Decoding the Mystery of Bitcoin's Founder

Szabo is a member of the loose digital privacy community Cypherpunks. His most notable work is the creation of Bitcoin's predecessor, bit gold. Cypherpunks laid the foundation for the core concept of Bitcoin - British researcher Adam Back created the hashcash algorithm at the core of Bitcoin, and an engineer named Wei Dai created b money. For the future of Bitcoin, the identity of the founder is actually no longer important.

Satoshi Nakamoto stopped participating in the Bitcoin project in 2011, and most of Bitcoin's open source code has been rewritten by a group of programmers whose identities are publicly known.

Satoshi Nakamoto had many reasons to remain anonymous, one of which might be the threats he faced. He alone mined about 1 million bitcoins in the first year of bitcoin's creation, worth about $240 million at today's prices. He was an easy target.