Origins — before Bitcoin, and who is Satoshi?

Bitcoin did not appear from nothing. Decades of ideas led to it, and the people who built those ideas are the same circle some believe Satoshi came from.

The long history of encryption

Bitcoin is built on cryptography — the art of secret writing. That art is about 4,000 years old. Bitcoin's hashing (SHA-256) and public-key signatures are simply the latest chapter.

Not to scale — points are spaced evenly for readability, not by true time gaps (most of the progress is actually crammed into the last ~100 years). The two dashed markers are time references, not cryptography events. Creation dates are religious tradition (Ussher's calculation ~4004 BC; the Hebrew calendar counts from ~3761 BC) — shown only as familiar anchors. Fittingly, Bitcoin's very first block is itself called the genesis block.

And here is the same history to scale — notice how almost everything happens in the final sliver near the bottom:

To scale: ~4000 BC at top to 2009 at the arrow. The modern breakthroughs (Enigma, public-key, Bitcoin) are so recent they almost touch — labelled to the side so they stay readable. The whole story of secret writing is old; nearly all of the working machinery is brand new.

From shaved heads to SHA-256

~1900 BC — the earliest known cryptography: non-standard hieroglyphs in Old Kingdom Egypt.
~650 BC — the Spartan scytale, a transposition cipher using a wooden rod; ~100 BC — Julius Caesar's substitution cipher (shift each letter).
~400 BC — the first recorded steganography: Herodotus describes a message tattooed on a shaved head, hidden once the hair grew back. (We teach modern steganography in the Crash Courses.)
15th–16th century — Alberti and Vigenère invent polyalphabetic ciphers, far harder to break.
1918–1945 — the Enigma machine; in WWII Alan Turing and Allied codebreakers crack it — a foundation of modern computing.
1970s — the breakthrough Bitcoin rests on: public-key cryptography (Diffie–Hellman 1976, RSA 1976/77 — secretly invented earlier at GCHQ by Cocks in 1973). For the first time, you could prove ownership and sign messages without sharing a secret.
2009 — Bitcoin combines SHA-256 hashing and public-key signatures into money. The 4,000-year story of secret writing becomes a way to own value no one can forge.

Watch: cryptography on film

Station X (1999) — documentary series on the Bletchley Park codebreakers. where to watch
Enigma (2001) — a Bletchley Park codebreaking thriller. where to watch
A Beautiful Mind (2001) — mathematician John Nash takes on secret cryptography work; Oscar Best Picture. Netflix · where to watch
Codebreaker (2011) — docudrama on Turing's life and work. where to watch
The Imitation Game (2014) — Alan Turing and the team that broke Enigma. Netflix · where to watch

The Cypherpunks — where it all came from

In 1992, Eric Hughes (mathematician), Timothy C. May (former Intel scientist) and John Gilmore (computer scientist) gathered cryptographers and privacy activists in the San Francisco Bay area. The name "cypherpunks" — a play on "cyberpunk" — stuck.
They started the Cypherpunks mailing list in 1992 (~700 members by 1994, ~2,000 by 1997) — one of the most fertile spaces of the early internet, where digital cash and pseudonymous transactions were first debated.
In 1993 Hughes published "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto": "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age … We cannot expect governments or corporations to grant us privacy … We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. Cypherpunks write code."
The key part: Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney and Adam Back were all part of this world. Satoshi posted the Bitcoin whitepaper to a cryptography mailing list in exactly this tradition.
That ethos — defend your own privacy, hold your own keys, trust code not institutions — is the same spirit behind Bitcoin and behind BITMI.

