Who is (the man behind the mask) the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto? To reveal who he is we must first uncover what has been done.
Money only has value as a Medium of Exchange if no one controls it. Satoshi Nakamoto’s genius in giving Bitcoin its value lies within the use of his pseudonym, the strategic release of the White Paper & timing.
The White Paper was released on 31st October 2008. In it was all the information anyone needed to start the Bitcoin network. Being released on a cryptographic mailing list the information was presented to some of the world’s most capable individuals.
Many people overlook the significance of its release date but the reason behind it was to give Bitcoin as much value as possible as a MoE and provide credibility to its network. It’s the very starting point that creates a paradox within Bitcoin in that if someone can start it, it can also be started by anyone else. This means there can be an infinite supply of digital currency which implies they all have a fundamental value of absolute zero. By releasing the white paper to the world, providing an equal opportunity for anyone to start the network, starting the network himself under a pseudonym & stepping away from the project, this has enabled the network to grow without any central point of authority, control or influence. Using Proof of Work (POW) consensus mechanism means that as the network grows the centralised starting point becomes increasingly diluted over time as more & more participants join the network, incentivised to compete by its financial rewards.
If the network had a central point of authority or control it would be fundamentally worthless. This is why Satoshi Nakamoto released the code as open-source. However, this also leaves the network vulnerable to manipulation & so measures had to be taken to insure against such an event.
The fundamental value of the Bitcoin network comes from its size & neutral growth. The technical value comes from the speed, cost & scale of transactions.
Satoshi Nakamoto, knowing he would have to step away from the project in order to let it grow without his influence gave himself the best chance of his true identity remaining a mystery by writing the White Paper in English, releasing it to the western world & yet giving himself a Japanese pseudonym. Japan being highly developed, technologically advanced & politically neutral gave the author as much credibility as possible while at the same time providing a language barrier along with the population size & geographical location to help his true identity stay hidden.
Timing
By releasing the White Paper on 31st October 2008 & not starting the network until 3rd January 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto had provided 2 months & 4 days for anyone else to start the network. In many circumstances, 2 months+ is considered by law to be a “reasonable” amount of time, which would appear to be the intention.
The next period to consider was the amount of time required to give the network value from its neutral growth & yet still have enough time to recover from any manipulation that may have occurred while his identity was still unknown. The two metrics Satoshi must have used for deciding on this period were 1) The block reward halving that occurs every 210,000 blocks, & 2) The probability of a competitive network achieving a similar time period of neutral growth.
The Tulip Trust
On the 9th June 2011, Dr Craig Steven Wright transferred 1,100,111 Bitcoins into a trust known as the Tulip Trust that stated: “All Bitcoin will be returned to Dr Wright on Jan 01st 2020.” The transfer was valued at USD $100,000 for Australian Tax purposes at that time.
This possibly illustrates Dr Craig Wright’s intention to reveal his identity as the author behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym 8yrs 6mths later. From its inception, this provides a neutral growth period from 3rd January 2009–1st January 2020 of 11 years. It’s this period of neutral growth, distribution & dilution of the centralised starting point that provides the network with its fundamental value because it is highly/extremely unlikely to be replicated & is therefore unique to Bitcoin.
The 1,100,111 Bitcoin must have been mined between 3rd January 2009–9th June 2011. The initial block reward was 50 BTC per block that were propagated approximately every 10 minutes. This would have represented roughly 17% of the entire circulating supply of Bitcoin as of 9th June 2011.
Due to the percentage of the supply of Bitcoin that these figures represent they suggest a very high probability that Dr. Craig Wright started the Bitcoin network himself using the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto”.
This trust being called the “Tulip Trust” would also indicate that it has an intentional purpose. Due to the Bitcoin code being open source and the likely hood that an individual or group of individuals would at some point try to manipulate things under their control and therefore fundamentally take the value of the network down to zero, this trust appears to have been created effectively as an insurance policy against such actions.
If the network has a fundamental value of ZERO & yet the coin still has a high price this would likely represent a huge bubble, hence the name Tulip Trust to mirror the famous Tulip mania bubble in Holland that popped back in February of 1637.
With each BTC having a current market price of around $18,000+ the value of 1,100,111 BTC as of today which is 9th December 2020 is approximately $20Bbn
What Dr.Wright will do with it remains to be seen, but it will certainly reveal the character of the man & is likely to expose Satoshi Nakamoto Naked for all the world to see very soon!
