🟡 Satoshi Nakamoto Has Been Gone For 15 Years

Letter From The Editor
Happy New Year! 2026 is going to be a great year!

In today’s newsletter I discuss bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto has been gone for 15 years, Silver prices have been surging, soon you’ll be able to change your Gmail address, Nokia and NASA are working together to build the first cellular network on the moon, Beyoncé has officially become a billionaire according to Forbes, and the NBA is exploring setting up an European NBA league.

Let’s get into it!

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🟡 Satoshi Nakamoto Has Been Gone For 15 Years

It's been 17 years since Satoshi Nakamoto brought Bitcoin into the world, and 15 years since they were last heard from, and yet the world is no closer to knowing their true identity. Why is that? Good question. Let's get into it.

The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto remains one of the greatest mysteries in the history of tech and finance. This person, or group, created a system that changed how the world thinks about money, and then they walked away. The disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto has led to years of searching and speculation, but no one has been able to prove who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Satoshi Nakamoto built the Bitcoin network, and then allowed the community to take over while they slowly melted into the background like Homer Simpson. The mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto is a core part of the story of digital money, and is just one part of the reason why Bitcoin has grown into a global force of change in the world, and why Bitcoin now has a market cap of $1.8 trillion dollars.

Satoshi Nakamoto launched the Bitcoin network by mining the very first block, which is known as the genesis block. Inside the code for this first block Satoshi Nakamoto included a specific message that explained why the system was being built. The message was a headline from The Times, a British newspaper, and it said “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” symbolizing the financial system's problems that inspired Bitcoin as a decentralized alternative. Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to create a financial system that did not rely on banks or governments that could fail and require bailouts. Satoshi Nakamoto designed the system to be decentralized so that no single person or organization could control the system or print more money whenever they wanted. It makes sense then that Satoshi Nakamoto would remain anonymous so as not to steal the focus away from what Bitcoin would become to the world. Had they stuck around they would be the story, and not the crypto revolution that Bitcoin ushered in.

The creation of Bitcoin’s genesis block was the first step in a global movement that would eventually involve millions of people worldwide, creating millionaires and even billionaires, while threatening to change the dynamics between financial systems governed by countries in the form of fiat currency, and a new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin that was decentralized by nature and governed by the economic laws of supply and demand.

So where did Satoshi Nakamoto go? It’s not like they just up and disappeared; well not exactly like that. Their first step was when they stopped all public facing communication. For a while, they continued to communicate privately with two of the core Bitcoin developers, including Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, to confirm with them the transition of leadership of the project and responsibilities going forward. Then came Satoshi Nakamoto’s final sign off, when they shared "I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone." A few days later on April 26, 2011, Satoshi Nakamoto sent what is considered their final email to Gavin Andresen himself, famously asking him to stop describing them (Satoshi Nakamoto) as a "mysterious shadowy figure", and instead focus on the Bitcoin open-source project and its other contributors.

In the end, Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to remain anonymous and maintain their privacy, while ensuring that Bitcoin would continue to be bigger than just one person. They were worried that the press would spin the Bitcoin story as someone’s get rich quick scheme, instead of as the decentralized open source cryptocurrency project that it was. This narrative ensured that the integrity of Bitcoin’s technological vision superseded any narrative concerning the personal glory of Satoshi Nakamoto.

The final act of Satoshi Nakamoto was the transfer of critical Bitcoin repository keys to Gavin Andresen in order to guarantee the long term success and decentralization of the entire Bitcoin network. Gavin Andresen was given the responsibility to lead the technical direction of the project, while Mike Hearn was given information about the status of the development. The code was left in a repository in a state where it could continue to function without the presence of Satoshi Nakamoto. And with that Satoshi Nakamoto was gone, without a forwarding mail address. This is someone who didn’t ever want to be found or contacted ever again.

