Who is the reclusive billionaire creator of Bitcoin?

Satoshi was extremely active in the development of the open-source software which powers Bitcoin. But towards the end of 2010, perhaps sensing that the project had gathered enough momentum to survive his withdrawal, he started to fade away. The last thing anybody ever heard from him was in April 2011 when he emailed a Bitcoin contributor and said he had moved on to other things.

Because of his early involvement in bitcoin, Satoshi is thought to be extremely wealthy. New Bitcoins are "mined" by performing complex cryptographic calculations which also serve to authenticate transactions. In the early days Bitcoins were far easier to mine than they now are, and worth far less.

Security researcher Sergio Demian Lerner believes - but cant categorically prove - that Satoshi mined around 1,000,000BTC and has never spent any. At a price of $1,000 each, that would make him worth around a billion dollars - around the same as the GDP of the Seychelles.

Considering his immense wealth and integral role in launching one of the largest economic experiments ever conducted, its not surprising that lots of people have tried to uncover Satoshi's real identity.

The most recent of many theories comes from Josh Zerlan, chief operating officer of Butterfly Labs, the makers of specific hardware to mine bitcoins. Speaking to IBTimes UK at a bitcoin conference in India, he said: "One of the prevailing theories, I think has credibility, is that it was some group of people from financial sector that created this. They released it and stepped back and let it go. So, Satoshi Nakamoto is a group of people, I think, is a reasonable possibility." He names no names, or explains what their motivation would be.

The New Yorker published a piece pointing at two possible Satoshis, one of whom seemed particularly plausible: a cryptography graduate student from Trinity College, Dublin, who had gone on to work in currency-trading software for a bank and published a paper on peer-to-peer technology. The other was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Vili Lehdonvirta. Both made denials.

Fast Company highighted an encryption patent application filed by three researchers - Charles Bry, Neal King and Vladimir Oksman - and a circumstantial link involving textual analysis of it and the Satoshi paper which found the phrase "...computationally impractical to reverse" in both. Again, it was flatly denied.

All three men also collaborated on a second paper backed by a Munich-based firm called Lantiq. The company was founded in 2009, the same year that the Bitcoin paper was first published, but did not answer phone calls or reply to emails when I tried to ask if there was any link.

This year two Israeli mathematicians wrote a paper claiming that there was a link between Satoshi Nakamoto, the mythical creator of Bitcoin, and Ross Ulbricht, who has been arrested and charged with running the underground online drugs market Silk Road. They claimed, after analysing the blockchain, that there was a financial link, but later issued a statement retracting it after their claims were debunked by a Reddit user.

But all of these accusations have gotten us no closer to the truth.

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Who is the reclusive billionaire creator of Bitcoin?