The full text of Satoshi Nakamoto’s self-certification (Part 1): The origin of Bitcoin and the name Satoshi Nakamoto

The name "bitcoin" not only comes from the IT term "bit", but also because we want to bring the BCCI name back to its glory days. The full name of BCCI is "Bank of CredIT and COmmerce INternational"

Note: This is an article updated by the person claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto on his website. The article mainly introduces the origin of Bitcoin and the name Satoshi Nakamoto. He said that BTC originally originated from the Bank of Credit International (BCCI) founded by Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of United Bank Limited (UBL); his nickname is Shaikho, and he heard about Satoshi Sumita, who was accused of being the culprit of the Bank of Japan's loose monetary policy, and Satoshi perfectly matched his nickname Shaikho. As for the origin of the name of Bitcoin, he said that the name "bitcoin" not only originated from the IT term "bit", but also because he wanted to bring the name BCCI back to its glory days. The full name of BCCI is "Bank of CredIT and COmmerce INternational", so he registered the domain name "bitcoin.org" on August 18, 2008.  

The following is the full text of the self-certification:

I am Satoshi Nakamoto.

I have always believed in freedom and liberation for common people. That is why I started my journey with Bitcoin. But the irony is that I got stuck in something that is hard to get myself out of.

It took me 8-9 years to understand and to have the courage to fight myself and get out of this false notion that this world’s view of the truth is because the truth is always stranger than fiction.

Hal Finney, one of my closest ally and mentor, said in a March 2013 post on Bitcointalk that “when Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he received a skeptical response at best.” This is absolutely true.

I insisted on making history, and I did. However, somewhere along the way, I lost it. I forgot who I was, and my battle was not with anyone or anything, but with myself. I am back now, not to prove anything to anyone, but to myself. No one can beat you, unless you beat yourself.

The origins of Bitcoin

Most people think that my development of Bitcoin was just a fluke, or something that was designed overnight, but looking back, I realize that this was not the case. Bitcoin was created through circumstance, and its current visibility cannot be attributed to design per se.

The trajectory of Bitcoin from its inception to its current maturity has allowed me to hide and protect myself from the judgement of my family because I cannot be blamed for something that certain governments have outlawed at one point in Bitcoin’s history.

In my conception of Bitcoin, it was worth only a few cents. Later, when its use was hijacked by illegal means, I made a decision and set off a chain of events that put distance between my creation (Bitcoin) and myself.

Today, as Bitcoin is understood by the advancement of technology but hijacked by greed, I feel it is my responsibility to work hard to make my creation better and take its vision to the next level.

The events I am about to reveal took place many years ago. I have been able to recall the memories I have had, even the painful ones. Here are some explanations of this journey.

BCCI (Bank of Credit International)

It all started in my childhood when I heard my father’s stories about Agha Hasan Abedi who founded United Bank Limited (UBL) in 1959. My father was a banker himself and worked at UBL for 27 years. He told me how Abedi changed the banking industry forever. When Pakistan nationalized its banking industry in 1972, Abedi founded the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which at one point was the seventh largest bank in the world.

In 1991, the Bank of England closed BCCI due to money laundering, bribery, smuggling and related scandals, affecting more than 1 million investors. I learned how unfair BCCI's demise actually was, with its fate at the hands of cruel, dirty world policies and prevalent backroom politics. Later in life, I realized that the wrongdoings of some within BCCI led to the collapse of the entire bank.

The worst bank in the world

My Master's Thesis

Growing up, I developed an interest in cryptography, computational/quantum finance, and numerology, which later played an important role in the creation of Bitcoin. In 1999-2000, I was studying for a master's degree in computer science at a university, and I submitted a draft of a thesis that studied the electronic currency company DigiCash Inc.

David Chaum founded DigiCash in 1989, and his vision seemed ahead of its time. DigiCash transactions were unique in that they were anonymous due to a number of cryptographic protocols. Although DigiCash went bankrupt in 1998 while I was still working on my master’s degree, the seeds for Bitcoin were planted in my mind through my research.

When I submitted my paper, my university felt that the content was too advanced, so I resubmitted a paper about a simple portal as my thesis project!

Necessity is the mother of invention

The final impetus for the creation of Bitcoin came not only from my personal banking experience and my need to redeem BCCI after its unfair demise, but also from the Great Recession of 2008.

Personally, when I visited the UK in 2005, no bank would open the door for me to access a bank account because I did not have a permanent UK address. Without a bank account, I could not access online networking facilities and I had no idea how to overcome this obstacle.

I didn't like the way banks controlled and exploited other people's money and I wanted to at least try to change that. I felt like a loser and was humiliated by the banks so I made it my mission to invent something that would allow the average layman to get money without involving the big banks.

I want to empower the poor, empower the little guy and create something that can be obtained as the people's money, a people's bank with no borders, no nationality, no discrimination, nothing that is controlled by the government, no one dictating and destroying them for the wrong politics.

