Satoshi Nakamoto creates Bitcoin

2009Turning pointContested

On 3 January 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto mines the genesis block, embedding a London Times headline about bank bailouts. The first money with no central issuer goes live, secured by a network anyone can join.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Babylonian mathematics → Babylonian astronomical diaries → Thales and natural philosophy → Trial and death of Socrates → Plato's Academy → Aristotle's Lyceum → Alexander's conquests → Alexandria founded → Library of Alexandria → House of Wisdom → Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics → Bacon's Novum Organum → Royal Society → Papin's steam digester → Newcomen steam engine → Watt's steam engine → Thermodynamics → Entropy → Quantum hypothesis → Bohr model of the atom → Quantum mechanics → Transistor → Integrated circuit → ARPANET → TCP/IP → World Wide Web → The Bitcoin whitepaper → Satoshi Nakamoto creates Bitcoin

Contested history

Consensus: Nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Satoshi wrote only online, stopped posting in 2011, and the roughly one million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi's early mining have never moved.

Satoshi was one person or a small group whose identity is still unknownEstablished

No claim of identity has been proven with a cryptographic signature from Satoshi's known keys.

Hal FinneySpeculation

He received the first bitcoin transaction and lived a few blocks from a man named Dorian Nakamoto. He denied it before his death in 2014, and a race he ran in 2009 coincides with emails Satoshi was sending.

Nick Szabo or Adam BackSpeculation

Both designed direct forerunners (Bit Gold and Hashcash) and both have denied being Satoshi.

Peter ToddUnsupported

Named by the 2024 HBO documentary Money Electric. Todd denies it, and the case rests mostly on a 2010 forum reply that the film read as Satoshi speaking.

Craig WrightDebunked

In March 2024 the UK High Court ruled in COPA v Wright that he is not Satoshi and found he had forged documents to support his claim.