The identity of Satoshi Nakomoto, who as a person or collective invented bitcoin, remains a mystery, but it’s at least plausible that Jack Dorsey could have done it.
The current chief executive of Block (XYZ) and former CEO of Twitter, Dorsey’s libertarian leanings and his advocacy of cryptocurrencies prompted that very blunt question to him at Square’s investor day held last week.
Jeff Cantwell, an analyst at Seaport Research, said, “Jack, this probably is the most important question you’ll ever get from the sell side – are you Satoshi Nakamoto? Thanks.”
“On the Satoshi question, the most beautiful thing about bitcoin is that question does not matter at all anymore,” Dorsey replied, according to a transcript published by FactSet.
He said it’s now an open protocol taken over by a community. “And if it was important to Satoshi, there is a simple way they can prove who they are, so we’ll wait for that day,” he added.
That intriguing comment spurred the team at the brokerage Baird to seek for coincidences between Dorsey and Satoshi.
They discovered a few. For example, Satoshi posted on the BitcoinTalk forum for the first time on November 19, which is both Dorsey’s birthday and Block’s investor day. “He may or may not be Satoshi, but it is his birthday today,” Block CFO Amrita Ahuja said. The Baird team also observed significant early bitcoin dates aligning with the birthdays of Dorsey’s parents.
The Baird team also noted that Dorsey was on the so-called “cypherpunk” mailing list as early as 1996, that he can program in C and in Python which both appeared in the early bitcoin codebase, and an early bitcoin address contains a sequence called “jD2m,” which reportedly stands for Jack Dorsey 2 Mint, a reference to Mint Plaza where he lived.
The Baird team also identified a difference in Satoshi mining activities, that matched with the period he launched Block in Feb. 2009, and the time he visited Iraq with the State Department in April that year. Finally, they notice rumors that Satoshi in early 2009 unintentionally signed into an Internet Relay Chat in January with an IP address indicating a California address, at a time when Dorsey lived in the Bay Area.
And then, there’s the issue that Satoshi’s 1 million bitcoins have never been moved, which is what Dorsey seems to be alluding with his claim that Satoshi’s identity could be simple confirmed. Forbes puts Jack Dorsey’s wealth at $4.7 billion, so he doesn’t need to touch that stockpile that at present is worth around $87 billion.
On Tuesday, Bitcoin (BTCUSD) was trading at about $87,000, down 29% from its peak.