The mystery of “Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?” remains unsolved. None of the Bitcoin held in the earliest Bitcoin wallets that were created when Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first Bitcoin have ever been touched. In total, it’s believed that Satoshi Nakamoto mined a total of 1,100,000 Bitcoins. These Bitcoin can be traced to the earliest blocks mined on the blockchain, and their associated addresses. One interesting quirk of the blockchain is that while only the person with a wallet’s keys can access a wallet to remove Bitcoin, anyone can send Bitcoin to a wallet. The very first Bitcoin wallet that was created by Satoshi Nakamoto when he successfully mined a block of 50 Bitcoin is called the “Genesis Wallet”. After that each new block of 50 Bitcoin mined were deposited into a new wallet that Satoshi Nakamoto controlled. Since the creation of the “Genesis Wallet”, people have continued to send Bitcoin to that wallet as tips or to thank Satoshi Nakamoto for his creation. In total an additional 50 Bitcoin have been sent to the “Genesis Wallet” by thousands of other wallets in the last 17 years as a form of tribute. You gotta love the Bitcoin community!

One of the most important rules Satoshi Nakamoto put into the Bitcoin code is the limit on the total number of Bitcoins that can ever exist. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins in the system, and this makes Bitcoin scarce like gold. Currently there are 19,934,271 million Bitcoin in circulation. Satoshi Nakamoto also created a process called “the halving”, which cuts the number of new Bitcoins that are minted in each block in half every 4 years. Technically, this happens every 210,000 blocks, and that comes out to around every 4 years depending on how much processing power is being applied to mining Bitcoin across the system. This “halving” is done in order to ensure that the supply of new Bitcoins slows down over time in order to prevent inflation and makes existing Bitcoin more valuable as the total supply approaches the maximum limit of 21 million Bitcoin. This mathematical certainty is different from traditional fiat currencies, where governments can print as much money as they want, which can cause inflation. Satoshi Nakamoto built this rule to ensure the long term value of the Bitcoin network would be protected by the laws of mathematics, rather than the decisions of politicians. The predictable issuance of new Bitcoin allows investors to calculate the exact supply of the asset at any point in the future. This transparency is a major reason why Bitcoin is often referred to as digital gold. Satoshi Nakamoto knew that scarcity would be essential for the currency to be viewed as a store of value. As it stands right now, the very last Bitcoin is expected to be mined around the year 2140.

One of the very first times that anyone used Bitcoin to buy a physical item is the famous story of one of the earliest core Bitcoin developers on the project named Laszlo Hanyecz. He wanted to see if the digital Bitcoins in his wallet could actually be used to purchase something in the real world. Laszlo Hanyecz went to a forum and offered 10,000 Bitcoins to anyone who would order two large pizzas and have them delivered to his house. A 19-year old man named Jeremy Sturdivant accepted the offer, and used his own credit card to buy two large pizzas from Papa John's for Laszlo Hanyecz. At the time those 10,000 were worth about $41 dollars, but today those Bitcoins would be worth $875,800,000! So Laszlo Hanyecz's loss should be Jeremy Sturdivant’s gain, right? Nope! Jeremy Sturdivant didn’t keep the Bitcoins he got from Laszlo Hanyecz. He used them to buy video games.

OMG!

Today, people celebrate May 22nd as “Bitcoin Pizza Day” in commemoration of Laszlo Hanyecz’s first purchase of 2 large pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin.

Quick side note to this story, those 2 large pizzas from Papa Johns weren’t the only time Laszlo Hanyecz used Bitcoin to purchase pizzas. Because he was one of the earliest Bitcoin miners, mining 50 Bitcoin every few hours with no way of spending the Bitcoin, it added up fast. According to Laszlo Hanyecz, he believes he may have mined as much as 100,000 Bitcoin, and used ALL of it to purchase pizzas. Before you flip out thinking about how much Bitcoin that would be in today's dollars, you need to remember that Bitcoin didn't really have any value back then. Laszlo Hanyecz was mining 50 Bitcoin every few hours when there were only a few dozen other Bitcoin miners in the world. Today, all those Bitcoins that Laszlo Hanyecz mined, and then used to buy pizzas, would be worth $8.75 billion dollars!

