There’s one question I’ve always wanted to figure out—who exactly created Bitcoin? No one knows. But this person changed the world with a PDF, and then vanished, leaving not even a trace. His name is Satoshi Nakamoto.

On October 31, 2008, a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a paper on a cryptography mailing list. It was only 9 pages, but the title was crazy enough on its own: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Two months later, on January 3, 2009, the Bitcoin network officially went live. Block 0 was mined, and Satoshi left a line of hidden information inside—quoting the headline from the British newspaper The Times at the time: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout.” This wasn’t just technical—it felt like an accusation.

Over the next two years, Satoshi Nakamoto did almost all of the pioneering work. He wrote the first Bitcoin client, ran the first full node, helped people mine, and sent the first BTC to developer Hal Finney. Then what? In 2010, he handed the project over to others. In April 2011, he left his last sentence: “I’ve moved on to other things.” And he never showed up again.

Here’s the craziest part—Satoshi Nakamoto is estimated to have mined 1,000,000 Bitcoins. At today’s prices, that would be worth more than 70 billion dollars. Fifteen years later, not a single one of these coins has been moved. No transfers, no spending—like they were frozen in time. If it really was him, this guy might be the wealthiest yet most low-key person in the world.

So who is he, really? Some say it’s an individual, others say it’s a team. Those who support the individual theory point to consistent writing style, unified development accounts, and detailed, in-depth emails. Those who support the team theory argue that his active hours span multiple time zones, the code was written at a lightning-fast pace, and his English is flawless.

The most frequently mentioned name on the list of suspects is Hal Finney. He was the first person to receive Bitcoin, and he was a well-known cryptographer. The place he lived was not far from a guy named Dorian Nakamoto. But he died of ALS in 2014, so the truth may never be known.

Nick Szabo is also on the list. In 2005, he created “Bit Gold,” which was basically the precursor to Bitcoin. He has legal, economic, and technical background, and his writing style is highly similar to Satoshi Nakamoto’s. But oddly, he never posted on early Bitcoin forums. This silence is pretty intriguing.

Adam Back invented Hashcash, and the Bitcoin white paper even references it. He’s a longtime Cypherpunk who uses British spelling, and he’s still active in the crypto world. And there’s Elon Musk—he was pointed out in 2017, but Musk directly denied it. Peter Thiel also made the list; he had mentioned similar concepts as early as 1999.

The most controversial is Craig Wright. This guy claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and he even went to court over it. But he has never signed anything using Satoshi’s private key—something that would prove his identity in an instant. The developer community generally doesn’t believe him. Some people even say the NSA is Satoshi, arguing that SHA-256 was designed by the NSA, that he appeared right after the 2008 financial crisis, and then vanished cleanly and completely. But there’s no solid evidence, and it goes against Bitcoin’s “decentralized” spirit.

Finally, what I want to say is this: Satoshi Nakamoto gave the world a set of code, and then disappeared. No pursuit of fame, no cashing out, no seeking power. Maybe that’s the most important part—Bitcoin doesn’t rely on any founder. Its foundation is mathematics, code, and the community. That’s why it can’t be destroyed.