Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym for the person or people who introduced the concept of Bitcoin in a 2008 paper, is the identity credited with inventing Bitcoin itself. He was not the first to hit on the concept of cryptocurrency but was the one to solve the fundamental problem that prevented its adoption: “double-spending.” Nakamoto proposed a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to solve this problem.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s involvement with Bitcoin ended in 2010, and the inability to put a face to the name has led to significant speculation about his identity. He proposed a decentralized approach for transactions using ledgers, a network, Merkle roots and trees, timestamps, incentives, cryptography, and a consensus mechanism. The blockchain records are kept secure because the computational power required to reverse them discourages attacks.

Analysis of Bitcoin’s blockchain has helped deduce which addresses are likely Satoshi Nakamoto’s to a relatively high degree of certainty. According to some researchers, Satoshi has about 1 million BTC in thousands of wallets. Others point to addresses with anywhere between 750 bitcoin and 1.1 million bitcoin. However, the only address known to be Satoshi’s is the Genesis address, the first blockchain address with the unspendable 50 bitcoins in it.

Anonymity was likely the only choice for Bitcoin’s creators, as their lives would be upturned by publicity and they might be targeted by criminals. If the larger figures are true, Nakamoto’s reputed stake of 1.1 million (5% of the total number of bitcoins) has considerable market power.