One of the great tech mysteries is “Who really is Bitcoin’s inventor, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto?” Recently, some people thought Linus Torvalds, the developer behind both the world’s most popular operating system, Linux, and its most popular development tool, the Git distributed version control (DVC) system, had also claimed he was the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, inventor: The perplexing Satoshi Nakamoto.
This story got its start in the cryptocurrency news site, BeInCrypto. There a writer argued that “Linux creator Linus Torvalds seems to be claiming that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the father of Bitcoin. Is he joking or is this the real deal?”
he reason for this claim? In a GitHub Linux kernel repository, it appeared Torvalds had changed a single line in the Linux Kernel. The change: ‘Name = I am Satoshi.’
And people were off to the races. News stories appeared here, there, and everywhere. The big question “Is he or isn’t he?” was debated on Twitter, Reddit, and Ycombinator.
Back in the late 2000s, no one really cared. Yes, there was a paper entitled, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” by Satoshi Nakamoto, but so what. There had been lots of papers that went nowhere. But then Nakamoto released the first Bitcoin program, version 0.1 on an early open-source code site, SourceForge, and launched the network with the genesis block of bitcoin aka block number 0. The race to cryptocurrency had started and it’s still going on today.
But, then and now, we still don’t know who Satoshi Nakamoto really is. Nakamoto, who never revealed any real clues as to his identity, stepped back from active Bitcoin involvement in mid-2010. Since then, he’s vanished from the internet.
No, Linus Torvalds is not Bitcoin’s legendary creator Satoshi Nakamoto. More>