Bitcoin's anonymous inventor is only known under a pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto. He was nominated for a Nobel prize in Economics, he’s a multi-billionaire but as of yet no one knows who he is. It is even possible that Satoshi is a group of people instead of one person.
In October of 2008, someone going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a paper called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. He e-mailed some Cypherpunks, asking if they were willing to assist him in creating this system he developed, called “Blockchain”; a peer-to-peer network that cannot be shut down by an online service provider.
The Blockchain is essentially an accounting system that records all its transactions on a public ledger. Since the idea of Bitcoin was so radical, it seemed more like science fiction than an actual new reality. But one Californian programmer, Hal Finney, saw its potential. He was the first person to take Nakamoto seriously. Finney agreed to work on the Bitcoin Project free of charge, and on January 3, 2009, Bitcoin was officially launched.
Finney and Nakamoto allegedly never met face-to-face, nor did they ever talk on the phone. Nakamoto only left his email address on the Bitcoin website, in case anyone wanted to contact him with questions about the project. After a while, many other programmers chipped in.
Originally the project only appealed to anarchists and libertarians who wanted to live their lives free from government rule. It was mostly they who held onto the “Bitcoin Revolution” and started calling Nakamoto a hero.
It didn’t take long though for criminals to figure out that with Bitcoin they could transfer money privately. This led to bad publicity, which upset Nakamoto because he never intended for his project to be used this way.
In the early years, Satoshi communicated with the (small) Bitcoin community on forums and he continued to help with the project. But all of a sudden, he disappeared in late 2010 after posting a last message on December 12, 2010.
The last known person to communicate with him was Gavin Andresen, a Bitcoin core developer who looked up to Nakamoto as his mentor and hero. He had offered to talk to the FBI and CIA about Bitcoin on the founder’s behalf because he wanted to assist in educating them about Blockchain. After that Nakamoto cut ties with the remainder of the first Bitcoin team.
Nakamoto is one of the richest men in the world, but his Bitcoins have remained untouched. He didn’t even touch his money in 2021 when the value skyrocketed to nearly $70,000 per coin.
In 2012 Nakamoto allegedly wrote an email to Mike Hearn, one of the first core developers of Bitcoin, that “Ripple is interesting therein it is the only other system that does something with trust besides concentrating it into a central server.” In his last email, he also wrote that he’d given up on Bitcoin and wanted to focus on another project without specifying what that new project was. There were concerns and doubts about this e-mail though, part of the community questions the source because Ripple is highly contested and not seen as a true Blockchain by some of the Bitcoin community.