A few days ago, Hungarian crypto fans unveiled a bronze sculpture of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of the world’s most widely used cryptocurrency.
Erected in the Budapest Technology Park, this is the first such statue on the planet. The reason why no one before honored the father of Bitcoin this way is that no one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto actually is.
The whole idea was the brainchild of Hungarian financial journalist Andras Gyorfi, who collected around $10,000 in BTC to finance the project.
Gyorfi wanted to pay homage to “the founding father of the whole cryptocurrency industry,” as well as to everyone who got involved in the world of cryptocurrency, thus helping its astronomical rise.
Satoshi’s Statue Honoring Everyone Who’s Ever Used Crypto
Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity is unknown. No one knows Satoshi’s gender nor whether this name was used by a single individual or a group of people. The obvious question is how did the artists decide how should the statue look like?
Sculptors Tamas Gilly and Reka Gergely wanted to portray a human form but without any specific features. This way, the artists wanted to show that Satoshi Nakamoto could’ve been anyone.
On top of that, they used reflective bronze surface, so that the visitors could see their own faces reflected in the statue. The motivation behind this is to remind everyone that Bitcoin isn’t just about one person – Satoshi Nakamoto might be its creator, but all cryptocurrency users need to be thanked for helping its growth.
So, Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto?
We don’t know, and we probably won’t ever find out.
Satoshi Nakamoto was an online nickname used by a person or persons of unknown gender who published the Bitcoin whitepaper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System in 2008.
A few months later, the Bitcoin software went live, with the first BTC transaction happening in January 2009. Satoshi Nakamoto sent ten BTC to Hal Finney, an American software engineer who was one of the pioneers of crypto technology.
All of this makes Finney one of the usual suspects when the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is concerned. Furthermore, journalists from Newsweek found out that a man called Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto was one of Finney’s neighbors for more than 10 years.
Sadly, Finney is no longer with us; he passed away in 2014. However, he had many times dismissed the speculations that he was the Bitcoin creator.
Finney has been gone for seven years, while the world hasn’t heard anything from Satoshi Nakamoto since 2010. In their final post, Satoshi Nakamoto gave over the alert key and the code repository to Gavin Andresen, practically putting him in charge of the Bitcoin development.
Obviously, that move put Andersen into the conversation about Satoshi’s true identity. As you’d imagine, he too dismissed the speculations, but then in 2016, he caused a real stir in the crypto community by calling Australian developer Craig White the real Nakamoto.
Since then, he’s backed away from his claim, saying that he had no intention of getting involved in the “who was Satoshi game.”
