Bitcoin Guide Gallery / Lauren Joseph / Jan 26th, 2018 @ 16:53

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    Before Satoshi disappeared, he handed control of bitcoin's source code to one of the project's earliest contributors, a Princeton alum and former 3D-graphics-software programmer based in Massachusetts named __Gavin Andresen__. Many have speculated that Andresen was Satoshi all along, but Andresen has repeatedly denied it.
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    One of the first attempts at identifying Satoshi was published in the *New Yorker* in 2011, In 2011when journalist Joshua Davis suggested that an Irish cryptographer named [__Michael Clear__](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/the-crypto-currency) had the right mathematical and programming chops to build bitcoin. Clear [denied being Satoshi](http://ciphron.netsoc.ie/clarif.html) and no other evidence has emerged to support the theory.
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    The most high-profile attempt at unmasking Satoshi came in March 2014, when a *Newsweek* cover story identified retired engineer __Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto__. Reporters swarmed Nakamoto's Temple City, California, home, but he soon explained that the article was based on a misunderstanding. Nakamoto, whose writing style is completely different from that of bitcoin's creator, had apparently confirmed to the magazine that he’d been involved in bitcoin. But he later said he was unfamiliar with bitcoin and thought *Newsweek* was asking him about work he'd done for the US government decades prior.
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    Hal Finney, who died in August 2014, was the second bitcoin user after Satoshi himself, having received the first test transmission of the currency. He also happened to live just a few blocks from Dorian Nakamoto. But Finney convinced then-*Forbes* reporter and current WIRED reporter Andy Greenberg that he wasn't Satoshi—and that Finney's proximity to Dorian Nakamoto was just a bizarre coincidence—by sharing a series of email exchanges he had with bitcoin's creator in 2009.
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    Another common theory is that Satoshi is Nick Szabo, a cryptographer who created a bitcoin predecessor called Bit Gold, thanks in part to a widely cited linguistic analysis conducted by researchers at Aston University in Birmingham, England. Like all but one other person on this list, Szabo denies that he is Satoshi.
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    In December 2015, WIRED [reported](https://www.wired.com/2015/12/bitcoins-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-this-unknown-australian-genius/) that Australian academic __Craig Steven Wright__ either created Bitcoin, or he is a brilliant hoaxer who desperately wanted the world to believe that he had. At one point, Wright even persuaded Andresen, who wrote that he was "convinced beyond a reasonable doubt" that Wright was Satoshi. But as skepticism mounted, Wright eventually [gave up](https://www.wired.com/2016/05/craig-wright-ends-attempt-prove-created-bitcoin-im-sorry/) trying to prove that he was in fact the inventor of bitcoin.
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