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Satoshi Nakamoto Meaning

Oct 6, 2023 | Updated Oct 6, 2023
Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym founder(s) who invented Bitcoin and authored its whitepaper.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin in 2009 and went on to publish a whitepaper and author forum posts using that pseudonym. Nobody knows the individual’s identity, or if it’s more than one person. The pseudonym is of Japanese origin, though many believe that because Nakamoto published forum posts in English and communicated well in English, the founder could  have been from an English-speaking country. 

After the successful launch of Bitcoin, Satoshi issued one last public post on December 12, 2010. In the post, Satoshi Nakamoto emphasized that “there’s more work to do on [denial-of-service] DoS.” The founder also communicated via email to Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, two other developers working on the Bitcoin protocol. In one of the emails sent in April 2011, Nakamoto told Hearn that they had ‘moved on to other things’. This is believed to be the last message Nakamoto sent to anyone. 

Nakamoto designed Bitcoin to operate in a decentralized manner. The digital asset was conceived as a currency that would be transferred or traded in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner without any intermediary. In order to keep this policy going, Nakamoto developed the blockchain to be open-source and leaderless. This allowed other developers to carry on building the blockchain after Satoshi vanished. This policy and its wider adaptation by subsequent cryptocurrency projects made Satoshi Nakamoto a ‘legend’ in the crypto space. 

Today, the smallest unit of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, a “satoshi” is named after its founder. 100 million satoshis make up one Bitcoin.  

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