Analysis

On December 24, 2021, PlanB rewrote the test for his stock-to-flow model. The original formulas and dates behind the power law, stock-to-flow and the rainbow chart, measured against the price.

On August 20, 2008 Satoshi emailed Adam Back a link to a draft titled "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party." Its title and abstract survive in two emails. The PDF does not.

By 2008 Microsoft's free compiler wanted a Passport sign-in. Satoshi used the 1998 Visual C++ 6.0 and free MinGW, signed up for services under his pseudonym, and designed a system without accounts.

Satoshi's code had a COIN and a CENT and nothing smaller with a name. Bitcoin's smallest unit, the satoshi, was named by users on BitcoinTalk two months after his last post.

In 2008 Satoshi wrote that only coin creators would eventually need to run nodes. Mining did leave ordinary computers; nodes did not. Who runs the nodes at 25,489 reachable addresses, and why, unpaid.

On October 3, 2026, 12,524 of the 25,501 Bitcoin addresses a crawler could reach were Tor onions. What the count measures, how it grew from Satoshi's 2009 Tor proxy support, and why nodes hide IPs.

Satoshi sized the 21 million cap so amounts would land between 0.01 and 1000. The cent ran through his code, his fees and more than two years of his writing. The yen does not appear even once.

Four exchanges opened between October 2009 and July 2010, none of them Satoshi's: NewLibertyStandard, Malmi's bitcoinexchange.com, Bitcoin Market and Mt. Gox. Satoshi advised from the sidelines.

On August 20, 2008 Satoshi called his C++ code nearly finished. Which precursors were in front of him by then? The earliest record for Hashcash, b-money, MicroMint, Bit Gold, DigiCash and RPOW.

In August 2010 a forum user asked whether Satoshi could withstand torture for Bitcoin's alert key. What the key could do, whose hands its copies reached, and how it left the network by 2018.

How a 1992 Oakland meeting became the Cypherpunks mailing list: the name, the remailers, the Clipper fight, the 1997 split, and the Hashcash and b-money posts the Bitcoin whitepaper later cited.

Proof of work vs proof of stake, scored axis by axis with dated numbers: market cap, track record, energy, attack cost, decentralization, speed and new-chain adoption, with DPoS and PoA beside them.

CoinMarketCap recorded Ethereum's market cap at roughly 85% of Bitcoin's on June 12, 2017 — the closest 'the flippening' ever came to happening, before both fell back.

The only record of Satoshi's gender is one field on a profile that has never been confirmed, yet Satoshi is still called 'he.' Every named candidate is a man, and it all traces to a male pen name.

Word-count and interval statistics for all 164 of Satoshi's SVN commits (r15-r202), plus diff-size stats for 158: after his 75-day silence, Satoshi's messages got shorter, not longer.

Wei Dai called Bitcoin's fixed supply a failure in 2013. His own 1998 b-money design needed the same real-world value figure Satoshi said software has no way to know.

A curated way in: questions about Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin history, each pointing to the page that answers it in full.

The only place Satoshi named a country for himself was one unverifiable profile. Language, timestamps, and the one actually Japanese candidate all read against that claim — and against each other.

Institutions built a $300B stake; governments turned seized coins into reserves. Two Nobel economists, asked years later, still weren't persuaded. What actually changed, checked against the record.

James Donald tied the issue he pressed Satoshi on to the 1982 Byzantine Generals Problem. Satoshi said Bitcoin solved it in a network anyone could join, and explained it with a king's wi-fi password.

Doubters called it unscalable in 2008. A famed hacker failed to break the code. A judge, a dictionary, and a Nobel nominator weighed in. What others said about Satoshi, read as one record.

A source-level map of Bitcoin v0.1: the byte boundaries for transaction, block, and signature hashes, and the reuse of one serializer across network and disk paths.

Five AI models were asked the same question and independently picked the same coin. Fact-checking their reasons: structural claims held up, confident superlatives mostly did not.

Governments that banned Bitcoin hardest ended up holding the most of it. A survey of policy reversals across thirty jurisdictions, and the two governments that never reversed at all.

