Meet The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard Of
I have a question for you. It’s for science, so please be honest.
How many of you have heard of Craig S Wright?
No?
Okay, how about this one?
Who has heard of Satoshi Nakamoto?
Okay, okay, a few more.
Today we found out something important about both men. The most important thing we found was that both men are the same person. You know Satoshi Nakamoto, or at least you know of him.
Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin, the electronic currency. Bitcoin is a virtual currency. It’s created by “mining.” Mining is a way of discovering new bitcoins by running a computer program.
Bitcoin is used to pay for things. It’s completely untraceable. That makes it appealing to people who want to buy and sell stuff without anyone tracing the purchase back to them.
Because bitcoin isn’t backed by any government or currency, it’s value is determiend by the market. Bitcoin currently sells for about $8,000. In December of 2017 Bitcoin was selling for $20,000. Two years before that in December of 2015 Bitcoin was selling for $400.
Bitcoin is the brainchild of Satoshi Nakamoto. Back in 2008 he wrote a whitepaper describing how it would work. He also then wrote most of the programming code that created bitcoins.
The thing was, no one knew Satoshi Nakamoto outside of the online bitcoin world. Naturally it was suspected that he was Japanese. I think that’s the reason he chose the name he did.
Part of the reason that no one could find Nakamoto was that once bitcoin was up and going, Nakamoto didn’t seem to care about it. He didn’t make a bunch of money off of it that anyone could tell. He didn’t speak at conferences or do anything else that “inventors” or programming rockstars typically do. He was invisible.
Many people tried to find out who he was and there are even pictures online that show an old Japanese man who might be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Today that all changed. We found out that Satoshi Nakamoto is not Japanese. He’s actually Australian. And his name isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto, it’s Craig Steven Wright.
What makes today different is that Craig Wright filed for copyright protection over bitcoin. That seems kind of hard to do. He actually filed for copyright protection for that whitepaper back in 2008. And he filed for copyright protection for the portions of the bitcoin programming code that Satoshi Nakamoto wrote.
You’d think that Wright was making a play for the fame or the glory or maybe some sort of financial play. But, it doesn’t appear that way.
There are actually several “flavors” of bitcoin. Wright claims that that Bitcoin SV (Satoshi Vision) is the right, or true version. He’s concerned that other versions, such as BTC, allow the system to be anonymized, and lead to illegal activity.
His intention is to push BSV as the “official” bitcoin and allow it to scale up in a way that current bitcoin iterations don’t.
So, the mystery of the creator of bitcoin is finally solved.
Maybe.
See, there are some people still not convinced that Craig S Wright is actually Satoshi Nakamoto.
The copyright office believes he is, but not everyone is convinced.
And that doesn’t really surprise anyone.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2019 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
