Satoshi Nakamoto might be back! At least that’s what the crypto community has been speculating over the last couple of days.
The cause of this talk lies in the fact that a chunk of bitcoin that was mined more than a decade ago has just moved for the first time ever.
Back in 2009, not many people even know what bitcoin is and only a handful of people were involved in bitcoin mining. One of the people who were involved in the mining of this cryptocurrency back in the day was no other than the father of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
No one can say for certain who Satoshi Nakamoto is, as the mysterious figure was last heard from in 2010.
Skeptics Doubt It’s Satoshi Nakamoto
Whale Alert sported a move of 40 BTC that was mined in 2009 when only Satoshi Nakamoto and a few others were involved in crypto mining. This fact narrows down the list of people who have made this transaction.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the usual suspect whenever old bitcoin is moved. However, crypto enthusiasts on Twitter have noticed a pattern that suggests he might not be the owner of the 40 BTCs.
Instead, it seems more likely that some of the other notable figures from the early days of crypto might be behind this move, e.g. Hal Finney’s family.
At that time when those 40 BTC were mined, bitcoin was worth practically nothing. Today, however, the price of one bitcoin is somewhere in the ballpark of $10,000.
It is speculated that the bitcoin creator has millions of BTCs in his crypto wallets, all of which were mined in 2009 and 2010. If that’s true, it makes Satoshi Nakamoto one of the richest people in the world today.
When bitcoin reached its peak price in 2017, it was speculated that Nakamoto was the 44th richest person on the planet.
John McAfee Claims He Knows Satoshi Nakamoto
Hal Finney, whom we mentioned before, is one of the most likely candidates to be the person behind the Satoshi Nakamoto persona. Or, at least, he was. Finney passed away in 2014, having spent the last couple of years of his life paralyzed.
He was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2009, only a couple of months before Nakamoto disappeared from the internet. Another fact going in favor of the theory that Finney was Nakamoto is that he was the first-ever recipient of bitcoin. He received the BTC from the account of no other than Satoshi Nakamoto.
However, not everyone believes a single man was able to come up with such an elaborate idea as bitcoin, nevertheless put that idea in practice.
John McAfee, an anti-malware software pioneer and a self-professed cryptocurrency buff, is among those who think the creation of bitcoin was something that required a lot of people to work hard for many years.
Actually, McAfee claims he knows who was behind the bitcoin creation. According to him, there isn’t a father of bitcoin, but many fathers. McAfee claims Satoshi Nakamoto is actually a team of eleven people who worked on this project for half a decade.