Twelve chains, compared by what each one's issuance rule decides about the price of a single unit, and what it leaves undecided.

AnonymousSpeech.com, the anonymous intermediary behind bitcoin.org: its pitch of protection under Japanese law, a mail relay on a Malaysian IP address, and an operator trail that ends in silence.

Bitcoin's first price was a production-cost estimate. Satoshi predicted in 2010 that market price would come to dictate production cost — not the reverse. The arc from 2009 to modern models.

Satoshi's ~1.1M BTC sit still while companies, ETFs, and nation-states build stacks of their own. A sourced map of who holds the 21 million — and why the biggest whales still have no names.

The first person to answer the Bitcoin whitepaper, James Donald was also the only other person known to use a rare word of Satoshi's, making him Benjamin Wallace's top lead. The evidence, weighed.

A former SpaceX intern named him in a viral 2017 blog post, citing his command of both C++ and economics and an idiom he shares with Satoshi. The evidence for Elon Musk as Satoshi, weighed.

His legal name was, literally, Satoshi Nakamoto — and a 2014 Newsweek cover story named him. The evidence, weighed.

The only candidate who claimed the identity himself — declared in coordinated BBC and Economist interviews in May 2016, cryptographic proof in hand. The evidence, weighed.

He wrote E4M, then built a criminal empire. The case Evan Ratliff, author of The Mastermind, set out in 2019 for Paul Le Roux as Satoshi, weighed.

The whitepaper's title names a payment system; section 6's gold is an analogy for issuance. Bitcoin is scarce like gold and spends like cash, and its scarcity later earned it the name digital gold.

Weighing the 'Blockstream controls Bitcoin' charge against the documentary record: where it comes from, and how each link in the chain holds up.

When correspondents wished Satoshi merry Christmas, predicted $10M per coin, or hoped he was well, his replies went straight to the technical point and ignored the rest. Five patterns, examined.

Bitcoin's 2015–2017 block-size war by phase, faction and turning point: Bitcoin XT, the BIP148 UASF, the New York Agreement, Bitcoin Cash and the cancellation of SegWit2x.

Hayek's 1976 case for competing currencies, the Extropians' imaginary 'Hayeks' currency of 1995, and Bitcoin, money no state issues: one line of thought, linked by ideas rather than proven influence.

Iconic Bitcoin losses by how they happened: a forgotten password (Thomas), physical disposal (Howells), collapsed custodians (QuadrigaCX, Mt. Gox, FTX), all made final by Bitcoin's irreversibility.

Satoshi's difficulty retarget has an off-by-one: it measures 2,015 blocks instead of 2,016. A hashrate majority can exploit it via timestamp manipulation. The Great Consensus Cleanup proposes a fix.

Bitcoin's 'digital gold' status rests on two layers of decentralization — system and people/organization — and six structural features no later cryptocurrency combines to the same degree.

Bitcoin chose a hard 21M cap; b-money (1998) proposed elastic supply; fiat runs central-bank discretion. The cypherpunk debate, Wei Dai's 2013 regret, and 15 years of cryptocurrency variants.

Where Bitcoin's current reality has drifted from Satoshi's design intent: four axes — mining (one-CPU-one-vote to ASIC oligopoly), custody (own keys to exchange IOUs), governance, and scaling.

Satoshi coded Bitcoin on Windows for 27 months, mainly with MinGW. In November 2009 he finished the Linux build Martti Malmi had started; by mid-2010 there were Windows, Linux and Mac releases.

Which Bitcoin assets are at risk from a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, and what the timeline and migration debate around post-quantum cryptography looks like.

What Satoshi's design assumed about a fee-only future, and the documented debate over whether transaction fees alone can sustain proof-of-work security after the block subsidy ends around 2140.

How the 2010-08-15 overflow incident unfolded: the soft-fork rescue, why a 5-hour response was possible only then, what the transactions themselves show, and the centralization paradox.

