Six years ago, a number of theories spread across the internet that claimed the famed American economist and mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. was Satoshi Nakamoto. There’s a bunch of circumstantial evidence that has invoked some research into the possibility that Nash could have been Bitcoin’s creator. The following editorial is the ninth installment of news.Bitcoin.com’s “the many facts” series, with a comprehensive look at some of the evidence that is tied to John Nash and Bitcoin’s mysterious creator.
During the last decade, there’s been a wide variety of individuals that people suspect could be Bitcoin’s inventor. In 2014 and 2015, a number of armchair sleuths published research posts that claimed the well known economist and mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. created blockchain technology.
Nash is quite popular for numerous reasons especially his contributions to economics, mathematics, and complex systems found in game theory. The mathematical genius is also well known because of the award-winning movie “A Beautiful Mind,” which was a biographical interpretation of his life.
Nash was also a Nobel prize winner for his work in economic sciences and he earned his Ph.D. by leveraging a 28-page dissertation on non-cooperative games. Over six years ago, Nash was considered a prime suspect in the Satoshi Nakamoto mystery and a number of bitcoiners have tried to tether the two individuals.
Some people suspect that Nash possibly helped with the project and assume Bitcoin may have been created by a group of geniuses. For instance, back in mid-June 2015, the author Travis Patron wrote an editorial called “Did Mathematician John Nash Help Invent Bitcoin?” which proposes the question.
Patron’s theory, like many others during that time, talks about a paper Nash wrote called the “Ideal Money” which Nash published on various occasions between 1994 through 2008.
“Nash described this ideal of money as something which could provide a global savings outlet for people who would otherwise be subject to ‘bad money’, or money expected to lose value over time under conditions of inflation among other things,” Patron wrote.
The Nobel Laureate’s paper about ideal money made a number of mainstream headlines in the press after he published the work. One headline, in particular, dubbed “Nobel Economist Says More Stable Currency Needed,” was published on Fordham University’s website a month and a half before Satoshi published the Bitcoin white paper on Halloween 2008.
Patron’s research describes two more papers that align with the Bitcoin network including a speech about the ideal money published in the Southern Economic Journal, and another paper from 2002.
The author is not the only one who believed Nash could have been involved, as a Reddit post written six years ago describes how Nash was Bitcoin’s creator. “John is an award-winning cryptographer, mathematician, and a Nobel prize-winning economist,” the Redditor wrote at the time. “This trifecta is key in understanding the genius behind Bitcoin as all three schools of thought came together.”
The armchair sleuth from 2014 added:
He’s been operating under several ‘schizophrenic’ false identities on the internet since the ’90s. His timezone/geographic location, access to computers within the faculty in Princeton (for early Bitcoin mining), and his raw genius are all parallel with what we already know about the real Satoshi Nakamoto, including his writing style, which also matches Nick Szabo’s.
The author also cited a Youtube video that described Nash’s political ideas and goals when it comes to the ideal money. The armchair sleuth said the video gave him “goosebumps” because of the similarities it had with the open Bitcoin network. News.Bitcoin.com readers can check out the video about John Nash with Martin Edwards below.
In addition to the Reddit post, an anonymous publisher from the web portal dubbed the “Financial Underground Kingdom” also released an editorial that claims John Nash could be Satoshi Nakamoto. The unknown author also says that it’s possible that Nash worked with Nick Szabo and Wei Dai during the creation period.
The editorial speaks about a letter Nash wrote in 1955 to the National Security Agency (NSA), which was declassified years later by the intelligence agency. Nash’s letter described an “encryption machine of his design,” one that did not interest the NSA and the project was soon forgotten. The anonymous writer says the letter pretty much sums up the fact that Nash was probably Bitcoin’s inventor.
“This man (John Nash) fills every single one of Satoshi’s markers and more, he rewrote the economy already, defined the encryption race 50 years ago,” the anon said. “He has since been touring the world, talking about a new kind of money technology and how it is going to give the people ‘the power’ vs government ‘schemes’ of money printing.”
The editorial continued:
[John Nash] is Satoshi, nothing is hidden it’s all in plain view. It makes 100% perfect sense now, but 20 years ago when the lecture was given, it was complete gibberish. How do you explain to a world population that everything will be different because of what you are about to do? How do you break it to them slowly before they rip you apart out of fear?
In the letter to the NSA, Nash said: “I am speaking about a research project that is not fully complete since I have not yet written up and submitted for publication any paper or papers describing the work. Also, the details of what axioms to use and how to select the basic set theory underlying the hierarchical extension to be constructed are not fully crystallized.”
There have also been a number of other theories concerning Nash and Satoshi’s alleged ties at the end of May 2015. Nash and his wife were killed in a car crash in 2015 and after he died on May 23, bitcoiners started sleuthing again.
Bitcoin proponents started to discuss the theory that erupted on Bitcointalk.org a year prior in September 2014. The interesting notion tethers Nash to Satoshi’s identity with a great deal of circumstantial evidence and a lot of speculation. The Nash speculation started after the owner of Bitcointalk.org, Theymos, received an ostensible, compromised email from Satoshi’s GMX email handle during the first week of September.
Many years have passed since this theory was revolving around the web and the sleuthing seemed to have stopped after Nash passed away. The internet is littered with theories that people have composed in order to tether the two geniuses together, but no one has ever provided a smoking gun.
John Forbes Nash Jr. definitely had the know-how to create Bitcoin but now that he’s gone, it would be even harder to prove, similar to the mysterious Hal Finney theories. Nash is just another individual on the list of possible suspects and the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto continues to remain unknown. Nash did discuss Bitcoin during a keynote presentation at Oxford University, which was published in February 2015. News.Bitcoin.com readers can watch his lecture where he discusses “Bitcoin Honesty” in the video embedded below.
What do you think about the claims that say John Nash may be Satoshi Nakamoto? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
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