Virus software mogul John McAfee thinks he’s figured out who Satoshi Nakamoto is, but he’s not telling a soul.
McAfee: I Know Who Built BTC
Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym given to the person who allegedly designed bitcoin and wrote its whitepaper back in 2008. The currency came about during the time of the Great Recession and was designed to alleviate some of the heavy economic strife the world was seeing at the time. Bitcoin would potentially put financial power back in the hands of the people and relieve them of their reliance on banks and third-party financial institutions.
McAfee has never been one to shy away from the media with controversial reports. The man is now living in Cuba where he’s looking to avoid U.S. tax authorities. McAfee has not paid income tax, for example, in several years, believing that its collection is an illegal practice the country has long gotten away with simply because people have proven too complacent. In addition, he has stated that he would run for U.S. president while living abroad.
Now, he says he’s about 99 percent sure he knows the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. While he’s not giving details, he’s confident Satoshi is more than one person. In an interview, he states:
It was a team of 11 people over a period of five years that came up, eventually, with [bitcoin]. How they decided who would write the paper, I don’t know. But anybody who wants to know who it is – I mean, you know who the options are. You’ve got Craig Wright possibly. I’m not going to name everyone else. Otherwise, you’ll figure out who it is, but somebody wrote the whitepaper.
McAfee pointed to various language points in the paper that suggest Craig Wright or someone like him may have been involved in the creation of BTC. He says that the paper uses British English over American English, and consistently used “two spaces after a period.”
Too Many Similarities
He explains:
The format of the document was identical to documents that [Satoshi Nakamoto] had published professionally. If you buy a two hundred-dollar authorship program, and you take the whitepaper and you run it through, and you take any one of the papers that he’s published – all of these people wrote papers by the way – only one comes out with 99 percent probability that it’s him.
McAfee claims that he’s spoken with one of the men behind the creation of bitcoin on the telephone. He was originally going to dispel who the person’s identity was, though he says this figure convinced him that he should remain quiet. Naturally, McAfee should expect some flack from bitcoin fans, some who will likely claim he has no idea who the person is, and that he’s simply trying to gain publicity for himself.