anonymous.

Dorian Nakamoto himself has issued denials to media outlets that he is the founder of the digital currency, but Newsweek editor in chief Jim Impoco stands by the story.

If this profile of Nakamoto turns out to be true, it paints an interesting picture of the eclectic man behind a currency that – if you total the value of the bitcoins currently in circulation – is estimated to be worth $7.8 billion.

Here are some interesting facts about Nakamoto that stood out in the 4,512-word article:

1. He is an avid model train enthusiast

When Goodman initially reached out to Nakamoto, she learned of his love for model trains. In e-mail exchanges, he talked about how, since his teenage years, he would import parts from Japan and England to modify and upgrade his model trains. His estranged wife, Grace Mitchell, speculated that Nakamoto’s interest in creating the virtual currency may have originated from the exorbitant bank fees and exchange rates involved when he was importing his model trains from England.

2. He is the son of a Buddhist priest and descendant of Samurai

Nakamoto was “descended from Samurai and the son of a Buddhist priest,” Goodman wrote. He was raised poor in the Buddhist tradition by his mother, who divorced his father and migrated to the United States with Satoshi in 1959 from the city of Beppu in Japan.

3. He is an ‘amazing’ physicist

According to his youngest sibling, Arthur Nakamoto, Satoshi’s propensity for science and math was obvious at a very early age. He went on to major in physics at the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, and worked as an engineer for various defense, electronic communications, and technology companies throughout his career (including classified military projects). He suddenly stopped in 2001, which fittingly dovetails his work with Bitcoin in the succeeding years.

 

4. He is a libertarian

Nakamoto’s eldest daughter, Ilene Mitchell, shared that her father was a politically aware man who was up to date on current events and had certain wariness toward governmental authority and interference. “When I was little, there was a game we used to play. He would say, ‘Pretend the government agencies are coming after you.’ And I would hide in the closet.” It has been noted that many of the early proponents of Bitcoin were libertarians, supportive of the fact there is no central bank or authority that regulates the exchange of the currency on the Internet.

5. He has not used his birth name in over 40 years

While originally born as Satoshi Nakamoto, the alleged founder has not been using this name for the past 40 years in his daily activities. In the early 1970s, Nakamoto received American citizenship and around that time decided to change his name to Dorian Prentice S. Nakamoto, partly to sound more Western. He chose “Dorian” as it alluded to simplicity, much like his modest lifestyle, while “Prentice” referred to his love of learning.

 

6. He drives a Toyota Corolla CE

As his first name implies, Nakamoto leads a very simple and reclusive lifestyle. Despite the wealth that has come with his work on Bitcoin, he drives a Toyota Corolla CE and lives in a modest single-family home in Southern California.

7. He is an ‘old-school’ programmer

Satoshi Nakamoto’s collaborators on Bitcoin disclosed that he had a slightly different, perhaps classical, approach to writing code. Gavin Andresen, the chief scientist for the Bitcoin Foundation, shared that Nakamoto used conventions such as Hungarian notation and reverse Polish notation, which are no longer widely used today by developers, signifying that they were dealing with an older, more mature man.

Another giveaway, according to forensic analyst Sharon Sergeant, was Nakamoto’s references in his 2008 spec paper on Bitcoin to saving disk space and Moore’s Law, old-school technological tropes that were major concerns in the past century, but have already been surpassed by today’s computers.

8. He has not spent a single Bitcoin of his already sizable fortune

Analysts have suggested that Nakamoto mined a large number of Bitcoin in the early stages of the currency, estimated to be around one million bitcoins in total. If these were converted to US dollars with today’s exchange rate, Nakamoto would now be sitting on a fortune worth roughly $600 million.

Despite this, Bitcoin experts have yet to see Nakamoto spend a single one of his Bitcoins. Due to the transparency of the currency, where all exchanges are publicly logged on a transaction record called the “block chain,” it has been shown that none of the original coins have been transacted thus far. And perhaps for good reason.

If Nakamoto were to move those original blocks of Bitcoin at a legitimate exchange, he would in effect be giving up his anonymity by alerting not only Bitcoin enthusiasts but also government agencies like the IRS and the FBI (and perhaps we might have solid proof that he is Dorian Nakamoto). In addition to this, analysts predict that any movement would also introduce increased volatility to the already unstable Bitcoin market. – Rappler.com