Later, Lerner also discovered that Patoshi apparently throttled his mining a lot - stopping for the first 5 minutes of many block intervals. All of this paints a very different picture of a "government op" who decided not to touch it. Patoshis behavior shows restraint - he could have out-mined everyone else easily and monopolized block finding, but he refrained and gave other early miners a chance.
So you are saying that if it were the CIA/NSA/Darpa, they would have mined all 21M Bitcoins and taken all of them and destroyed Bitcoin? That makes no sense. Indeed, mining what Satoshi mined is consistent with
any of the theories of Satoshi's identity. What he mined was about what you'd expect from an entity in that position.
Facts beat conspiracy theories on the internet.
I wish that were true.
Regardless, all we have right now is theories and various bits of evidence supporting those theories. Nobody has "facts" about Satoshi's identity (except the CIA
).
In fact, there have been cases throughout history where people have refused a monetary Nobel Prize. Even though it represents enormous wealth (a million dollars), and these people weren't rich. 🙋
OH WOW A MILLION DOLLARS!!!.
You understand that Satoshi's coins are worth over $80 billion, right?
Imagining its some guy who just didn't feel like making himself and his family and everybody he ever knew on earth some of the richest in the world, or imagining he wouldn't want to give this to a charity of his choice, is just... bonkers. This isn't a hippy trading a fancy car for a more mellow life here.
In my opinion, proof that Satoshi Nakamoto wasn't working for the government is the fact that the US government, like other governments, isn't particularly fond of Bitcoin. Yes, Donald Trump voiced his support for it in 2025. However, by 2026, we all realized he's much more fond of meme coins. And government officials are most fond of fiat currencies, especially central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). 🧖
Bitcoin became defacto legal in the USA shortly after it was introduced. It's now
legal as hell. The US House has passed legislation actually
preemptively banning CBDCs, so the "government hated Bitcoin" theory doesn't hold up.
And even if it did, the US government has hated all kinds of things that rogue groups within the US intelligence community has nevertheless done anyhow.
And for that to happen, Satoshi Nakamoto had to disappear. It was an absolutely necessary step.
Bitcoin would have done much better had he been around and was a public figure.
Way the hell better than Michael Saylor.
Also, Satoshi almost never posted between roughly 5 and 11am GMT, so either he was on US hours or he had the most disciplined insomnia in history.
Yep, sounds like US eastern time hours for a late-sleeping software developer. (The CIA, NSA, Darpa and the Pentagon are all in ET...).
Several years ago I compiled all of Satoshi's public activity timestamps from emails, forum posts, and code commits to generate the following chart. My conclusion is that Satoshi maintained a sleep schedule consistent with someone staying in the Pacific time zone.
Real hackers don't go to bed at 9PM.
That looks much more like eastern time (three hours later) to me. Midnight to 8am is perfect hacker sleeping hours.