The pre-2009 ideas (the ancestors)

1983 — David Chaum, the "godfather of cryptocurrency", proposed eCash / anonymous electronic money, and launched DigiCash in 1989. It never reached wide adoption.
Hashcash — Adam Back: introduced proof-of-work, the same mechanism Bitcoin later uses to secure its network.
1998 — b-money (Wei Dai) and bit gold (Nick Szabo): the first real proposals for decentralized cryptographic money. Both are intellectual parents of Bitcoin; neither solved the double-spend problem.
Reusable Proof of Work (RPOW) — Hal Finney: built on hashcash; Finney later received the very first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi.
b-money and hashcash are both referenced in the Bitcoin whitepaper itself.
1999 — Milton Friedman (Nobel-winning economist) predicted it in words: that the internet's missing piece, coming soon, was "a reliable e-cash — a way to transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A." He died in 2006, before Bitcoin launched.

David Chaum

1983

eCash / DigiCash — anonymous e-money

Timothy C. May

1988

Crypto Anarchist Manifesto; ex-Intel

Eric Hughes

1992

founded Cypherpunks; wrote the Manifesto

John Gilmore

1992

co-founder; EFF; privacy activist

Adam Back

1997

hashcash — proof-of-work

Wei Dai

1998

b-money proposal

Nick Szabo

1998

bit gold — "inches from Bitcoin"

Milton Friedman

1999

economist — predicted internet e-cash

Len Sassaman

1999

cypherpunk; Mixmaster remailer, PGP; studied under Chaum

Hal Finney

2004

RPOW; received the first BTC (2009)

Satoshi Nakamoto

2008–09

pseudonym — identity unknown

Peter Todd

2012

Bitcoin Core dev (first code 2012, RBF 2014); accused by a 2024 film of being Satoshi — he denies it

Who is Satoshi? (the suspects)

Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym — anonymous, text only. There is no real footage of Satoshi; any clip claiming otherwise is speculation.
The names the community debates are mostly this cypherpunk circle: Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Adam Back, Wei Dai — none confirmed.
The 2024 HBO film "Money Electric" argues, on circumstantial evidence, that developer Peter Todd could be Satoshi. Todd denies it.
Worth noting: Todd's first provable Bitcoin work is a 2012 Bitcoin Core code commit (his first major protocol feature, replace-by-fee, came in 2014). He says he talked with cypherpunks as a teenager, but that is not provable. The fact that his verifiable activity starts years after Bitcoin launched is exactly why most analysts argue he is not Satoshi — Satoshi was active in 2008–09.
Another name often raised is Len Sassaman (1980–2011) — a deep cypherpunk, maintainer of the Mixmaster remailer, PGP contributor, and a researcher who studied under David Chaum. He was proposed as a Satoshi candidate (2021), and a tribute to him is permanently embedded in Bitcoin's blockchain. He died in 2011, around the time Satoshi went quiet. Still speculation, not proof.
Many Bitcoiners see Satoshi staying unknown as a strength: no leader to pressure, bribe, or arrest.
A Satoshi insight worth keeping (Dec 2009): lost coins can never be recovered, so they shrink the effective supply — which makes everyone else's coins worth slightly more. As Satoshi put it, it is "the opposite of when a government prints money" and the value of existing money goes down.
Bitcoin v0.1 released (16 Jan 2009): in the release announcement on the cryptography mailing list, Satoshi laid out the vision — that electronic currency would be in use within about a decade, starting in small niches (micropayments, reward points) and growing as more people came to value it. In his words, once enough people believe in it, that becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

The earliest timeline

18 Aug 2008 — bitcoin.org domain registered.

Who registered bitcoin.org?

On 18 August 2008, the domain bitcoin.org was registered — presumably by Satoshi Nakamoto — using AnonymousSpeech, a service that lets you buy domains anonymously. It is still unknown how Satoshi paid for it without leaving a trace.

So how was it paid? Nobody knows for certain — and this is exactly the trail that could have unmasked him. AnonymousSpeech (run by Michael Weber, a Swiss citizen then living in Japan) accepted cash by mail, MoneyGram, PayPal, or a Swiss bank transfer. Since Bitcoin did not exist yet, Satoshi had to use one of these old-school methods. The most likely choice for staying invisible was cash sent by mail or an anonymous money transfer — leaving no identity behind. The only person who could ever reveal the payment is Weber, and it is very unlikely he kept 2008 records for an anonymity service. A textbook example of Satoshi's operational security.

