Even as it has grown into a new type of digital money worth billions of dollars, Bitcoin has always retained an air of mystery. Central to its cachet has been the mythic status of the system’s creator. Its developer went by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, but that is all that Bitcoin’s adopters seemed to know — or wanted to know. After all, Bitcoin was a project dedicated in part to making it easier to avoid the all-seeing gaze of the government and corporate America.
Five years after Bitcoin’s creation, its elusive founder is now Newsweek’s latest cover star. Press outlets and members of the Bitcoin community have long speculated that “Satoshi Nakamoto” was a pseudonym for — according to various claims over time — certain noted economists, cryptographists and mathematicians across the globe, or even a consortium of inventors. But in the cover story of its first printed issue since 2012, under its new owner IBT Media,Newsweek alleges that Satoshi Nakamoto is the actual name of the currency’s 64-year-old, Japanese-American architect.
