The Man Who Really Built Bitcoin

Who cares about Satoshi Nakamoto? Someone else has made Bitcoin what it is and has the most power over its destiny.

In March, a bewildered retired man faced journalists yelling questions about virtual currency outside his suburban home in Temple City, California. Dorian Nakamoto, 64, had been identified by Newsweek as the person who masterminded Bitcoina story that, like previous attempts to unmask its pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, was soon discredited. Meanwhile, the person arguably most responsible for enabling the currency to swell in value to $7.7 billion, and with the most influence on its future, was hiding in plain sight on the other side of the country, in Amherst, Massachusetts.

That person is Gavin Andresen, a mild-mannered 48-year-old picked by the real Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he or she is, as his successor in late 2010. Andresen became core maintainerchief developerof the open source code that defines the rules of Bitcoin and provides the software needed to make use of it. The combination of Nakamotos blessing and Andresens years of diligent, full-time work on the Bitcoin code has given him significant clout in Bitcoin circles and stature beyond. The CIA and Washington regulators have looked to him to explain the currency. And it was Andresen who conceived of the nonprofit Bitcoin Foundationestablished in 2013which is the closest thing to a central authority in the world of Bitcoin.

Some Bitcoin enthusiasts offer bombastic predictions that Americans will shake off the shackles of the Federal Reserve and poor nations will rise to prosperity with the low-cost transactions made possible by the stateless virtual currency. Other Bitcoin boosters have the air of salesmen chasing a mark, reeling off reasons you should buy into the currency that make you feel youre not getting the whole story. In contrast, Andresen seems to be in search of quiet personal satisfaction, cheerfully calling himself a geek interested in nuts and bolts things. He can make a pretty good pitch for Bitcoin, but he quickly slides into technical nuances that would be a turnoff for most. We say this is going to be the year of the multisignature wallet, he says when summing up what 2014 holds for Bitcoin.

Still, Andresen has had and maintains more influence than anyone else on the code that determines how Bitcoin operatesand ultimately whether it can survive. Although there is no central bank for the currency, its design needs significant changes if it is to become widely used. How Andresen wields his power over Bitcoin will shape not only its fate but also the prospects for other virtual currencies.

Lucky Bet

Bitcoins origins may be shrouded in mystery, but plenty is known about Andresen and his past. Formerly known as Gavin Bell, he has been a software engineer ever since he graduated in computer science from Princeton in 1988 and took a job with the Silicon Valley computing company Silicon Graphics. He worked there for seven years, and then at a series of startups building products from 3-D drawing software to online games for blind and sighted people to play together. Then he encountered Bitcoin in 2010.

Bitcoins were essentially worthless at the time and extremely finicky to get ahold of and use. But Andresen saw technical elegance in Nakamotos design, and a currency outside the control of any government appealed to what he calls his mostly libertarian politics. Rather than being created by a central bank, bitcoins are mined by people running software that races to solve a mathematical puzzle and win a prize of newly minted bitcoins. The mining process is designed to gradually pay out less and less over time, until 21 million bitcoins exist, and it also serves to verify transactions made in the currency (see What Bitcoin Is and Why It Matters).

Eager to see people start using Bitcoin, Andresen launched a website in 2010 called the Bitcoin Faucet that handed out five free bitcoins to every visitor. (A bitcoin was worth only cents at the time but each one trades for $600 today; Andresen reduced the size of the handout as bitcoins rose in value, then shut the site down in 2012.) He also began sending code tweaks and improvements to Nakamoto. Bitcoins founder liked his work, and soon made his protgs e-mail address the only one on the projects homepage. Andresen formally stepped forward in a December 2010 post on the Bitcoin forum. With Satoshis blessing, and with great reluctance, Im going to start doing more active project management for Bitcoin, he wrote. He has worked full-time on it ever since. The Bitcoin Foundation paid him $209,648 in 2013a salary he received in bitcoins.

His smooth ascent has led to frequent accusations that Andresen is Nakamoto and shed the pseudonym once the currency gained traction. He always flatly denies it. I am not Satoshi Nakamoto; I have never met him; I have had many e-mail conversations with him, he said after giving a talk in April. Nobody knows who he is, I think. If that was a lie, Andresen is a remarkable con man. Throughout hundreds of forum posts, e-mail messages, and lines of code, his style has been distinct from that of Nakamoto.

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The Man Who Really Built Bitcoin