Valentina Picozzi's Satoshi Nakamoto sculpture in Lugano, Switzerland: a near-transparent figure made of polished steel profiles, sitting at a laptop, with the lake and mountains behind it
Photo: Martin Thurnherr / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin's John Galt: 18 Years On, No One Knows Who Wrote the White Paper

NodeWitness Team 11 min read

October 31 marks 18 years since the Bitcoin white paper. Nobody knows who signed it, and its author, like Ayn Rand's John Galt, walked away from the world and left behind something that runs without him

"Who is John Galt?" is the first line of Atlas Shrugged, the novel Ayn Rand published in 1957. Nobody in the book can answer it and everybody keeps asking it. As The Atlas Society puts it, the phrase works as a kind of verbal shrug, an expression of resigned futility [1]. For hundreds of pages, that is all Galt is: a figure of speech. A name without a face.

Eighteen years after someone published a nine-page paper called Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, people are asking a different question that sounds a lot like Rand's: who is Satoshi? Here is what we do know. On October 31, 2008, at 2:10 p.m. Eastern time, someone calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto wrote to the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com: "I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party." The original message is still in the archive, sent from a vistomail.com address and with a link to bitcoin.org [2].

Before the statue, the court cases and the reporters knocking on the wrong doors, there was a text. Satoshi left no voice, no photo and no handwritten signature, only words. This piece does not try to unmask him. It tries something more modest: to work out what he was like from what he wrote.

Satoshi Nakamoto in his own words: "cryptographic proof instead of trust"

The Bitcoin white paper is dry and technical, and it makes no concessions to the reader [3]. It is signed Satoshi Nakamoto, with a gmx.com email address, and the thesis fits in a single line: "What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust." There is no manifesto, just diagrams, a probability calculation and eight references. One of them is Hashcash, by a British cryptographer named Adam Back, a name that would come up again in this story years later.

Two months later, on January 3, 2009, the first block of the chain was mined: the genesis block. Nothing required anything to be written inside it, but it carries a newspaper headline: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." That text is in the block itself, and the block's 50-bitcoin reward can't be spent because of a quirk in the code [4]. Whether that was intentional is not known either.

The headline is probably the closest thing to a statement of principles that Satoshi put into the code. It works as a timestamp, since it proves the block was not created before that day, and as a comment. Satoshi never explained it.

What Satoshi wrote on the cryptography list

In the weeks after the white paper came out, Satoshi answered the skeptics on the list one by one, patiently and with numbers. On November 3, 2008, he replied to someone who warned that the system wouldn't scale by running the math on the 37 billion transactions Visa had processed in fiscal 2008 [5]. When someone told him "You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography," he replied on November 6: "Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years." [6]

"It's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I'm better with code than with words though."

On November 14, replying to the cryptographer Hal Finney, he wrote the line that may describe him best: "It's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I'm better with code than with words though." [7] Three days later, answering another skeptic, he said he believed he had "worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it." [8] He was a perfectionist, and more at ease showing than persuading.

His most political text came on February 11, 2009, on the P2P Foundation forum, when he introduced version 0.1: "The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust." [9] A week later, in the same thread, he compared Bitcoin to a precious metal: the supply is fixed, and what changes is the value [10].

On BitcoinTalk, on June 21, 2010, a user asked what happens to the coins of someone who loses their wallet. Satoshi's answer was almost zen: "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone." [11]

Who is John Galt? Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

This is where the parallel with Rand's novel gets tempting. John Galt is an inventor who gets fed up with the system, withdraws and persuades other creators to do the same [12]. The world keeps asking about him while his absence changes everything. Satoshi withdrew too. And both left behind something that works without them.

On April 23, 2011, in an email to the developer Mike Hearn, Satoshi wrote his most quoted goodbye: "I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone." We know it because Hearn later made the messages public [13]. Gavin was Gavin Andresen, whom Satoshi had left in charge of the project. After that, nothing.

"I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone."

The parallel breaks down in two places, though. Galt eventually shows himself: he takes over the country's radio waves, and his speech opens by answering the very question of who he is [14]. Galt wants to be found. Satoshi doesn't. And Galt has a speech, a very long one, with a complete philosophy. Satoshi left only a handful of political lines, always wrapped in technical explanations. Still, neither question has an answer today.

The people named as Satoshi Nakamoto

There has been no shortage of candidates. The first was Hal Finney, the cryptographer who received the ten bitcoin in the first transaction ever, in January 2009. Finney always spoke of Satoshi as someone else. "I thought I was dealing with a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere," he wrote in "Bitcoin and Me," posted on BitcoinTalk in March 2013, when ALS had left him almost completely paralyzed [15]. He died in August 2014 [16].

Nick Szabo, who designed bit gold, has been named again and again, for example by the writer Dominic Frisby in 2014, and has always denied it [17]. That same year, Newsweek ran a cover story naming Dorian Nakamoto, a 64-year-old Japanese American living in Temple City, California. He denied it right away: "I'm not in Bitcoin, I don't know anything about it." [18] On March 7, 2014, Satoshi's old P2P Foundation account posted a single sentence: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto." The archive itself warns that, given the date, the post's authenticity should be treated with caution [19].

Australian Craig Wright went further and claimed to be Satoshi. The High Court of England and Wales rejected that on March 14, 2024. "First, that Dr Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin White Paper," Mr Justice Mellor said, as reported by The Law Society Gazette [20]. He set out his reasons in a written judgment on May 20 [21].

