A new take on an old investigation potentially sheds light on the whereabouts of Satoshi Nakamoto — at least while he was working on Bitcoin.
A new report has determined that London was the most likely place Satoshi Nakamoto worked on Bitcoin between 2008 and 2010.
Report author Doncho Karaivanov reviewed several factors in order to justify the conclusion, including an analysis of timestamps of Satoshi’s published materials, his use of regional colloquialisms and word spellings, and the fact that The Times headline embedded in the genesis block was specific to England’s print version of the periodical.
The idea that Satoshi was British is not new as hundreds of journalists, sleuths and investigators have thoroughly poured over traces of the Bitcoin creator’s activity and scoured the internet for clues leading to his origins.
But this latest report in The Chain Bulletin includes additional information to previous analyses, such as highlighting the probability that Satoshi must have been referring to the print edition of The Times when coding the now-famous headline from Jan. 3 2009 into Bitcoin’s genesis block.
That’s because only the print edition of The Times distributed in England used the headline, “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” whereas the online edition included the chancellor’s name in the headline. The U.S. edition of the paper did not contain the story at all. Karaivanov analyzed readership data that shows roughly 43% of The Times’ readership is located in London, and when “coupled with London being the largest financial hub in the world, this data makes it highly probable that Satoshi lived in London in the period between 2008 and 2010.”
Karaivanov’s analysis of time-stamped materials posted by Satoshi — including posts on Bitcointalk, emails sent to Bitcoin’s early developers, and commits made to the Bitcoin repository on SourceForge — lends additional evidence that Satoshi may have resided in the GMT (U.K.) time zone. However he acknowledges that Satoshi’s pattern of posting could also reflect somebody who resided in the EST (U.S. east coast) or PST (U.S. west coast) time zones.
Among the time zones ruled out completely were those encompassing Japan, where Satoshi claimed to have been from according to his P2P Foundation profile, and Australia, which Karaivanov says was “not even remotely possible” unless Satoshi was “a vampire.”
The finding that Satoshi probably lived in London between the years of 2008 and 2010 was not revelatory information to some Reddit users with one commenting, “In other breaking news, Santa Claus may have lived in the North Pole while working on toys for young children.”
Additionally, not everybody in the Bitcoin industry is keen to uncover the origins or identity of Satoshi. In August, Blockstream CEO Adam Back told Cointelegraph it would be unwise for Satoshi to publicly reveal himself. Blockstream holds the position that Satoshi’s identity should not be speculated upon as the activity runs “counter to cypherpunk ideals.”
