The hunt for the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto continues to this day, as new data-driven research was recently deployed to determine the location of the creator while he / she was working on the network. Researchers analyzed Satoshi’s 539 Bitcointalk posts, 34 emails, 169 code commits, metadata for all versions of Bitcoin he worked on, genesis block data, and archived Wayback Machine data.
Report suggests Satoshi Nakamoto lived in London when Bitcoin was created
To this day, the world still has no idea who Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the first Bitcoin cryptocurrency network, is. Most recently, research from The Chain Bulletin published an op-ed that attempts to focus on Satoshi Nakamoto’s location when creating the world’s first blockchain.
On November 23, 2020, author Doncho Karaivanov explains that researchers combed through “Satoshi’s Bitcointalk messages, Sourceforge validations and emails, along with other available data.” According to the research, the data points to “the most likely place the anonymous Bitcoin inventor called home – London.”
Karaivanov says the research is data-driven and relies on time stamps that span approximately “742 instances of activity of 206 days (non-consecutive).” Time-stamped documentation began on Halloween on October 31, 2008, and statistics end on December 13, 2010, which was the last time the community heard of Satoshi. Researchers compiled scatter charts based on suspected time zones in order to see when the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin was awake and active.
“Common suspicious sites are the United Kingdom (GMT), the Eastern United States (EST), the United States Pacific (PST), Japan (JST) and Australia (AEST)”, details Karaivanov’s study. “The last two were easy to demystify, but the first three prospects needed further consideration.”
During Satoshi’s online activity, the researchers also note that Nakamoto posted a total of 539 times on the bitcointalk.org site’s forum. “Looking at these data alone, we cannot determine beyond a reasonable doubt what time zone Satoshi lived in,” Karaivanov’s report stresses.
On Sourceforge, a code repository web portal where Bitcoin code was once stored, Satoshi deployed 169 commits during this time. Again, the researchers used scatter plots based on specific time zones to analyze the validation activity of Satoshi, which has evidence timestamps in UTC.
Likewise, the validation graphics, just like the Bitcointalk post graphics, are consistent, and Karaivanov notes that they don’t leave any guns in any of the plausible regions. Next, the researchers mapped out most of Satoshi’s messaging activity, which alone left no hard evidence. However, by merging all the data from Bitcointalk’s posts, commits, and emails, the data begins to infer that Satoshi’s original location was neither in Japan nor Australia.
Bitcoin’s Genesis block: “ Chancellor on the verge of second bank bailout ”
The biggest clue that Satoshi was originally from London was in the original Genesis Block post from The Times of London issue of January 3, 2009.
According to the researchers, they deduce that Nakamoto could not have seen the headline of The Times of London, if the inventor was located in the United States. “This exact issue of The Times did not circulate in the United States,” Karaivanov wrote.
Karaivanov says it would be “extremely unlikely” for the front page of the US edition to be formatted in the same way, as it would be entirely different from the headline of The Times of London in the UK. Also, the diary had an online version of the story, but the headline was written in a completely different way. This online article read: “Chancellor Alistair Darling is on the brink of second bank bailout.”
The data from the genesis block tip the balance “strongly in favor of the GMT time zone,” insists the author. “This is without mentioning all the clues that indicate Satoshi is British, such as his end spelling with -ise instead of -ize and -our instead of -or, eg analyze, organize, neighbor, color, etc. . “, Karaivanov study concludes. “Then there’s his use of the word bloody. Specifically, we not only believe he is British, but also lived in London while working on Bitcoin.
Karaivanov also concedes, saying that it is impossible to say with “absolute certainty” that London was the exact location. “However, we can say, with reasonable confidence, that it was located in London,” added the researcher.
2011 and 2018 Satoshi Time Zone Studies
Karaivanov’s research is not the first time that Satoshi clues have been discovered by searching for specific time zones in relation to Nakamoto’s known online activity. In February 2018, another data-driven research study called “Satoshi Nakamoto’s Time Zones” also attempted to uncover Nakamoto’s location during the creation of Bitcoin.
For example, the report highlights a first draft of the Bitcoin paper and the paper’s online metadata. Along with this, they looked at the metadata related to bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf that Nakamoto also created. The combination of the two timestamp values indicates that the computer used by Satoshi to do these things online has been set to “Mountain Time Zone” in the United States.
But the 2018 article on Satoshi’s time zones is a little less conclusive, as multiple timestamps show that Satoshi could have been located in a myriad of regions. For example, the 2018 study also shows that Satoshi’s engagements indicate that his computer used “British Summer Time” time stamps.
The journal “Satoshi Nakamoto’s Time Zones” also highlights an analysis of Nakamoto’s time activity that was published in 2011. This specific research from 2011 concludes that Satoshi must have lived in an EST time zone in the United States. . The 2018 survey alludes to circumstantial evidence that Satoshi was a “night owl” and regularly spent all night online. Most of Nakamoto’s sleepless nights took place during “summer 2010 and February”.
Satoshi’s All Nighters and Cramming to Get Full Bitcoin
One of the most compelling research findings of 2018 suggests that Satoshi rushed to the end of his task, after taking a brief period of time off from the Bitcoin project. The results show that Nakamoto invested little or no activity in anything Bitcoin related during the months of March, April and May 2010. Then all of a sudden in the summer of 2010 there was a huge explosion. of online activity from the creator of Bitcoin.
“This is the behavior of someone who, at the end of February, found himself with a tedious task to accomplish before the end of May and who then had virtually unlimited free time, including including the latitude to work until the wee hours of the night, until the following October ”, concluded on February 13, 2018 the armchair detective nicknamed“ In search of Satoshi ”.
The latest research from 2020 suggesting Satoshi lived in London and research from 2018 shows the evidence looms larger towards a UK based home. In Karaivanov’s opinion and his team’s research, London certainly holds the highest probability.
“Taken together, his writing style, his business model and the Genesis block message blatantly points to the capital of England as the most likely candidate,” Karaivanov’s results infer.
Meanwhile, a number of cryptocurrency advocates have discussed Karaivanov’s time zone study and questioned the reliability of its findings. For example, Jorge Stolfi, a computer science professor commented on the theory after the study was posted on the Reddit r / btc forum.
Stolfi said that “the ‘London’ hypothesis implies that he worked on Bitcoin directly from 5:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. without dinner. The “United States / East” hypothesis would imply that he started working there at noon and had dinner after around 10:00 pm. The “US / Western” hypothesis would imply that he worked all day from around 8:00 am to 8:00 pm and hardly worked after dinner. “
Stolfi added:
While all of this is possible, this data would on the contrary confirm that he was in the United States, probably in the western part during this period – according to PDF metadata.
What do you think of the study which assumes Satoshi lived in London when Bitcoin was created? Let us know what you think of this enigmatic topic in the comments section below.
Image credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, The Chain Bulletin Satoshi study, “Satoshi Nakamoto’s time zones” study,
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