This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
Overanalyzing every crumb in Satoshi Nakamoto’s long-cold trail isn’t exactly useful these days. Not to mention that Satoshi left for a reason and deserves his privacy.
But there’s hardly a better excuse to lean into the Nakamoto mystery than a cryptic fake birth date.
It’s generally assumed that Satoshi listed April 5, 1975 as his birthday as a reference to President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102, which on that day in 1933 made it illegal for US citizens to hold physical gold — forcing them to give it to the government in return for cash.
President Ford reversed the order in 1975, so at best we figure Satoshi mashed up those dates as a nod to bitcoin’s potential as self-sovereign digital gold outside of government control. Neat!
On This Day – Satoshi was “born”
Let’s be clear — today is probably not Satoshi’s 50th birthday.
The facts: Satoshi set his birthday as April 5, 1975 in his P2P Foundation forum profile, which also stated that he resided in Japan (another unlikely factoid based on his known activity patterns).
Satoshi’s only posts on this forum were to share the first version of Bitcoin, Bitcoin v0.1, in February 2009. He’d mined the genesis block about five weeks earlier and had already released the software via the Metzdowd cryptography mailing list.
If today were really Satoshi’s birthday, he would’ve been 32 when he started coding Bitcoin in 2007.
Perhaps Satoshi entering his founder era in his early thirties sounds about right.
Although you might already know about some idiosyncrasies that hint he could’ve been older.
Double spaces
Satoshi widely used double-spaces after sentences — in the whitepaper, on forums, and in emails.
Double-spaces are a relic of the typewriter era, which more-or-less ended with the arrival of PCs in the 1990s. On typewriters, a single space was often not enough for the reader to easily differentiate between sentences, so people were taught to use two spaces after every end punctuation.
Setting aside the possibility that double-spaces were part of some sophisticated ploy to obscure Satoshi’s true identity, it points to him learning to type earlier than the ‘90s. Perhaps in the ‘80s or even the ‘70s — the latter likely making him a boomer born sometime in the ‘60s.
Here you can see Satoshi use double-spaces between sentences in the Bitcoin whitepaper.
This would put Satoshi in his mid-forties when he started coding Bitcoin, and up to around 65 years old today.
Coding style
Satoshi wrote Bitcoin in the programming language C++, released in 1983, which in and of itself is not peculiar. It’s the way he wrote it.
Developers have pointed to Satoshi’s use of a variable naming system called Hungarian notation, popularized by Microsoft in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which had fallen out of favor as development environments improved.
Satoshi also defined classes using a capital C. Doing so was standard when working with the Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC), a coding suite that was at peak popularity in the mid-to-late 90s — a whole decade before Bitcoin was written — and eventually surpassed by .NET.
Satoshi named classes with a capital C, as shown here in the code that instructs the properties of Bitcoin block headers.
Following that arc suggests Satoshi may have had more than 20 years worth of C++ experience by the time he came to write Bitcoin. In that case, he would’ve probably been in his early-to-mid forties in 2007 and close to 60 today, a similar age to other cypherpunks like Julian Assange and Adam Back.
Cultural clues
On the Bitcointalk forum, an early adopter in July 2010 had wondered what might happen to the network if someone were to maliciously buy up all the bitcoin.
Satoshi pointed to an old tale of the silver market from the late 1970s, when the billionaire Hunt brothers sought to corner the supply and borrowed heavily to do it. They’d reportedly acquired more than half of the world’s deliverable silver, more than tripling its price in five months.
The trio was eventually bankrupted following the Silver Tuesday market crash in March 1980, which saw them face a $100-million margin call and losses of over $1.7 billion as prices tanked.
Satoshi clearly wasn’t too worried about someone cornering the bitcoin supply (for what it’s worth, here’s a decent exploration of the differences between the Hunt brothers’ scheme and Michael Saylor’s current bitcoin strategy).
Early Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn has previously said that Satoshi referenced Silver Tuesday “as if he remembered it,” and that his coding style suggested that “he came of age as a developer in the ‘90s and then stopped. He did not keep up with the evolution of the industry.”
But hey, whether Satoshi would be 50 years old today, as his P2P Foundation profile states, or really in his mid-sixties born in an entirely different month, he will have a birthday this year. We just don’t know when.
So, cheers to Satoshi!
What do you give someone who already has 1 million BTC? Well, Depeche Mode is touring right now — great if Satoshi were born in 1975 — and the Rolling Stones are playing in Boca Raton later this month, a solid bet for someone in their mid-60s, I’d say.
— David
Rizzo’s take, the Bitcoin Historian
I’ll leave David to the deductions. As for myself, I prefer to look at Satoshi’s birthday as a lens of how the architect behind the world’s greatest digital history preferred to be known.
What I mean by this is that Satoshi, while pseudonymous, did selectively reveal himself to the world. I say himself, because he chose to identify as a man, just as he chose to identify as Japanese, just as he chose April 5, 1975 as his birthday.
But let us absolve ourselves of specificity for a moment to focus on a greater point. Satoshi Nakamoto was a person of intent. Given the fact that we know so little about them, in an age when our entire lives are digital, not to mention that we can track the lives lived of millions to the hour, it remains remarkable how little is known at all about Satoshi Nakamoto.
If one is to consider the internet the greatest ever assault on human privacy, Satoshi, then, is an anomaly. He’s The Boy Who Lived, the ghost that passed through the machine, who sent physical cash to the one domain registrar that promised to destroy his records, who used Tor to hide his footprints, and then vanished, some two years later, leaving not so much as a trace.
