Every brand on a ranch has a story behind it. Bitcoin's story starts with a name nobody can put a face to: Satoshi Nakamoto.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the made-up name used by the person, or people, who created Bitcoin. In 2008, Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper. It laid out a plan for a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system," a way for people to send money directly to each other without a bank or any central authority in the middle.
In 2009, Nakamoto released Bitcoin's open-source software and mined the very first block, called the genesis block. That was the foundation everything else has been built on.
For a couple of years, Nakamoto talked with early developers by email and on forums. Then, in 2011, Nakamoto went quiet and left Bitcoin's development to the community.
To this day, nobody knows who Satoshi really is. People have guessed for years, and the guessing still goes on.
Nakamoto is believed to hold over one million Bitcoin from those early days. Those coins have never been moved.
Here's what we think is the best part of the story. Because nobody knows who made it, there's no founder to follow, no boss to call, and no one person who can change the rules. Bitcoin belongs to everybody who uses it.
That's a little like a good old ranch road. Somebody cut it a long time ago, nobody remembers who, and everybody's used it ever since.
Bitcoin's success has started a worldwide movement toward money that nobody controls. Nakamoto's idea keeps shaping how people think about money and technology, more than fifteen years later.
Read Why Bitcoin Was Born for the world Satoshi was answering, and Bitcoin Explained: Common Questions, Plain Answers for the basics.
Show where you stand with our Believe in Bitcoin T-Shirt or anything from the I Believe collection.
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