OKX Blockchain 60 Lectures | Episode 39: The Disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto

Hello everyone, I'm Xiao K Jun. Today we're going to talk about: "The Disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto"?

We all know that Satoshi Nakamoto is the founder of Bitcoin. This ID first appeared in the email list of the "Cypherpunk" forum. At that time, there were only a few lines of information: Satoshi Nakamoto, born April 5, 1975, Japanese, male. Until 2008, when Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper, this ID began to receive widespread attention from cypherpunks.

After creating the Bitcoin system, Satoshi Nakamoto discussed Bitcoin's technical updates and development direction with tech enthusiasts on the Bitcointalk forum for a long time. However, one event broke the calm of the Bitcoin world and prompted Satoshi Nakamoto to disappear, and this event was the famous "WikiLeaks" incident.

This happened in December 2010. At that time, there was a public interest media organization called "WikiLeaks," whose mission was mainly to expose insider information about companies and governments through whistleblowers, so that they could operate with complete transparency. The organization's original intention was noble, but reality often falls short of expectations.

On December 5, 2010, this organization angered the US government by leaking US diplomatic cables. The US government shut down all its donation channels from traditional financial sources such as credit cards and bank cards. Facing the problem of losing revenue sources, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and fellow cypherpunk, announced that Bitcoin would be used as a channel for accepting donations.

This was the largest single payment transaction since Bitcoin's birth. The Bitcoin community was overjoyed. However, Satoshi Nakamoto strongly opposed it. In Satoshi's view, the Bitcoin system was still in a development stage at the time, and attracting the attention of a powerful government like the United States at such an early stage was naturally not a wise choice. To this end, he stated on the Bitcointalk forum: "In any other case, Bitcoin attracting people's attention would be a good thing, but WikiLeaks has kicked a hornet's nest, and the swarm is flying toward us."

For safety reasons, on December 12, 2010, without any farewell, Satoshi Nakamoto never appeared on the forum again after answering questions about the fix for the Bitcoin 0.3.19 version on Bitcointalk. However, at this time, Satoshi Nakamoto had not completely left the Bitcoin world. He handed over the code management rights of Bitcoin to Gavin Andresen and maintained contact with him for a period of time, hoping that he would further decentralize development power.

On April 26, 2011, Gavin Andresen received the last email from Satoshi Nakamoto. At that time, Satoshi learned that Gavin would be invited to an event organized by a CIA-affiliated organization. He expressed that he did not want his image to be mythologized any further. Compared to him, Gavin should talk more about Bitcoin as an open-source project, which would give developers more trust.

But this was still not Satoshi Nakamoto's last email. In March 2014, the media discovered a computer engineer named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto and mistakenly identified him as Satoshi Nakamoto. Subsequently, the poor Dorian was watched by the whole world and could not bear the harassment. At this point, Satoshi Nakamoto sent his last email, saying: "I am not Dorian." This letter saved Dorian.

Later, several more emails were sent from Satoshi Nakamoto's address, but the content was threatening recipients and demanding money. People inferred that Satoshi Nakamoto's email account should have been hacked. Since then, people have completely lost touch with Satoshi Nakamoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto has become a complete mystery.

To this day, there are many theories about why Satoshi Nakamoto left. Some say it's because Bitcoin was ready to say goodbye to its founder, while others say Satoshi Nakamoto didn't want to invite trouble. But whatever the reason behind it, Satoshi Nakamoto has completed the mission entrusted by the times, bringing Bitcoin and blockchain to this world, and they will set off waves that will change the world in the future.

Special thanks to Teacher Liu Changyong for his help and guidance with this episode.

Sina Weibo: @昌用老师

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