Is Jack Dorsey the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto? The debate rages on

The biggest open question in the cryptocurrency industry – Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? – Still unanswered. That didn’t stop people from guessing.

The latest to float the idea that Block (XYZ) president and cryptocurrency enthusiast Jack Dorsey could be the creator of the pseudonymous Bitcoin network were Baird analysts, who raised the question again this week. At Block’s Investor Day earlier this month, Seaport Research analyst Jeff Cantwell asked Dorsey directly.

The CEO replied ambiguously. “The most beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that this question no longer matters at all,” he said. (This is debatable, if for no other reason than that Satoshi Nakamoto is known to be extremely wealthy through his Bitcoin holdings.) Investopedia A request for comment, sent via Block, in time for publication on Tuesday.

Dorsey, founder of Block, might not be a wild guess. Dorsey has a penchant for wearing Nirvana-inspired Satoshi T-shirts, and his company was one of the first to integrate bitcoin into its payment services. He likely did not explicitly say he was not Satoshi at the investor event, which made some feel more certain that he was.

If you like connecting the dots, there are Dorsey-related dots you can connect. He is said to have the requisite technical ability – the ability to write code in Bitcoin’s core software language. An early Bitcoin wallet address contains a sequence that some believe refers to its name and former address. Satoshi’s first post on the BitcoinTalk forum was on November 19, Dorsey’s birthday. Certainly these are only a few.

Sean Murray, Editor-in-Chief of Industry Magazine Deprived of bankswas among the first to publicly posit that Dorsey was Satoshi; In early 2024, he said that his “mind had not changed.” “(An explicit denial) would have been appropriate if the answer to the question was in fact ‘no,'” Murray said. Investopedia In response to a question about Dorsey’s response to a Seaport analyst.)

Murray’s arguments have convinced some. Matt Siegel, head of digital assets at VanEck, earlier this year published a 30-page slide deck titled “Jack Dorsey = Satoshi Nakamoto.” He said Dorsey — if he is the creator — could address Bitcoin users’ concerns that Satoshi might sell their stash of 1.1 million coins, removing from the table a potentially destabilizing issue for the market.

Dorsey isn’t the only one being seen as a potential answer to a baffling mystery. At Polymarket, you can currently bet long odds on the possibility that Donald Trump will be President. Several other people sometimes thought to be Satoshi — including Dorian Nakamoto, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Peter Todd, and Elon Musk — have denied it.

Dorsey also said “no” in response to direct inquiries about being Satoshi, although in a 2020 interview he denied being Satoshi and said “If I were, would I tell you?”