The post Celebrating Dorian Nakamoto, the Satoshi who wasn’t appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.  Bitcoin doesn’t have an official mascot.  Still, for at least a few years, Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto was the closest thing Bitcoin had to a spirit animal — an unassuming everyman who became symbolic of Bitcoin’s power to change the world from humble beginnings. Newsweek started it on March 6, 2014 with “The Face Behind Bitcoin,” in which journalist Leah McGrath Goodman detailed a months-long investigation into potential candidates. But the article hinged on a misunderstanding. Earlier attempts considered the Nakamoto name a pseudonym. Goodman instead searched for Satoshis hiding in plain sight. Goodman found a number of people named Satoshi Nakamoto, dead and alive: “A Ralph Lauren menswear designer in New York and another who died in Honolulu in 2008, according to the Social Security Index’s Death Master File,” Goodman wrote.  Amazingly, tweets like these are still online. Goodman eventually stumbled across a Satoshi in a database for naturalized US citizens. Dorian’s profile matched the background of someone who might’ve created Bitcoin: a brilliant, “obsessively private” physicist and engineer who boasted a keen interest in politics alongside a deep distrust of banks and government constructs. Dorian, a Japan-born descendent of Samurai on his mother’s side and the son of a priest on his father’s side, hadn’t used his Satoshi birth name for 40 years, having legally changed it at the age of 23. He’d signed his name “Dorian S. Nakamoto” ever since. When Goodman approached Dorian outside his home in southern California — after emails between the two had gone dark — he soon called the police. That Temple City home, by coincidence, was situated a few blocks away from Hal Finney’s. A perfect storm Dorian spent much of his career working on classified projects…

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Filed under: News - @ March 7, 2025 5:26 pm