It has been ten years since the Bitcoin whitepaper was released and almost a decade since the cryptocurrency market was created. The blockchain revolutionised the way financial transactions were taking place and proposed to be the future of the global financial industry.

While many belittled and mocked the industry by calling it a bubble and a scam, the cryptocurrency market was quitely amassing a community of its own and doubling in value over the years. The cryptocurrency market caught everyone’s attention last December when Bitcoin went right up to $19,000 USD and set an all-time high. The reason it caught so many people’s attention was that the return on investment rate that the bitcoin had established was unlike anything a stock can offer an investor.

One of the biggest mysteries of the cryptocurrency market is the identity of its creator. Bitcoin was created under the psyeudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. There have been many widespread searches for the cryptocurrency market’s creator but to know actual avail. But since last December, the fervour to find Satoshi Nakamoto is at an all-time, unprecedented high.

Self-Proclaimed Satoshis

Satoshi Nakamoto is one of the most common Asian names in the book. Being named Satoshi Nakamoto in Asia is like being named John Smith in the western world. So it is a pretty safe assumption that Satoshi Nakamoto is an assumed identity taken by the founder of Bitcoin.

This fact is one of the most misused facts in the cryptocurrency market. Many key players in the industry have come out repeatedly proclaiming that they are, in fact, ‘the’ Satoshi Nakamoto. While some of them were downright comical, others were very convincing. But here is a list of the top ‘self-proclaimed’ Satoshi Nakamotos’ of 2019.

Ronald Keala Kua Maria 

Ronald Keala Kua Maria is the man that owns the Bitcoin Cash trademark. Being a resident of Hawai,  Ronald Keala Kua Maria had filed for a patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office. In the files, he explains why he wants to patent ‘Bitcoin Cash’ and he also explains in detail why and how he is Satoshi Nakamoto. 

“I am the real one and only Satoshi Nakamoto — I own all the private keys, blockchains, altcoins and bitcoins under copyright law. In the event of my death, incapacitation, coma, kidnapping, detainment and or incarceration all of my copyrighted works and all related works shall no longer be used by anyone anywhere for any reason at any time subject to change without any notice at any time by Ronald Keala Kua Maria only.”

It was later discovered that Ronald Keala Kua Maria was involved and named in the propagation of a lot of fraudulent schemes and plans.

The Bitcoin Book 

Earlier this year, the cryptocurrency community was abuzz with news that the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto had surfaced and was writing a book about the creation of Bitcoin. The first 21 pages of the memoirs were released on a website called nakamotofamilyfoundation.org.

While initially, everybody was quite excited about the news, it only took a couple of hours before people beat it down, exposing that the ‘memoirs’ was a fake and had not been released by the real Satoshi Nakamoto. 

The same was done using stylometric assessments. The preface that was released was compared to the original Bitcoin whitepaper and other posts that came from Satoshi and concluded that both could not have been written by the same person. 

Gavin Andresen; Stylometric Satoshi? 

A cryptocurrency non-profit organisation called Zy Crypto conducted a stylometric test on many of the key players in the cryptocurrency industry. Based on their research they concluded that it is highly likely that the Bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen was actually Satoshi. 

Stylometrics is essentially a process of comparing writing styles and linguistics. When they released this report Gavin Andresen denied it and said, “My opinion of the accuracy of Stylometry has dropped significantly after reading this.”

Time Traveller Theory 

In June when a Bitcoin mining pool was mining the block number 528249 on the Bitcoin Blockchain, the miners came across a curious block hash. The block hash contained this address; 00000000000000000021e800 and the 21e800 drove everyone crazy. 

There was talk that Satoshi is actually a time travelling alien that has crazy quantum computing skills and that he came to Earth created Bitcoin and vanished. The E8 in the hash was connected to the Theory of Everything and people were going crazy. The Theory of Everything is also called the Unified Field Theory. 

Roberto Escobar 

2018 was also the year that Roberto Escobar, the brother of the infamous drug dealer Pablo Escobar, released a cryptocurrency called the Diet Bitcoin. In the whitepaper that Roberto Escobar released, he said that he had met Satoshi Nakamoto and that he was in fact a NSA Agent. 

He further went on to claim that the US Government was controlling the cryptocurrency market and specifically Bitcoin. He even claimed that Satoshi came to his house and spoke to him about Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market. And in order to create a genuine cryptocurrency, Roberto Escobar, in memory of his brother, released Diet Bitcoin into the market.

Community Not Likely to Stop

While the cryptocurrency market’s thirst to find Satoshi Nakamoto remains unquenched, the creator has successfully covered his/her/their tracks so far. With that being said, it must have taken the creator a great deal of self control to walk away from the success of Bitcoin.

But with the way the cryptocurrency market is head-hunting for Satoshi, it seems that the only way they will stop is after the identity is uncovered. So as the community and market gears up for 2019, the identity of the creator of Bitcoin still remains a mystery and one of the market’s best kept secrets.

Ramaa Mohan