Bitcoin.com releases a ranking of the top ten Bitcoin figures. Is there anyone you like?

While many people still associate 'Bitcoin' with cybercrime and black markets, the underlying technology has been forged and maintained for decades by some of the world's brightest minds.

The following list is compiled by our Bitcoin.com team and we agree that they are the most influential people in the Bitcoin community right now. In addition to spreading the benefits of Bitcoin and strengthening Bitcoin infrastructure, some of them are directly involved in the maintenance, development and creation of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

10. Pieter Wuille

Pieter Wuille discovered Bitcoin in October 2010. He joined the Bitcoin Core development team in May 2011. He currently follows Bitcoin Core developer Wladimir van der Laan . He is responsible for Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) 30, 32, 42, and 62, and is the main author of libsecp256k1, an efficient elliptic curve cryptography library used by Bitcoin.

Wuille worked at Google as a Site Reliability Engineer before joining Blockstream. Wuille grew up in Belgium and received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Leuven, Belgium, with a focus on programming language design.

Pieter Wuille

9. Barry Silbert

Barry Silbert has become one of the most active angel investors. He is the founder of Digital Currency Group. The company has invested in more than 40 Bitcoin-related companies, including BitGo, BitPay, BitPagos, BitPesa, Chain, Circle, Coinbase, Gyft, Kraken, Ripple, TradeBlock, Unocoin, Keza, and Bitwala.

Silbert was also responsible for launching the Bitcoin Investment Fund (BIT), ticker symbol GBTC, the first publicly traded security tied to the price of Bitcoin. BIT offers investors an opportunity to profit from Bitcoin price fluctuations through traditional investment vehicles without the need to purchase, store and custody Bitcoin.

Barry Silbert

8. Roger Ver

Roger Ver is the first person in the world to start investing in Bitcoin startups, providing seed round financing for the first generation of Bitcoin companies. He is also known as "Bitcoin Jesus" by the community.

In 2011, his company Memorydealers became the first mainstream company to start accepting Bitcoin as a payment method. He also founded Bitcoinstore.com, the world's first website that can be paid with Bitcoin. Later, Ver created Bitcoinbuntyhunter.com, which rewards those who help catch cyber criminals in the Bitcoin field. He has been an outspoken critic of censorship in the online Bitcoin community on Reddit and provides his own uncensored platform for discussing topics related to cryptocurrency.

Roger Ver

7. Patrick Byrne

Patrick Byrne is often called the ‘Bitcoin Messiah’ and the ‘scourge of Wall Street’. Byrne is the CEO of online retail giant Overstock. He is an unconventional figure in the corporate world. His company was the first major retailer to accept Bitcoin for payment, long before Microsoft and Dell, and Byrne has long been an active supporter of the cryptocurrency. He also believes that Wall Street was forced to accept Bitcoin technology sooner than most people think. He said at the 2015 San Diego Blockchain Conference:

“If you’re in Bitcoin and you’re working on Wall Street, you’re going to have a lot of haters. But we have incentives for them to defect and come over to us. I think you’re going to see a rush of these things happening pretty quickly in 2016. Once they start happening, it’s going to happen pretty quickly.”

Byrne is also responsible for establishing T0, a company dedicated to using blockchain technology to reform the financial industry, "making transactions more fair, transparent and accessible to all market participants." However, Byrne recently announced that he would be taking a leave of absence due to health reasons, leading many experts to speculate whether this would slow down the adoption of blockchain technology.

Patrick Byrne

6. Andreas Antonopoulos

Andreas Antonopoulos is a technologist, entrepreneur, and public speaker who has made Bitcoin more understandable to the general public and has spoken in support of cryptocurrencies at numerous technology and security conferences around the world.

In his speech, he explained:

“For the remaining 6 billion people who are not served by the world’s unbanked, Bitcoin represents an opportunity to become part of the global economy. For Bitcoin users, Bitcoin is more than just a curiosity; it could be a gateway to connecting the world.”

Antonopoulos is also the author of “Mastering Bitcoin,” a technical guide to understanding Bitcoin, and a very popular guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. He also advises many startups and even appeared before the Canadian Senate to help them evaluate the best approach to regulation.

He is largely known for coining the term “Internet of Money” to describe Bitcoin back in 2013. Antonopoulos has published several community open source projects, has published extensively on Bitcoin, and is the host of the “Let’s Talk About Bitcoin” podcast.

Andreas Antonopoulos

5. Adam Back

Adam Back is a cryptography pioneer. He has been working on electronic cash protocols since 1995. His inventions include hashcash proof-of-work and the decentralized mining function used for Bitcoin. Hashcash is also used in other protocols, such as combating blog spam. Back is also a zero-knowledge system developer.

Back is an active member of the Bitcoin community, often commenting on issues such as scalability, privacy and mining technology. Currently Back is the CCO of Spondoolies Technologies Ltd. and the president of Blackstream. In February 2016, Blockstream raised $55 million in Series A funding to advance its technology, including its working sidechain prototype Liquid.

Adam Back

4. Gavin Andresen

Gavin Andresen , one of the most prominent and high-profile members of the Bitcoin community who worked directly with Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto on the Bitcoin source code, now has the ability to broadcast information about major network issues to all Bitcoin users.

“The purpose of Bitcoin is to bring us a decentralized currency that is better than gold.”

In 2014, Andresen stepped down from his position as Bitcoin developer leader to become the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, where he works on broader Bitcoin issues. However, more recently, Andresen has criticized Bitcoin Core, saying that developers have failed to listen to the public. As a result, Andresen has switched his support to Bitcoin Classic.

Gavin Andresen

3. Hal Finney

Hal Finney is not only a well-known crypto activist, he is also a Bitcoin pioneer. In 2004, Finney created the first reusable proof-of-work system before Bitcoin. In 2009, he participated in the first transaction in Bitcoin history and received Bitcoin sent by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Finney worked as a developer for PGP Enterprises until his retirement in 2011. However, he continued to work on an experimental software called Bcflik that used trusted computing to improve Bitcoin wallet security. Finney died in 2014.

Hal Finney

2. Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo is a computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer known for his work on digital contracts and digital currencies. In 1998, he designed a mechanism for a decentralized digital currency called 'bit gold'. Although the currency did not gain much support at the time, it did lead to the advent of Bitcoin. He is also credited with coining the term "smart contracts".

When Szabo attended Devcon1 in London in 2015, he discussed where he thought Bitcoin was headed, explaining how crypto and Ethereum in particular could help solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

Nick Szabo

1. Satoshi Nakamoto

There has been much speculation about the true identity of the creator of Bitcoin, whether Satoshi Nakamoto was a man, a woman, or a group of people. We may never know the truth.

However, the most important thing is that this technology cannot be reverted to its original state. Therefore, even if you believe that Satoshi Nakamoto was a secret CIA project with the goal of introducing a new order for global currency, you cannot deny that Bitcoin has opened the floodgates towards decentralized P2P currency that is not controlled by governments or central banks.

Satoshi Nakamoto explained:

“The fundamental problem with traditional currencies is trust, which is required for traditional currencies to work. Central banks must be trusted not to debase their currencies, but the history of fiat currencies is full of trust holes.”

Therefore, Satoshi Nakamoto should undoubtedly be ranked first among the people who have the greatest influence on Bitcoin.