Who was Michael Weber? A Swiss citizen who ran AnonymousSpeech and Vistomail — privacy-focused email and domain services. He lived in Japan in 2008 and later moved to Mexico. His service promised not to respond to government or private inquiries about subscribers, and even carried legal-protection insurance; it later started accepting Bitcoin in 2013. His name comes up in the Satoshi hunt because Satoshi used his services (Vistomail / GMX email, the bitcoin.org domain). But he is almost certainly not Satoshi: early developer Martti Malmi said Weber had no involvement in Bitcoin beyond being the contact for the domain-registry service. He is the privacy operator Satoshi used — not the man himself.

The deeper dig. Business Insider investigated Weber: a software developer, apparently in his early 30s then, into fitness and a certain look — with a documented past interest in anonymous online banking. An archived 2007 description said AnonymousSpeech "specialises in international law and IT security consulting" and was based in Tokyo. Notably, in 2007 the service advertised payment by bank transfer to a Swiss bank account — one more Swiss thread in the story. Weber never responded to BI's requests for comment (sent to his email and phone numbers in Japan and Mexico).

The 2011 handover. In late 2011 the bitcoin.org registration was moved from AnonymousSpeech to a Finnish company, Louhi Networks Oy. Martti Malmi (who works in Finland, and had denied being Satoshi) confirmed the domain was transferred to him — and called it the "first time (in 2011) I was in contact with Satoshi." The whole point of Weber's business was that he would not know who his clients were, which is exactly why the trail goes cold.

Where is Weber now? Not publicly known. He was originally Swiss, lived in Japan around 2008, and was last linked to Mexico (as of the mid-2010s investigations). He never responded to journalists' attempts to reach him, and there is no reliable recent public record of his current location — fitting for someone who built and ran an anonymity business. Anything claiming to know exactly where he is today is speculation.

Why two different names on the domain? Over time bitcoin.org carried two very different "owners", and it confuses people:

• 2008–2011 — AnonymousSpeech LLC (Weber's service). This was never Satoshi's name — it was the privacy cloak. The registrar's name sat on the record so Satoshi's real identity stayed hidden behind it.

• 2011 onward — Martti Malmi ("Sirius"). A real, known early developer who took the domain over in 2011 (via the Finnish company Louhi Networks). The bitcoin.org site once claimed Sirius co-registered it back in 2008, but Malmi says he wasn't involved with Bitcoin until 2009 and only first contacted Satoshi in 2011 — so the "co-registered in 2008" version is disputed.

What was the tactic? When Satoshi stepped away in 2011 he deliberately handed bitcoin.org to several other people rather than keeping it. The point: no single person — not even Satoshi — should control it. If one owner held the domain, a government, court, or attacker could pressure that one person to seize, redirect, or shut it down. By spreading control, there is no single point of failure to attack. It is the exact same idea as Bitcoin itself: decentralise control so the network cannot be captured or switched off. The disappearance of Satoshi serves the same purpose — no leader to arrest, bribe, or coerce.

Where the idea comes from. The "no single point of failure" principle is not new. It has three well-documented roots: military network design (the 1960s–70s ARPANET was built to keep working even if parts were knocked out); intelligence and security practice (organising in independent cells so capturing one part does not expose the whole); and computer-security engineering (redundancy and distribution so a system survives the loss of any one component). The cypherpunks, who came from the cryptography and security world, applied the same principle to money in Bitcoin.

The WHOIS record listed the registrant as "AnonymousSpeech LLC" at a Tokyo, Japan address — the "Japanese connection" that puzzled investigators for years (though it was just the anonymizing service's address, not necessarily Satoshi's).

Some accounts say it was co-registered with Martti Malmi ("Sirius"), an early developer — but Sirius says he wasn't involved with Bitcoin until 2009, so that part is disputed.

A curious extra: the day before, on 17 Aug 2008, the same anonymous service was used to register netcoin.org — Bitcoin could have had a different name.

