Satoshi Nakamoto

Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used by the person, or group, who designed Bitcoin and launched the network. They published the whitepaper on October 31, 2008, mined the genesis block on January 3, 2009, and remained active on email and forums for about two years.

In April 2011 Satoshi sent their final known message and disappeared. They had been handing development control to early contributor Gavin Andresen in the months prior, telling him they had "moved on to other things." No verified message from Satoshi has appeared since.

Satoshi mined an estimated 1.1 million BTC in the network's earliest months. None of it has ever been spent. At current prices that's tens of billions of dollars sitting visible on-chain, untouched for over a decade - one of the more credible signals that whoever Satoshi was, they were not in it for the money.

Many candidates have been proposed (Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Dorian Nakamoto, Adam Back, Craig Wright, others). None have been definitively confirmed. The identity may never be known, and that's a feature: Bitcoin works because no one controls it, and an unknown founder is a stronger guarantee of that than any founder who could be subpoenaed, threatened, or co-opted.

Satoshi's earliest collaborator Hal Finney was the first person besides Satoshi to run Bitcoin, the recipient of the first BTC transaction, and the author of the famous "Running bitcoin" tweet on January 11, 2009 - now etched into Bitcoin culture.