The latest name came this year. On April 8, 2026, The New York Times published an investigation by John Carreyrou that pointed to Adam Back, the Hashcash author cited in the white paper and now CEO of Blockstream, as the most likely candidate, based on an analysis of writing patterns on the cryptography lists. Back denied it on X: "i'm not satoshi." He put the overlaps down to people with similar experience and interests [22]. None of these theories has been proven.

A statue without a face, and coins that don't move

On October 14, Vienna unveiled its Satoshi statue in Viertel Zwei, in the city's second district. It is the work of the Italian artist Valentina Picozzi: a programmer at a laptop, made of 61 mirror-polished steel profiles. Seen from the front, it almost disappears, so whoever stands behind it takes Satoshi's place. The motto is "We are all Satoshi." Bitcoin Austria, which paid for it with donations, says it is not a portrait and would stay the same even if Satoshi's identity were revealed one day [23].

That leaves the money. In 2013, researcher Sergio Demian Lerner analyzed the earliest blocks and found a mining pattern that pointed to a single entity, the so-called Patoshi pattern, which he cautiously attributed to Satoshi [24]. In 2019 he refined the figure: roughly 22,000 blocks and about 1.1 million bitcoin, a little under 5.5% of all bitcoin issued so far according to our supply page, with 99.9% of those blocks still unspent [25]. It is an estimate, not a proven fact. But if those coins never move, they would be, in Satoshi's own words, a donation to everyone.

Eighteen years on, Bitcoin keeps running without the person who wrote it. Galt came back to give his speech. Satoshi, for now, is still busy with other things.

Sources

Source type in parentheses.

  1. The Atlas Society, Who Is John Galt?. "Who is John Galt?" as the first line of Atlas Shrugged and as a verbal shrug. (Secondary, explainer)
  2. Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper, Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd.com), October 31, 2008, 2:10 p.m. Eastern time. White paper announcement, sent from vistomail.com. (Primary, original message)
  3. Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, 2008. Nine pages, gmx.com address, reference to Adam Back's Hashcash. (Primary, original document)
  4. Bitcoin Wiki, Genesis block. The Times headline in the genesis block and the 50 BTC reward that can't be spent. (Secondary, technical wiki)
  5. Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, Satoshi's reply of November 3, 2008, thread Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper. The math on Visa's 37 billion transactions. (Primary, email archive)
  6. Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, Satoshi's reply of November 6, 2008. "A new territory of freedom." (Primary, email archive)
  7. Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, Satoshi's reply to Hal Finney, November 14, 2008. "I'm better with code than with words though." (Primary, email archive)
  8. Satoshi Nakamoto, message of November 17, 2008, Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd.com). (Primary, original message)
  9. Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency, P2P Foundation, February 11, 2009. Trust and fiat currencies. (Primary, forum archive)
  10. Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, Satoshi's reply of February 18, 2009, P2P Foundation. "More typical of a precious metal." (Primary, forum archive)
  11. Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, Dying bitcoins, BitcoinTalk, June 21, 2010. (Primary, forum archive)
  12. Wikipedia, John Galt, read October 28, 2026. (Secondary, collaborative encyclopedia)
  13. Cointelegraph, Ana Paula Pereira, 'I've moved on to other things' — Satoshi Nakamoto's final email revisited after 13 years, April 23, 2024. The April 23, 2011 email to Mike Hearn, as published by Hearn. (Secondary, press)
  14. LitCharts, John Galt Character Analysis in Atlas Shrugged. Galt's radio speech. (Secondary, study guide)
  15. Hal Finney, Bitcoin and Me, BitcoinTalk, March 19, 2013, in the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute archive. (Primary, first-hand account)
  16. CoinDesk, Jon Southurst, Bitcoin Pioneer and First Bitcoin Recipient Hal Finney Passes Away, August 29, 2014. (Secondary, press)
  17. International Business Times, Jeff Stone, New Book Claims Nick Szabo As True Bitcoin Creator; Researcher Denies Establishing Digital Cryptocurrency, November 12, 2014. (Secondary, press)
  18. Al Jazeera, 'Face behind Bitcoin' rejects magazine claim, March 8, 2014. Dorian Nakamoto, 64, Temple City. (Secondary, press)
  19. Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, post of March 7, 2014, P2P Foundation. "I am not Dorian Nakamoto." The archive flags its authenticity as doubtful. (Primary, forum archive)
  20. The Law Society Gazette, Judge dashes bitcoin entrepreneur Dr Craig Wright's claim to be 'Satoshi Nakamoto', March 14, 2024. (Secondary, legal press)
  21. Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, COPA v Wright, [2024] EWHC 1198 (Ch), written judgment of May 20, 2024. (Primary, court ruling)
  22. TechCrunch, British cryptographer Adam Back denies NYT report that he is Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, April 8, 2026. The New York Times investigation and Back's reply on X. (Secondary, press)
  23. Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden, Satoshi Statue in Vienna: Where to Find It and What It Means, October 14, 2026. (Secondary, press)
  24. Sergio Demian Lerner, The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitslog, April 17, 2013. (Primary, on-chain analysis)
  25. Sergio Demian Lerner, The Return of the Deniers and the Revenge of Patoshi, Bitslog, April 16, 2019. About 1.1 million BTC; "99.9% of all Patoshi blocks are unspent." (Primary, on-chain analysis)

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Last updated: October 31, 2026