As you may know Bitcoin came into existence with the publication of a paper in a cryptography (that the science of keeping stuff secret) mailing list by Satoshi Nakamoto.  The technical details are fascinating and most is beyond my understanding but another fascinating point is that Satoshi is an unknown person or persons! After the introduction of the Bitcoin software and once things seemed to be moving along with bitcoin achieving some actual value, Sathoshi simply disappeared!

For a while, before he disappeared he was communicating with a few people on the cryptography mailing list. One of those people was Gavin Andresen who created something called the “Bitcoin Faucet” where you could go to simply be given bitcoin’s! Now remember that bitcoin’s initially were worth about 0.05 cents (USD). Gavin bought 50,000 bitcoins (for $25) and simply gave them away, initially in 5 BTC chucks just for solving a trivial captha (that proved you were human). It was actually a brilliant way to bootstrap the Bitcoin economy and as things turned out it worked. According to numerous accounts in the press Satoshi asked Gavin if he could add Gavin’s email as a contact for the bitcoin reference software to which Gavin agreed. Next Satoshi simply vanished! Since then Gavin has become the main core bitcoin software developer (along with several other people) and that’s where things stand today. No one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, or isn’t talking, fun fun!