"Wei Dai was a computer engineer who came up with the idea in 1998 to create a digital and decentralized currency, called it b-money. Wei was part of a movement that called itself cypherpunk.

A cypherpunk is an activist who advocates large-scale use of powerful cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies. A number of other decentralized cryptographic coins were designed but none of them went through the development similar to that of the Bitcoin.

Cover of Wired in mei/juni 1993. Source: Wired

In 2008, in response to the banking crisis, a white paper was published by another cypherpunk. In this white paper, the concept of Wei Dai was further developed. With it, the Bitcoin protocol was designed, and in 2009 the network was launched. It is still a mystery who the person (or persons) is behind it. On which it is agreed that he used the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto as sender.

Satoshi was responsible for creating the majority of official Bitcoin software and was very active in making changes and communicating about technical information on Bitcoin forums. Satoshi gave his currency the name Bitcoin. But every coin also has pennies and this was also thought of in the white paper. However, this penny did not translate into one hundredths but one hundred millionth. Also, it is not called a penny but one Satoshi.

There is and is much speculation about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. The New Yorker and Fast Company have done a lot of research into the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. The New Yorker's investigation resulted in at least two possible candidates: Michael Clear and Vili Lehdonvirta. The investigation of Fast Company provided indirect evidence for linking an encryption request submitted by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on August 15, 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name registered 72 hours later.

The patent application contains network and encryption technologies similar to Bitcoin's. Text analysis showed that the expression “... computationally impractical to reverse” appeared in both Bitcoin's patent application and white paper. All three inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto. In short, to this day it is still unknown who really is Satoshi Nakamoto. Nowadays we don't hear from Satoshi Nakamoto anymore. However, Bitcoin is maintained by a group of volunteers called Bitcoin Core Developers.

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