Who made Bitcoin? It's Satoshi Nakamoto, obviously. But controversy swirls around who Satoshi really is. It exploded a week ago on X when the @satoshi account posted for the first time since 2018. But could that be the real Satoshi? I'm going to dig into the top suspects - from least likely to my #1 pick. With some pretty compelling evidence that Satoshi is posting right here on X. The first person on the list is Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto Thanks to being outed by the now legendary Newsweek article and memes, he's forever destined to be the face of Satoshi. But while he shares the same name as the Bitcoin creator, Dorian possesses neither the cryptography background nor C++ programming language to create Bitcoin. But his geo location concerning another person on this list is striking. More on that in a minute. Gavin Andresen He was one of the first developers to work on Bitcoin and communicated directly with Satoshi via email. He also took a lead role in Bitcoin development after Satoshi's disappearance. However, the differences in coding style between Gavin's known works and the original Bitcoin code written by Satoshi are too significant to ignore. PLUS if Gavin were Satoshi, he would have had to be a Brad Pitt-level actor when he expressed his belief this next person was Satoshi in 2016. That person is Craig Wright He's the only person on the list who claims to be Satoshi. And if you saw my post last week you'll know that @Dr_CSWright is involved in a bunch of Bitcoin-related legal battles. But at the core, Craig has failed to show cryptographic proof of being Satoshi. This includes the time he convinced Gavin that he was Satoshi by signing with one of Satoshi's wallets. Turns out it's possible Craig tricked Gavin using a compromised computer. Everything changes when he moves Bitcoin from one of Satoshi's known wallets. Until that day, he's too sketchy to believe. The next person on the list you've definitely heard of but probably don't know why. His name is Wei Dai And all subunits of ETH are named "wei" after him. So when you pay for gas on Ethereum, you pay in "gwei" right? That's a million wei. He created "b-money," an early concept similar to Bitcoin, and along with @adam3us was one of the first people contacted by Satoshi about Bitcoin and was credited in the Bitcoin whitepaper. But currently, there is no concrete evidence that would indicate Dai is Satoshi. Next on the list is not a person, but a government. The United States government. It certainly has the technological capability to create Bitcoin. In 2001 the NSA developed the SHA-256 hashing algorithm which is an essential part of Bitcoin's architecture. And there's this thing that when you look up Satoshi on Wikipedia, you get "intelligent" And when you look up the Nakamoto family history on you get "central" Central Intelligence Got it? But the bigger clue was that time in 1997 when the NSA wrote the paper: How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash So maybe this was a brilliant psyops to onboard libertarians onto Bitcoin's transparent ledger technology and thereby usher in the rise of the surveillance state. If so, I gotta hand it to them. Well played USA. Could any founder be more devastating than the US government if he turned out to be Satoshi? Maybe this guy. Murderer, drug dealer, and general bad dude Paul Le Roux is a brilliant programmer whose cryptography and software development skill align with what would have been required to develop Bitcoin. His incarceration since 2012 would explain why none of Satoshi's Bitcoin has moved. Add in the fact that Satoshi vanished around the time when Gavin Andresen was scheduled to give a talk about Bitcoin at the CIA headquarters, and it fits with how we would expect Le Roux to behave. And maybe the most interesting piece. A Republic of Congo passport was issued to Le Roux just 25 days before Satoshi released the Bitcoin whitepaper. The middle name on the passport. Solotshi 🤯 Now we're transitioning from the worst person on the list to maybe the best. Hal Finney was heavily involved in the cypherpunk community and was instrumental in the success of Bitcoin. He was the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction, from Satoshi himself. And look at how he was shilling Bitcoin when it was first released. You can earn, 100 million times return on your money! Shill away Hal!! 🤣 One other point, that's kind of crazy to consider. Prior to his early death of ALS in 2014, Hal lived in the same town as Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. What are the odds? The odds are pretty good that the next person on our list could be Satoshi. Nick Szabo proposed "Bit Gold" a decentralised currency concept that bears similarities to Bitcoin in 1998. As author @DominicFrisby proposed in his 2014 on Bitcoin, the writings of Szabo closely resemble those of Satoshi in the Bitcoin whitepaper. This has been confirmed recently using LLM's to further compare his writing with Satoshi. Plus we get this email sent from Satoshi to Hal Finney where Satoshi sends a wallet address and then describes how users can brute force scan Bitcoin addresses to find one with the first few characters customised to your name or initials. And the initials in the address? N S Nick Szabo That would be tough to beat, but Adam Back does him one better. Of course, he has the deep technical skill and understanding to pull it off. Adam is cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper for his development of Hashcash. And while Satoshi's first known email was sent to Wei Dai, in the email Satoshi mentions that Adam "noticed similarities and pointed me to your site." So it's very likely, that Adam was the first person Satoshi contacted. Adam, not surprisingly, was interested in Dai's b-money when he first proposed it. What's noteworthy is that he was basically the only person who was interested in b-money. Go back and look. Adam was one of the few who cared. To say Adam was obsessed with crypto is an understatement. He lived for it. He began writing to The Cryptography Mailing List, A LOT, beginning in 1996. For more than a decade he had been an active participant, and then in November 2007, he made his last entry. Gone for 4 years. Imagine that. Adam's wholly engulfed in crypto. He interacts with Wei Dai about b-money. He invents Hashcash. Every month for a decade, he's a huge part of the discussion. And then he's gone. Contacted by Satoshi about the thing he's most obsessed with. Not interested. And he's so uninterested that he will preemptively disappear from the space. Only to magically reaper on April 17, 2013, when The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Visionary and Genius article was posted. It included a chart that estimated Satoshi held more than 1 million Bitcoin. 6 hours later, Adam joined the Bitcoin Talk Forum. And then, 13 days later, Adam responded to the post to ask if they figured out if Satoshi had spent any of the Bitcoins? I wonder. O and Adam did finally return to The Cryptography Mailing List on September 14, 2013. Where he talks about. The NSA