Why Bitcoin's 2015-2017 fork wars were fights over what Bitcoin is, not OSS disputes: the authority vacuum after 2011, the money riding on rule choices, and three layers binding code to currency.

The August 2010 overflow recovery rested on knightmb's snapshot. Secondary sources have since attached a misattributed 10%-holder claim and a contested Tennessee identification to the same handle.

Genealogy of every Bitcoin protocol fork that left a separate chain alive (Bitcoin Cash, SV, Gold) and the adjacent cryptocurrencies derived from Bitcoin (Namecoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin).

How the 2014 'Bitcoin Core' rebrand changed the language of authority in Bitcoin: the internal disagreement over PR #3408, the 2015-2017 forks, and Hearn's regret in 2025.

Wei Dai's b-money is whitepaper reference [1], his Crypto++ shipped inside Bitcoin v0.1, and he was the second person Satoshi contacted. The evidence for Wei Dai as Satoshi, weighed.

He built RPOW, received the first Bitcoin transaction, and lived blocks from Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. The evidence for Hal Finney as Satoshi, weighed.

A reanalysis of van Dorst's stylometric corpus for the five most-cited candidates. Szabo led them, in the top 4.67% of 12,739 authors, but 594 unnamed authors came closer.

He conceived Bit Gold, and three of the four most-cited stylometric studies place him first. The evidence for Nick Szabo as Satoshi, weighed.

Bitcoin v0.1 reuses one cypherpunk primitive (PoW from Hashcash), borrows general CS components (Merkle trees, linked timestamping, ECDSA), and synthesizes the rest (UTXO, mining, 21M cap, P2P).

Hashcash's inventor and the first person Satoshi contacted. In April 2026 the NYT named him the closest stylometric match among 620 cryptography-mailing-list writers. The evidence, weighed.

Satoshi has been hunted in public for years and left a large trail of material, yet remains unidentified. Why all that searching and all that material have not led to a name.

How "Satoshi Nakamoto" stayed unidentified through development, the public phase and withdrawal, in six layers: pseudonym, channels, language, development environment, genesis constants and handover.

A reply that read like the continuation of Satoshi's thought — and two days later, Satoshi went silent. The evidence for HBO's Peter Todd identification, weighed.

Twelve recurring Satoshi candidates, compared across four independent layers: profile match, stylometric attribution, direct correspondence and development environment.

The only Japanese-named candidate, creator of the anonymous P2P system Winny. The evidence for Isamu Kaneko as Satoshi, weighed.

The Mixmaster developer who died 68 days after Satoshi's last known email. The evidence for Len Sassaman as Satoshi, weighed.

Interactive D3 timeline of every documented Satoshi event — correspondence, mailing lists, BitcoinTalk, P2P Foundation, SourceForge — from August 20, 2008 to the disputed 2014 P2P Foundation post.

Every Satoshi self-reference in the public record (Aug 2008 – Apr 2011): identity claims, development disclosures, operational status, farewells and disputed statements, each tied to its source.

Bitcoin v0.1's unusual distribution and missing tooling (.rar packaging, no version control, no tests), read against Warez-scene conventions and Kaminsky's 2011 security audit.

The "Satoshi Nakamoto" pseudonym read against the 1980s-90s cyberpunk and techno-orientalist field: a Japanese name on a crypto project arrived already evoking networked anonymous intelligence.

Three primary-source clues to Satoshi's place among the cypherpunks: he had not heard of b-money, Wei Dai called him "not previously active," and what Satoshi did tracked Hughes's 1993 manifesto.

Satoshi's working environment during the Bitcoin v0.1 launch week (Jan 8-12, 2009): "from where I am" in the Jan 12 email to Finney, and how much he packed into that week.

Bitcoin's genesis block, read from the v0.1 source: how hardcoded constants build it, the five-day gap as a timestamp artifact, who counts as its author, proof-of-work headroom, and who holds the key.

Statistical analysis of Satoshi's Bitcoin source (v0.1.0–v0.3.19): coding-style fingerprint, commit times suggesting EST/CST, growth from 19,901 to 31,909 lines over 23 months, final-commit traits.