The hunt for the mysterious Bitcoin inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto continues to this day, as new data-driven research has been recently deployed in order to figure out the creator’s location while he/she or they worked on the network. The researchers analyzed Satoshi’s 539 Bitcointalk posts, 34 emails, 169 code commits, metadata from all the versions of bitcoin he worked on, the genesis block data, and archived data from the Wayback Machine.
Report Suggests Satoshi Nakamoto Lived in London While Creating Bitcoin
To this very day, the world is still clueless about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the first cryptocurrency network Bitcoin. Just recently, research stemming from The Chain Bulletin published an editorial that attempts to hone in on Satoshi Nakamoto’s location during the creation of the world’s first blockchain.
On November 23, 2020, the author Doncho Karaivanov explains researchers combed through “Satoshi’s Bitcointalk posts, Sourceforge commits, and emails, along with other available data.” According to the research, the data points to “the most likely place the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin called home – London.”
Karaivanov says the research is data-driven and relies on timestamps that cover approximately “742 activity instances from 206 days (not consecutive).” The timestamped documentation started on Halloween on October 31, 2008, and statistics end on December 13, 2010, which was the last time the community heard from Satoshi. The researchers compiled scatter charts based on suspected time zones in order to see when Bitcoin’s mysterious inventor was awake and active.
“Common suspect locations are the UK (GMT), US Eastern (EST), US Pacific (PST), Japan (JST), and Australia (AEST),” Karaivanov’s study details. “The last two were easy to debunk, but the first three prospects needed further examination.”
During the course of Satoshi’s online activity, the researchers also note that Nakamoto posted a total of 539 times on the website forum bitcointalk.org. “Looking at this data alone, we cannot determine, beyond a reasonable doubt, which time zone Satoshi lived in,” Karaivanov’s report stresses.
On Sourceforge, a code repository web portal where the Bitcoin code was once stored, Satoshi deployed 169 commits during that period of time. Again the researchers used scatter charts based on specific time zones to analyze Satoshi’s commit activity, which has proof timestamps in UTC.
Similarly, the commit charts just like the Bitcointalk post charts, are consistent and Karaivanov notes that they don’t leave a smoking gun in any of the plausible regions. Then the researchers charted Satoshi’s bulk of email activity which alone did not leave any hard evidence. However, by merging all the data from the Bitcointalk posts, commits, and emails the data starts to deduce that Satoshi’s home location wasn’t in Japan or Australia.