Even a poor child with limited education in China, India or Africa could potentially benefit from Bitcoin. I was driven to create something that would change finance and banking forever, empowering people and taking control away from central banks.

How Bitcoin got its name

The origin of the word Bitcoin not only stems from the IT terminology of "bit" but also because I was obsessed with bringing the BCCI name back to its glory days. While building the "nameless" distributed digital currency, I was looking for a name for the "Credit Bank and International Commercial Bank" and the lightbulb moment came where the letter asked me to choose a name. The name was:

B ank of C red IT and CO mmerce IN international.

Regardless, I was determined to get the BCCI name back. But initially I realised that this had to be done in a cryptic way because I knew the BCCI name had been discredited.

My intention is to create a new era digital bank and to create a system with open source access, my intention is to make it more useful and better in later times. To this end, I registered the domain name "bitcoin.org" on August 18, 2008, speaking anonymously, without requiring the registrant to identify himself.

At the same time, I tried to register "BCCI" as a domain name, but it was not available. As an alternative, I registered "theBCCI.net" on November 18, 2008, using my real name (which I later legally changed in the UK), a domain name I still own. I will share my real identity with you in more detail in the third part of "my Reveal", as the registration dates of August 18 and November 18 for the two domains are not coincidental.

Finding a new identity

When I created my alias Satoshi Nakamoto, I was very suspicious of my real name because I thought it was synonymous with bad luck. I felt that nothing I did with my original name went well, and everything associated with my old name was unlucky. I felt that everything I did ended up going to waste, for example, the university I enrolled in to complete my master's degree ended up having problems with government accreditation. Whether it was pursuing higher studies or my failed relationships, I blamed it all on my unlucky name.

I feel more fortunate to have a nickname in my family, which is Shaikho. It comes from the nickname of Mughal emperor Jahangir, Sheku, which was given to him by his mother, the wife of Akbar the Great. In 1607, Jahangir founded the present city of Shekpura in Punjab, Pakistan. Different spellings of the same name occur when variations are created in translations between different languages.

Once I decided to work on a project to create a digital currency, I wanted to create it through an alias because I needed help from the online community. I also thought that the only way to succeed was if I changed my name and chose a blessed number in numerology, using numerology would also allow me to be loyal to BCCI but without any public mention of the company that was low-key in the rest of the world.

This meant that I had to be very careful about the alias I chose. I wanted to choose a name that was unusual and clever, but at the same time harkened back to my roots.

Strength in numbers

Some say that numbers are messages with an inherent energetic nature, and by studying numerology, you can better understand the deeper meaning and purpose behind our experiences. I have been a student of Chaldean numerology since I was a child.

I use numerology to encrypt many of the decisions I make in the development of Bitcoin. The following examples will help illustrate how Chaldean numerology is combined with the use of names.

My nickname is Shaikho.

Then, taking the next step in the Chaldean system, the numbers 2 and 4 in 24 are added together to get 6. Therefore, my nickname Shaikho is equivalent to the number 24 in Chaldean numerology. Since this name begins with the letter S, I also wanted my alias to begin with the letter S, the same number as 24, which is 6, which is important in many religions.

While dealing with and exploring the world of finance, I heard about Sumita Satoshi. He is often blamed for the Bank of Japan's loose monetary policy, which led to the Japanese asset price bubble in the late 1980s. However, later research has exonerated him. I am working on something that will change the world forever, and Satoshi and my nickname Shaikho are a perfect match, and a perfect match in consonants and vowels.

Hal Finney is a well-respected programmer and computer scientist in California. He is a member of an activist group called the cypherpunks, which advocates for widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a means of social and political change. Hal has been a great help to me. Together, we created the first Bitcoin transaction in 2009.

Hal and I started working on a P2P electronic cash system in 2006-2007 - before it was named Bitcoin, more accurately in 2007-2008. I came up with a solution for electronic cash that leveraged his ideas about the Reusable Proof of Work system (RPOW), and he really wanted to improve it. Hal was an idealist, a true cypherpunk who didn't care if it would succeed, while my vision was to bring BCCI back to digital commerce.

In addition to testing early versions of Bitcoin, Hal also helped me get a remote PC because I was using TOR (The Onion Network), an open source software that enables anonymous communications. I wanted to use a computer that didn't use a VPN and was on a physical network that wasn't blacklisted, which is why some people mistakenly thought I was working on Bitcoin in California, but I never lived there.

My way of thinking

I found the right solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem in Hal's RPOW in 2004. That's why he is my closest ally and why Hal and I worked very hard on many aspects of Bitcoin in its early days.

I'm not a traditional programmer or techie, some people have realized this, but I'm good at macro-level vision and seeing things from a bigger perspective. I can go to the graveyard of future technology and find useful things that have been discarded. But in these things, I can see the future and create a giant from it, just like Lego.

