Ten years after murmurs of the world’s first cryptocurrency appeared online, there’s still no definitive clue as to the identity of its creator, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto.
While Nakamoto vanished from the internet in April of 2011, he left behind a slender trail of breadcrumbs in the form of emails exchanged with early bitcoin developers, commentary in online forums, and bitcoin’s original whitepaper itself.
While there’s plenty of speculation regarding Nakamoto’s true identity, all of the guesses hazarded thus far have led to inconclusive dead ends.
One bitcoin developer, Laszlo Hanyecz, best known for making the first real-world purchase in bitcoin for a pair of multi-million dollar pizzas, told Business Insider that he exchanged hundreds of emails with the bitcoin creator over the course of 2010.
Their interaction began when Hanyecz, who had been mining bitcoins on his laptop, expressed interest in contributing to the cryptocurrency’s development online. Nakamoto agreed, Hanyecz said, and over the course of the year, he sent over tasks for Hanyecz to complete.
Hanyecz said that his interactions with Nakamoto were always “kind of weird.”
“I thought bitcoin was awesome and I wanted to be involved, but I had a regular developing job,” said Hanyecz. “Nakamoto would send me emails like, ‘Hey, can you fix this bug? Hey, can you do this?'”
Hanyecz said that even though his work on bitcoin was a side project that he worked on for free, Nakamoto treated him like he was a full time employee.
“He’d say: ‘Hey, the west side’s down.’ Or, ‘We have these bugs, we need to fix this.’ I’d be like, ‘We? We’re not a team,'” said Hanyecz. “I thought that it was approval from him, that maybe he accepted me as a member. But I didn’t want the responsibility. I didn’t really understand all of the forces that were going on at the time.”
Hanyecz said that Nakamoto’s demands occasionally rubbed him the wrong way.
“I’d say, ‘Hey, you’re not my boss,'” said Hanyecz. “I didn’t take it too seriously, though.”
I asked a few questions — he always dodged them
Nakamoto didn’t seem too thrilled about Hanyecz’s burgeoning mining pursuits either, said Hanyecz.
“He said, “Well, I’d rather not have you do the mining too much,'” said Hanyecz. “He was trying to grow the community and get more commerce-use cases. He fully recognized that mining would become a thing where a few people would get wealthy.”
Typically, Hanyecz would contact Nakamoto throughout the week with technical inquiries usually related to bitcoin’s code, he said. When Nakamoto chose to respond, he’d do so all at once, usually towards the end of the week.
“I just assumed he was busy working on other stuff,” said Hanyecz.
Despite working on a strenuous, highly technical project together, Hanyecz said that Nakamoto always maintained his veil of anonymity, to the point that it struck Hanyecz as distinctly odd.
“He or she or whoever it was never told me anything personal,” said Hanyecz. “I asked a few questions, but he always dodged them. Those questions never got answered.”
Because of Nakamoto’s name, Hanyecz assumed like many others, that he was conferring with a slightly eccentric man of Asian origins. There were several emails where Hanyecz said that Nakamoto struck him as paranoid.
“There were a few times when I got messages that seemed off-base,” he said. “I brushed them off because I was like, ‘Who cares if this guy tells me to go pound sand and go away?’ This wasn’t my job or anything, it was a hobby. I was trying to be friends with him. He seemed very paranoid about people breaking the software. He kept calling it ‘pre-release,’ and I was helping him get it to release.”
In retrospect, Hanyecz said that Nakamoto’s paranoia was understandable.
“If anything had happened to the code early on, we wouldn’t be heaving this conversation today,” he said.
Hanyecz said that he’s used to dealing with eccentric people over the internet, but that his interactions with Nakamoto consistently gave him what he called “a weird feeling.”
Ultimately, though, Hanyecz said that he has deep respect for both Nakamoto’s project and the person, or team, behind the name Nakamoto. Hanyecz believes that bitcoin might not exist today if it wasn’t for its creator’s decision to evade the public eye.
“It’s exciting because people love a man of mystery, but I try to steer people towards the fact that it doesn’t matter who made it. He could be a psycho killer,” Hanyecz said. “People like to identify with heroes or villains, but in the cryptosphere your code has to speak for itself. Charisma and being an interesting person only gets you so far when you’re a developer. Ultimately, you’ll be judged on the quality of your code and your idea.”
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