Ripple’s chief technology officer David Schwartz says he’s not Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
In response to questions posted on Twitter regarding whether he’s responsible for building the Bitcoin network, Schwartz says he didn’t find out about Bitcoin until 2011 – two years after BTC came into existence. Schwartz, who is one of the original architects of the XRP ledger, believes it is more likely Bitcoin’s pseudonymous architect was actually a small group of people, rather than a single person.
“I think it’s more plausible that Satoshi was a small group of people given the wide set of skills displayed and the amount of work done. It could have been one person, but that seems somewhat unlikely to me.”
Schwartz also says he has been slowly selling his Bitcoin for several years. Though he’s still bullish on BTC overall, he says the riskiness of the asset has convinced him to sell.
Schwartz is the latest high-profile crypto personality to deny Satoshi rumors. In May, Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson said he thought Adam Back, co-founder and chief executive officer of blockchain technology company Blockstream, could be the founder of BTC.
“These are just great examples of what you would expect from the inventor of a proto-system that’s almost Bitcoin, to kind of keep doing that research. The other thing is that Back is an expert in cryptography and he has a lot of experience in privacy.
So you say, OK, who would have enough operational security knowledge to create an alias that’s very secure and capable of defending against? That would be Back. Back was friends with Hal Finney. They knew each other for a long time. The very second person to enter the Bitcoin space.”
Back, however, denied it.
Metaphorically "We are all Satoshi" but concretely I am not.
— Adam Back (@adam3us) May 26, 2020
Hoskinson went on to say that disagreement about Satoshi’s identity is a good thing.
“[It] means the alias is working if people can have divergent reasonable opinions. Best to leave the old dog sleeping and move on.”
Back agrees that it’s best if Satoshi remains an unknown.
“For what it’s worth, [computer scientist Hal Finney and Nick Szabo] both said it wasn’t them also.
We’ll never know – many cypherpunks had no social media footprint, and anon posts. Probably a digital ghost, who burned the nym to be safe. Bitcoin is better as a decentralized digital commodity without a founder. We are all Satoshi.”
