On August 30, the account of Satoshi Nakamoto, the father of Bitcoin, suddenly changed: 3,000 Bitcoins mined in 2010 suddenly moved to two wallet addresses, and Satoshi Nakamoto’s account still holds about 440,000 Bitcoins.
Just as Bitcoin returned above 30,000, Satoshi Nakamoto seemingly “reappeared”! On August 30, the Bitcoin wallet believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto showed unusual activity: 3,000 Bitcoins mined between January 25 and 31, 2010 suddenly moved to two addresses, and it had been 7 years since the account was last operated. The account currently holds 440,000 Bitcoins, which at current market prices are worth as much as 13.2 billion yuan.
As of August 30, 2017, Satoshi Nakamoto quietly moved 3,000 previously stored Bitcoins. With Bitcoin prices so high today, 3,000 Bitcoins are undoubtedly a huge fortune, and Satoshi Nakamoto’s move to use these 3,000 Bitcoins has set the crypto community abuzz.
Some netizens said that with Bitcoin prices so high today, Satoshi Nakamoto was surely dazzled by huge wealth and therefore cashed out through Bitcoin to obtain riches. Others went further, saying that since Bitcoin reached its all-time high, it was time to pick the fruit, and Satoshi Nakamoto reappeared to take this opportunity to dump Bitcoin and fleece people around the world.
The Secret History of Satoshi Nakamoto
On October 31, 2008, a person named Satoshi Nakamoto (English name Satoshi Nakamoto) published a paper in a cryptography mailing list titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. The English original of this paper is very concise—eight or nine pages—but it clearly explains all the important concepts and algorithms. Besides publishing that paper and clearly explaining the principles of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto also personally put the Bitcoin system into practice and built it.
In January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto launched the Bitcoin program and open-sourced it. He mined the 50 Bitcoins in the first block of Bitcoin, making him the first person in the world to mine Bitcoin. He also sent 10 of the mined Bitcoins to the first person who downloaded his Bitcoin software, completing the world’s first Bitcoin transaction.
It can be said that Satoshi Nakamoto is rightly called the father of Bitcoin. Because he not only laid the foundation of Bitcoin’s principles, but also personally built Bitcoin, realizing Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin transfer. At the same time, Satoshi Nakamoto also established a website called bitcoin.org. The purpose of this site was to let other programmers jointly develop and discuss. Soon, a growing community formed around Bitcoin, and its influence grew.
However, just as Bitcoin’s influence was growing rapidly, Satoshi Nakamoto did something quite surprising: in 2010 he actually handed the community over to others to manage, while he gradually faded from public view.
There has been a great deal of speculation on the Internet about who Satoshi Nakamoto really is—many guessed whether he is Japanese and where he lives. In 2014, American freelance writer Leah McGrath Goodman said in Newsweek on Thursday that she had found Satoshi Nakamoto; she said his surname is indeed Nakamoto, but his given name is not Satoshi, and his English name is Dorian Nakamoto, a Japanese-American living in Los Angeles. But interestingly, just when everyone thought Satoshi Nakamoto had been found, Satoshi Nakamoto himself posted a message on March 7, 2014, saying “I am not Dorian Nakamoto”—he is not that person. This also became the last message Satoshi Nakamoto published to the outside world; after this message, there was no more news of Satoshi Nakamoto in this world.