For those unfamiliar with BGP, it is a fictional problem that first appeared in the 1982 paper “The Byzantine Generals Problem”.

Simply put, BGP asks the question, “How do you ensure that multiple entities separated by distance agree before taking action?” I wrote about a real-world application of BGP’s solution in my 2008 white paper, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.

Of course, I would love to take all the credit for solving BGP, but that's not me, although I will give myself some credit because I always put the right pieces into the puzzle.

I am lucky to see smart people. My vision finds solutions for me, which already exist, but no one has discovered it. I play in an orchestra and I know which musician plays the best.

“Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?”

When I first conceived the idea for Bitcoin, I used a pseudonym and had no intention of creating a last name.

Of my first many email addresses, I only used Satoshi. Shortly after I left the Bitcoin development company, I discovered that all of my email addresses had been hacked.

I was very careful to encrypt all communications, even with my closest collaborators, and not to reveal any personal details. Gavin Andresen, Nick Szabo, and others knew very little about me.

I can’t remember exactly, but when Hal initially saw my name Satoshi online sometime in 2005-06, he commented,

"Satoshi who? Satoshi Nakamoto?"

I must have subconsciously remembered this to create the last name of Satoshi. After I created Bitcoin, for many years after I created Bitcoin, I did not hear that Hal and the only three people named Satoshi Nakamoto in the United States at the time lived near Temple City, California.

The man, whose full name is Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, was mistakenly referred to as me in a 2014 Newsweek cover story. I supposedly sent an email at the time from my old Satoshi address saying “I’m not Dorian Nakamoto.” I’m not that person, but I didn’t send that email either.

I was very paranoid at the time, but Hal didn't know that, and he wasn't interested in asking irrelevant questions. When I first interacted with him, he told me my last name was Nakamoto, and he asked me where I was from, and I responded that I was of Asian descent. Because of my pseudonym, he thought I was Japanese. Hal was the only person I told my actual ancestry to.

Satoshi + Nakamoto = 55

When deciding on an alias, I wanted a master numerology that had two Mercury numbers associated with it (5). Mercury is the messenger of God in astrology. The number 55 represents a complete and whole person, and is symbolized by two hands - 10 fingers - joined together in prayer. In Chaldean numerology, a person named 55 is believed to have the power to defeat any enemy he faces.

I also love the first verse of the Torah/Bible Book of Isaiah Chapter 55. This verse is very close to my heart because I wanted to create something for people who don't have money, or for people to make their own money.

Come, all you who are thirsty.

Come to the water;

You who have no money,

Come, buy some food!

Come, buy some wine and milk

No money and no cost.

This is where the name Satoshi Nakamoto comes from. “Satoshi” means “clear-minded, quick-thinking; wise” – “Naka” means “medium, interior, or relationship,” and “Moto” means “origin” or “foundation.” Satoshi himself is also number 24 in Chaldean numerology, which is the same number as my nickname Shaikho, 24. Satoshi Nakamoto is 55!

A complementary team

While developing Bitcoin, I learned more about C++ code, but Hal was at a higher level, he was my Steve Wozniak, working tirelessly for the vision I instilled in him. I always looked at how to succeed in business and change the financial world, while he looked at the technical aspects.

Hal allowed me to pick and choose what I thought would be best for the project. Since I had to coordinate with Hal most of the time, I operated between his time zone (US Pacific Time) and the UK time zone, sometimes due to my travels. I also shared with him my concerns about not using my laptop for long periods of time and about my IP address not being traced while I was working in Pakistan and later traveling back and forth between Pakistan and the UK.

Hal arranged for me to have a couple of computers because I was using an old Fujitsu and that laptop was slow. As you can imagine, even in early 2009, I was running that laptop with XP SP2 instead of XP SP3. That laptop had a small capacity disk as can be seen in my email exchanges with Hal. Any heavy lifting was done on a remote desktop that Hal provided me with via remote desktop software, and these computers were located in different parts of the US.

One of the computers I use to mine Bitcoin

Thank you, my friend

Hal knew from day one that I was neither a cypherpunk nor a hardcore technologist, but he always said that he liked how genuine and smart I was about things that others couldn’t imagine. He liked that I talked about people’s logos, which he mentioned in his last post on Bitcointalk on March 19, 2013.

“Today, Satoshi’s true identity has become a mystery,” he said. “But at the time, I thought I was dealing with a young man of Japanese descent who was very intelligent and sincere. I have been fortunate enough to know many outstanding people in my life, so I can recognize the signs.”

I think he used this post to communicate with me because he knew all my emails were hacked. Unfortunately, when I saw this post in 2015, he was gone forever.

When I read that Hal had died of ALS in 2014, I thought I should speak out. But I kept asking myself if exposing myself was worth the risk at the time.

I owe Hal a lot. He was a true genius. At some point in my life, if I could do something to make people remember him, I would do it.

Rest in peace, Hal Finney.