Satoshi's Soup

Who was Satoshi?

It has been a personal fascination of mine since 2012. Who is this mysterious creator of Bitcoin? We can never know for sure, but we can learn a lot about Satoshi by looking at the sources of where they were getting inspiration as well as theory.

One interesting conclustion reached by my friend and mathematcian Dr. Frederick Krueger (@dotkrueger on Twitter). Fred went through the math of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and verified all of the math proofs recently. His conclusion is that it seems highly likely that Satoshi was someone who either had access to a post-graduate level mathematician, or was one.

Ingredients of Bitcoin

For the past year, I have been doing some research on which ideas were original and where the other “ingredients” of Bitcoin came from. This is a timeline which shows the main ideas and their sources. Everything in orange was an original idea of Satoshis. The others have been colored to match their respective origins.

It is quite notable to look at the concepts which came from Nick Szabo - a cypherpunk and security researcher who wrote the spec for BitGold in 1998. There has been much discussion online about the connections between Szabo and Satoshi. One of the strongest cases for the relationship lives here on archive.org.

I have tweeted this a few times, but it renders very small and therefore it is very difficult to read. This is an embedded version and I will continue to update the Figma with new feedback and information.