When Satoshi left in April 2011, ownership of the domain was transferred to several other people — deliberately spreading control so no single person or organisation could take over or speak for Bitcoin.
31 Oct 2008 — the whitepaper posted to a cryptography mailing list.
3 Jan 2009 — the genesis block is mined (with a headline about bank bailouts embedded in it).
12 Jan 2009 — first transaction: Satoshi sends 10 BTC to Hal Finney.
22 May 2010 — "Bitcoin Pizza Day": 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, the first real-world purchase.
Dec 2010 — Satoshi's last public forum post; April 2011 — his final known email, then he vanishes.
Real news coverage only began around 2011, once BTC crossed $1 and the first bubble hit.

Watch the related film on the Films page: "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery".

Why Bitcoin exists — the macro backdrop

US debt and gold over time, with the crisis events and Bitcoin's inventors marked. As debt climbs, hard assets (gold — and the Bitcoin thesis) climb with it.

The numbers behind it

1971 — the dollar leaves the gold standard; becomes pure fiat.
2001 (9/11) — debt ~$5.8T; gold ~$270. Debt has risen every single year since.
2008 (financial crisis + Bitcoin whitepaper, Oct 31) — debt ~$10T; gold ~$870. The bank bailouts are the backdrop Satoshi wrote against.
2009 — genesis block; debt ~$11.9T; gold ~$974.
2013 — US debt crosses 100% of GDP; Bitcoin first tops $1,000; gold ~$1,410.
2020 (COVID) — the largest one-year debt jump ever (+$4.2T); gold ~$1,774 (+24% that year).
2025-26 — debt ~$37-39T, heading toward $40T; gold ~$4,500. Debt-to-GDP ~123%, up from under 60% in 2000.
Since 2008 the correlation between US debt and the gold price is about 83% — hard assets rise as the dollar's debt load grows. That is the case Bitcoin makes for itself.
Market crashes along the way: Black Monday (1987), the dotcom crash (2000), the 2008 crisis, the COVID crash (2020), and the 2022 bear market. Each downturn was met with more money printing and more debt.
Bitcoin's own crashes (it is volatile): 2011, 2014 (Mt. Gox), 2018, and 2022 (FTX). It has recovered to new highs after each so far — but past recoveries are not a guarantee.

The money supply — Fed data (M2)

M2 is the Fed's count of how many dollars exist. It crept up for 60 years — then exploded during COVID. This is "inflating the supply" in one picture.

Read that again

It took from 1959 to 2000 to create the first ~$5 trillion.
Roughly $7 trillion was added in just two years during COVID (2020–2022).
In spring 2020, M2 grew 3.4%, 6.3%, then 4.9% in single months — before 2020 the monthly change was almost always under 2%.
M2 is now at its highest ever, over $22.5 trillion.
More dollars chasing the same goods is what erodes your purchasing power. A money with a fixed 21-million cap cannot be inflated this way — that is Bitcoin's core pitch.

Priced in gold, the picture is even starker — measured in ounces, the dollar has lost enormous purchasing power since 1971. Bitcoin, with its fixed 21-million cap, is the digital version of that "hard money" argument.

What inflation quietly does to savings

An illustration at a steady 2% inflation — the official "low" target. Cash sitting still loses real value every year, even when the number on the account doesn't change.

Years	Real value of $100,000 (at 2%/yr)
Year 0	$100,000
Year 1	$98,000
Year 2	$96,040
Year 10	~$81,700
Year 25	~$60,300
Year 48 (a working life)	~$37,900

Illustrative, 2% per year. Over a working life, money left in cash can lose well over half its purchasing power — and real-world inflation is often higher than 2%. This is the quiet cost a fixed-supply money is meant to answer.

It gets worse: the interest on a "safe" savings account is usually lower than inflation, so your real value still falls — and that interest is normally taxed on top (income tax in the US, 20–45% bands in the UK, ~25% withholding in Germany). So a saver can lose to inflation and pay tax on the small gain at the same time.