The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has given an intriguing response to an inquiry about the elusive creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The query, prompted by an investigative journalist’s Freedom of Information Act application, returned a standard non-definitive response. The FBI neither confirmed nor denied the existence of records on Nakamoto, alluding to the enigmatic figure as a ‘third-party individual’.
The FBI’s tentative response has stirred further speculation about the true identity behind Nakamoto. Various theories suggest that Nakamoto could either be a single person or a group that masterminded the inception of the original cryptocurrency. Despite numerous speculations and investigations, no conclusions have been reached regarding Nakamoto’s identity to date. One person of interest, however, has been the early Bitcoin stakeholder Hal Finney, who passed away in 2014.
The lack of clarity surrounding Nakamoto’s personage, namely regarding Finney’s possible connection, leaves much room for interpretation, with some pointing out that if the FBI deemed Finney as Nakamoto, his records should be open for disclosure.
In a related development, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright, who famously claimed to be Nakamoto, might face perjury charges in a UK court owing to his assertions. Wright, after close to a decade of insisting that he is Nakamoto, recently issued a legal disclaimer on his website dismissing these claims.
Only scant information is available about the enigmatic Nakamoto. According to a profile on a peer-to-peer networking platform, Nakamoto was born on April 5, 1975. The last known interaction of Nakamoto with Bitcoin developers occurred in 2011 when he indicated that he had “moved on to other things”.