Hope those pizzas were good!

So what would happen if someone were to come forward claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto? Well, more than a handful of colorful characters have in recent years claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, but none of their claims have ever panned out. In order to conclusively prove their identity they would need to provide proof that they could access any of Satoshi Nakamoto’s early wallets, move those Bitcoins, or sign a message using the private keys associated with the genesis block. Without doing that, there can be no definitive proof that anyone claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto is really them.

That hasn’t stopped some people from claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, only to be publicly humiliated when they failed to provide that proof. My favorite example of someone falling flat on their face after claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto is the case of Craig Steven Wright, who claimed for years to be Satoshi Nakamoto, but when push-came-to-shove the High Court of England ruled against Craig Steven Wright. Judge James Mellor ruled that the evidence in the trial was overwhelming that Craig Steven Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto, and that he had lied extensively including forging documents to try and support his false claims. Craig Steven Wright was sentenced to twelve months in prison which was suspended for two years as long as he never again sues anyone while claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Today Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin wallets are worth approximately $96 billion dollars, and have remained untouched for the last 17 years. The silence of Satoshi Nakamoto is the most powerful evidence that the creator intended for the project to live on without him.

So will we ever know the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto? My guess is no, not after all this time. If they had wanted to come forward they probably would have done so by now. It’s obvious that they didn’t create Bitcoin for the money, since they’ve never touched any of the Bitcoin they mined. And because they’ve never come forward it wasn’t for the publicity of being the creator of Bitcoin. So why did they do it? The best answer I can come up with is they wanted to bring something into this world that didn’t exist, and they wanted it to live on long after they were gone. Bitcoin has achieved both of those goals. Thank you Satoshi Nakamoto.

Quick Hits

🩶 Business

Silver prices have been surging in the last week, and just hit an all time high of $83.90 dollars per ounce over the weekend. Silver has rocketed up over 158% in 2025, while outperforming the S&P 500 total return index. I asked ChatGPT, so you didn’t have to, and it predicts that Silver could reach $100 per ounce in 2026, with some analysts predicting that Silver could reach between $100-$200 per ounce by the end of 2026.

💸 Entertainment

Beyoncé has officially become a billionaire according to Forbes, following the success of her “Renaissance World Tour”, which earned $579 million dollars, and the growth of her music catalog with the release of her “Cowboy Carter” album and accompanying "Rodeo Chitlin' Circuit" tour, which brought in over $400 million from ticket sales and $50 million dollars in merchandise. Damn! Beyoncé is just printing money with each new album and tour!

📫 Tech

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced that users can now change their primary Gmail address without having to create a new account or losing any of their existing emails or data.  How will this work? Well, essentially you’ll create a new email address, and your old one will still be active and act as an alias that redirects incoming emails to your new email address. I won’t bother trying to explain how this works technically, but I don’t understand how alias or even email works in the first place, but it is nice to see that a company worth over $2 trillion dollars will finally let me change my Wu-tang Clan referenced email address from 2004.

🌝 Space

Nokia and NASA are working together to build the first cellular network on the moon through a contract valued at $14.1 million dollars. Their goal is to set up a 4G system that will support HD video streaming for both astronauts and lunar rovers as a part of the Artemis program. Spending $14.1 million dollars for astronauts to doomscroll on the moon seems expensive, but can you really put a price on watching cute cat videos?

🏀 Sports

The NBA is exploring setting up an European NBA league, and is talking with a number of family offices, Gulf state investment funds, and Premier League sports teams about purchasing stakes in the new teams for between $500 million to $1 billion dollars. By some estimates a new European league could generate $3 billion dollars in annual revenue, and would have a market valuation of $20 billion dollars. So it’s easy to see why NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is exploring the expansion. 

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The Business Behind The News is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.