Could He Be the Elusive Satoshi Nakamoto?

The crypto industry’s biggest open question—who is Satoshi Nakamoto?—remains unanswered. That hasn’t stopped people from guessing.

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

The CEO responded cryptically. “The most beautiful thing about bitcoin is that question does not matter at all anymore,” he said. (That’s debatable, if for no other reason than that Satoshi Nakamoto is understood to be vastly wealthy through their bitcoin holdings.) He did not respond to Investopedia’s request for comment, sent through Block.

Dorsey, the founder of Block, is perhaps not a wild guess. Dorsey has a penchant for wearing Nirvana-inspired Satoshi t-shirts, and his company was an early integrator of bitcoin into its payments services. That he did not explicitly say that he wasn’t Satoshi at the investor event likely made some feel more certain that he is.

If you like connecting dots, there are Dorsey-related ones to connect. He is said to have the requisite technical ability—the ability to write code in the language of Bitcoin’s core software. An early bitcoin wallet address contains a sequence some think points to his name and former address. The first Satoshi post on the BitcoinTalk forum was on Nov. 19, Dorsey’s birthday. Those, to be sure, are just a few.

Sean Murray, editor-in-chief of industry publication Debanked, is among the first to publicly theorize that Dorsey was Satoshi; in early 2024, he said that his “mind has not changed.” (“An explicit denial would have been appropriate if the answer to the question was in fact ‘no’,” Murray told Investopedia in response to question about Dorsey’s response to the Seaport analyst.)

Murray’s arguments have convinced some. VanEck head of digital assets Matt Sigel earlier this year published a 30-page slide deck titled “Jack Dorsey = Satoshi Nakamoto.” He said that Dorsey—if he were the creator—could address bitcoiners’ fear that Satoshi might sell the 1.1 million stockpile of coins they own, removing a potentially market-destabilizing issue from the table.

Dorsey is hardly the only person seen as a possible answer to a tantalizing mystery. On Polymarket, you can currently take long-shot odds on the chance it’s President Donald Trump. Several other people at times thought to be Satoshi—including Dorian Nakamoto, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Peter Todd and Elon Musk—have denied it.

Dorsey has also said “no” in response to direct queries about his being Satoshi, though in a 2020 interview, he both denied being Satoshi and said, “If I were, would I tell you?”