Satoshi Nakamoto lived in London when he invented Bitcoin, believe it or not?

The heroes are gone, only legends remain in the world!

After Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, left the community in April 2011, he left too many mysteries. But while he was working on Bitcoin, there are still plenty of clues to delve into his whereabouts. This research will be carried out from the following aspects:

Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcointalk account (539 available posts)

His 34 emails on the Cryptography and Bitcoin mailing list

His 169 project commits on SourceForge

About Genesis Block Information

The research focused on timestamps in Satoshi's Bitcointalk posts, SourceForge commits, and emails representing 742 instances of activity over 206 days (non-consecutive).

Using this data, the study compiled a scatterplot of activity in different suspect time zones. Suspicious locations are London, UK (GMT), East US (EST), Pacific US (PST), Japan (JST) and Australia (AEST). The last two probabilities are not high, but the first three prospects need further examination.

The Prime Minister of Vanuatu Approves the Satoshi Island Encryption Project: On March 25th, Vanuatu Prime Minister Bob Loughman has officially given the green light to the Satoshi Island encryption project in the country, and expressed that he is looking forward to seeing Satoshi Island further development. According to news yesterday, the number of NFT applications for free permanent residence on Satoshi Island has reached 50,000. It is reported that Nakamoto Island is a private island located in Vanuatu with an area of 32 million square feet. The final occupancy of Satoshi Nakamoto Island is limited to 21,000 people. In order to obtain permanent residency, in addition to holding NFT, you also need to obtain Vanuatu citizenship for US$130,000. The Nakamoto Island team stated that Nakamoto Island is scheduled to open in the fourth quarter of this year. It will become a gathering place for global encryption enthusiasts and will operate on the basis of DAO. (Cointelegraph)[2022/3/26 14:18:47]

1. Bitcointalk activities

Satoshi Nakamoto published a total of 539 posts on Bitcointalk, and these posts all have UTC timestamps to specify the time of publication. Since all the posts are in UTC, it was possible to scrape them and graph the different time zones' and three main suspicious spots were revealed.

Europe/London

Craig Wright's identity as "Satoshi Nakamoto" was questioned by Monero developers and others: According to news on June 20, Gavin Andersen, who has been serving as the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, confirmed in court that he had received Craig Wright ( Satoshi Aoben) applied for a job at the Bitcoin Foundation. In this regard, Monero developer Riccardo Spagni tweeted to question: "Why does Bitcoin creator Craig Wright need to seek a job at the Bitcoin Foundation?" (U.Today) [2020/6/20]

US/East

US/Pacific

At first glance, all three positions seem reasonable. In London, he was a night owl, working until the wee hours and sleeping until noon. On the East Coast of the United States, he worked until the end of the day and slept until the early hours of the morning. On the west coast of the US, he was an early bird, going to bed late at night but also waking up very early.

Voice | Jimmy Song: Personal belongings including hats were auctioned to Satoshi Nakamoto Research Institute at a price of 0.25 BTC: Bitcoin core developer Jimmy Song tweeted: The rumors are true, my hat was auctioned to The "vault" of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, and some other stuff, including my signed book, Saifedean (Economist Saifedean Ammous) book, Tone Vays hair, a BitBlockBoom shirt, and There is NVK's hardware wallet Coldcard v2. A total of 0.25 bitcoins were sold. I have to buy a new hat. [2019/8/17]

From this data alone, we cannot determine which time zone Satoshi lived in.

2. Project submission activities

In the early days of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto and the few developers who joined the project probably used local repositories without SVN. However, on August 30, 2009, the project was uploaded to SourceForge.

Satoshi made a total of 169 commits, and the timestamps of each commit still exist in UTC. Similar to what was done for the Bitcointalk post, this research plotted scatterplots and looked at when Satoshi Nakamoto was active-zce on SourceForge in three suspicious time zones.

