Maybe the reason that no one can find Satoshi is because he is not a real person, nor has he ever existed.

Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym borne in Santa Barbara California in about 2008. This was meant to protect software developers from a legal backlash being experienced by others who had tried to test the boundaries of the monetary system, such as the eGold creators.

Who get’s credit for Bitcoin, how much and why?

I am just a man who lived in Santa Barbara at the time, had some measure of experience in database software and who was working on some ideas which may have fallen into the mix.

The CypherPunks

Without the CypherPunks Bitcoin would have had no early support and was a key ingredient in the Bitcoin success recipe.

Hal Finney was the main author and chef for the Bitcoin software and did most of the programming. He left us in 2014 to join our heavenly father, but he will return again. I am sorry to those who have kept purposefully silent about this fact, but it has been 17 years since 12 January 2009 and maybe it is time to talk about this matter.

Myself, just a humble software contributor was developing a new operating system design called ideaOS that would have fixed our reliance upon Microsoft. That company pushed back and began breaking into my company servers, to protect their precious operating system monopoly.

Hal Finney, or Herald Finney, had been around the Santa Barbara, Goleta area for about as long as I had, perhaps longer. I owned a software company nearby to one of his jobs working at Green Hills. My company is called Williamson Software and was located at 104 Anapamu Street.

We would see each other from time to time and chat about events, attitudes and the things that mattered to our world. Hal was always out ahead, able to make sense of complex dynamics, and develop fresh insights.

We both were private pilots, software developers, runners and lived in Santa Barbara. It would have been hard for us to not know each other.

What Hal lacked was a practical solution to the double spend problem, so I applied my expertise in database systems to provide the solution that he had spent years trying to find.

The project that I was working on at the time consisted of a hash entry verified file system called IFS that included something called the iBlock which is a part of the ideaOS project. This decentralized file system that I invented in 2007 provided a means to share a file system across numerous devices and every file had a hash value that was like a fingerprint of that file. This is very similar to the design of blockchain.

“Why not give a copy of the database to everyone? By giving the ledger of everyone to everyone and using a linked hashing system, you could eliminate your reliance upon a proprietary hardware card and introduce true scalability.”

The iBlock plus Hal’s work on RPoW, an early cryptocurrency experiment, became the main ingredients for Bitcoin. Hal did not need much help from me except with a better double spend solution.

We suffered greatly soon after. We endured highly sophisticated and extremely secretive attacks on our digital infrastructure, in our homes and upon our loved ones.

We had broken the forbidden boundary of reliance upon the central authority for monetary control. We had pushed back.

I do not take my gifts lightly, and I do not like to use them except for the betterment of our world. This problem vexed me, however, as I saw no way to break us out of monopolistic control of our planet of not just the money but our operating systems.

God help us and guide us as we venture forth into uncharted waters upon our world adventure. I pray for the people. We must be more responsible now as the stewards of our world and critical infrastructure systems. That means that everybody must think about and take some degree of responsibility for these matters.

I think Hal deserves most of the credit, perhaps 75%. The CypherPunks, perhaps 10%. Others, 12%, and myself, just 3%. Later, the Bitcoin adventure continued largely without the originators and has grown into something quite colossal.

Attached, find the letter that I sent recently to my attorney in Mexico. This and the below linked FBI evidence is what I am offering as proof of my involvement in the early Bitcoin years. I am not seeking fame by this disclosure and, in my humble opinion, blockchain is a limited technology. I am looking ahead not back. Perhaps this may bring some closure to the matter.

Letter to attorney in Mexico

Evidence submitted to FBI field office in Ventura California (the closest office to Santa Barbara) in 2009. Evidence was part of a police report filed by myself for the abhorrent and relentless stalking taking place against myself and Hal.