Why do people care about Satoshi Nakamoto's identity?

Estimates place the size of Satoshi Nakamoto's holdings at between 600,000 BTC and 1.1 million BTC.

The vast majority of Satoshi Nakamoto's wallets received a 50 BTC block reward and have remained dormant since.

If those resources were to come into play, it could cause a major disruption of the value of bitcoin.

Because it's interesting, someone did a significant thing and we don't know who they are.

> What good would it do for the rest of us to find out his real identity?

Other people's curiosity isn't about you or some potential good that you receive.

You’re really overthinking this.

It’s a mystery. People like mysteries. People naturally want to see mysteries solved. It’s that simple.

For me it’s interesting because in the general case, nobody is perfect at opsec and eventually slips up. Satoshi is a super prominent counter-example.

Fairly few people do, but some of them can't seem to shut up about it. Media outlets like the cheap clicks too.

It's also like those cheap "reddit comments" that are discouraged on HN-- the sort of thing anyone can comment on which most people will find mildly interesting.

The discussion threads are usually low in insight and even contain a lot of outright falsehoods, but the people involved are having fun.

The identity seems to have been shared initially between 2 people. One of them being Craig Wright, the other is the genius Dave Kleinman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kleiman

Dave died years ago following depression, before releasing bitcoin he published papers on the topic of Cipher Block Chaining and similar cryptographic tech: https://www.davekleiman.com/

This has already been known for years. There were good reasons to keep his anonimity at the time, especially if you consider that his main customer was the same government where cryptography tech is considered an ammunition. At that time he could face jail for his work, or in the best scenario lose his customers/reputation.

You have to remember that in 2009 and next years, BTC was something only relevant for cybersec researchers and criminals. You would not want to be seen as associated with the latter.

Do people still care? This is the first time in a long time I've seen Satoshi being mentioned at all. Though admittedly I'm not big into crypto.

Bitcoin works because you can prove it mathematically without Satoshi's involvement. He made a quote in the recent email dump that reinforces this: "self-evident proof of the majority consensus”. [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1760718747768087033

The world doesn't need Satoshi for Bitcoin to continue working. And so the reason people want to find his identity is because there exist people in the world who lie, cheat, steal and ultimately kill. Those people want to find Satoshi, to punish him for inventing a fair system of economic trade that doesn't cut them into it.

Human beings are obsessed with narrative: x did y to z. This repeats everywhere - the identity of the characters is as important as the events themselves.

I don’t know why this is, but I do know that it is much, much bigger than Bitcoin.

It’s not about the billions of dollars, it’s not about the mystery. It’s because we are pack animals obsessed with hierarchy and cannot rest as organisms until we identify which people are important.

It could be related to survival in pre-civilized times. Not being aware of the social hierarchy and society’s expectations placed on you based on your position in it could very well have proven to be lethal throughout most of human history.

If Craig Wright is Satoshi he can claim it all as his intellectual property, which could be worth billions.

If Satoshi remains a ghost, it belongs to everyone and it is whatever it is.

I think mostly people only want to prove it isn't Craig Wright.

I think it is a mixture of both celebrity worship and the fact that his stake within his invention is significantly high. He specifically stated that he didn't want to be associated with the project anymore, so I'm pretty sure he had his own reasoning behind that decision. Taking into consideration the fact that he used a nickname to keep his anonymity, I assume that not becoming a public figure was one of those.

We don't want to hurt him..... We just want to talk

It's all money laundering. The creators are probably Russian oligarchs and mobsters. There is no Satoshi, just Ivan, Vladimir, and so on.

It's like asking why historians care who was the author of some historical piece of art or literature. We mammals are curious, curiosity is driving evolution and innovation. The quest of understanding the world our us and beyond us never stops.

I don't personally care about his identity.

As a layman I think its cool that there's some mystery dude who built something cool, "valuable" (debatable), and then disappeared.

I'd honestly be disappointed if his identity is ever revealed. Even worse would be if it turns out to be some d bag we all know lol.

because it's a tale of intrigue!

People like puzzles.

I just want to know his ip address “Hint”

i always thought it was that Swiss guy living in Tokyo