Voice | Liu Changyong: Satoshi Ao Bencong said that he is Satoshi Nakamoto Some basic logic does not make sense: Liu Changyong, founder of Zhimi University, posted a Weibo summary of the simple logic that Satoshi Ao Ben is a liar, Satoshi Ao Ben (CSW) said I am Satoshi Nakamoto, some basic logic does not make sense: 1. Satoshi Nakamoto was afraid of his identity leaking and chose to retire after the WikiLeaks incident, CSW racked his brains to prove to the public that he is Satoshi Nakamoto; 2. CSW claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, However, he said that taking out early private key signatures is very dangerous, and convincing the public that he is Satoshi Nakamoto is as dangerous as publishing private key signatures; Government power, retiring is also worried about government harm, while CSW applies for patents, sues doubters, criticizes the spirit of cypherpunk, and claims that there are people in national security, more like government employees. If these logics are not explained clearly, no matter how many stories we make up and how much evidence we forge, we will not be able to fool sensible people. [2019/4/19]

Happy Father's Day to Satoshi Nakamoto from YouTube channel host: Crypto Bobby, YouTube channel host and digital currency analyst, posted a message - Happy Father's Day with @satoshi. Satoshi is the English name of Satoshi Nakamoto. [2018/6/17]

The submission chart is consistent with the Bitcointalk release chart. Although to be expected, this doesn't lead one to pinpoint one of the three suspicious locations.

3. E-mail campaign

After announcing the project on the cryptography mailing list on October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto continued to communicate with members of that mailing list who had become interested in Bitcoin and wanted to learn more.

In 34 emails on Satoshi Nakamoto's own crypto mailing list and the Bitcoin mailing list, he discussed the project's length, many people's attention to the double spend problem, and Bitcoin's workaround.

Due to the emails sent by Satoshi Nakamoto to some people, it is impossible to verify whether their timestamps are in UTC format. Therefore, this study only uses encryption and data from the Bitcoin mailing list.

Again, only confirming the models we've already built. Email graphs still don't allow one to pinpoint one of the three suspicious locations. Now let's combine all timestamps and see what we get.

4. Summary of all activities

Combining all 539 Bitcointalk post-launch timestamps with 169 commit timestamps and 34 email timestamps provides a better understanding of Satoshi’s activity patterns.

Have you noticed that the Europe/London overlap is higher? But it's too early to say for sure. By the way, this is a good time to quickly rule out Japan and Australia.

Asia/Tokyo

Obviously, Japan is out of the question. Although the chart itself greatly reduces the plausibility of Satoshi working on Bitcoin in Tokyo.

Australia/Sydney

Unless Satoshi Nakamoto is a vampire, it is impossible to work completely from midnight to morning.

All in all, Satoshi’s activities on Bitcointalk and SourceForge, as well as his emails, set a clear pattern. All the charts above clearly identify the three most likely time zones - London Time (GMT), US Eastern Time (ET) and US Pacific Time (PT).

5. "Chancellor to offer second bailout to banks"

The Times reported on January 3, 2009 that a second bank bailout was imminent. The key detail was the headline "Chancellor to deliver second bailout to banks".

The Times is not distributed in the United States. Therefore, the original headline of the news is unlikely to appear in the American newspapers on January 3, 2009. What can be found so far are articles with slightly the same title-zce as the original article.

This makes it unlikely that Satoshi Nakamoto read the article on a US-based website. Because if he did, then he would likely include the exact title-zce in the genesis block, not the one from The Times.

At this point, this research suggests that Satoshi likely lived in London while working on Bitcoin.

In addition, data from the 2008 National Readership Survey showed that of the 1.8 million readers of The Times' print edition that year, 770,000 (43%) were from London. Combining the data provided above and London being one of the largest financial centers in the world, it is very likely that Satoshi Nakamoto lived in London from 2008 to 2010.

6. Genesis block data

Due to the timestamp of the genesis block, the conversion is January 3, 2009 18:15:05 UTC. It is highly unlikely that Satoshi Nakamoto saw the Times article about the Chancellor published a few days later and then went back and set the Genesis timestamp to a random hour from January 3, 2009 of.

Finally, what if the title-zce of the article on the Times website was later changed to include the Chancellor’s name, but initially it didn’t, and it was the same title-zce as the genesis block?

This is impossible, as the title-zce of the Times article was found citing the January 3, 2009 post, and is still found.

Conclusion

While it’s not entirely certain where Satoshi Nakamoto lived while working on Bitcoin, it’s safe to say he was based in London. Taken together, the style of his writing, the manner of his activities, and the thematic message of Genesis, flagrantly point to the English capital as the most likely candidate.

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