Yesterday, a blog went viral claiming to be written by a Pakistani called Bilal Khalid who changed his name to James Cann and now lives in the UK.
In the blog, he claims that he is the elusive founder of Bitcoin – Satoshi Nakamoto – but the blog was met with widespread suspicion with experts calling it another Faketoshi – people who claim to be Satoshi but aren’t.
It has been close to a decade since Satoshi Nakamoto went underground and nobody knows their real identity. Over the years, multiple people have claimed to be Satoshi but almost all of them have been fake.
The real Satoshi Nakamoto has the single largest collection of Bitcoin in the world said to be around 1 million Bitcoin. In today’s value, his collection is worth $10.4 billion, meaning that should they decide to cash-in, it would bring the crypto-currency down.
He has also placed a cap on the number of Bitcoin at 21 million, meaning that Satoshi has the single largest quantity of Bitcoins that will ever exist.
Bilal Khalid hasn’t given any concrete proof that can attest his identity as Satoshi Nakamoto.
The two ways he can prove his identity is by either moving the Bitcoin that Satoshi has or signing in and sending a message through the genesis block using his private keys. The genesis block is the first-ever Bitcoin that was mined by Satoshi back in 2008.
Bilal in his “reveal” had a convenient excuse for that and says that he lost the hard-drive that contained those Bitcoin when he sent it for repair. He writes,
My everything was in that hard drive! It was military-grade encrypted and password-protected, so I was overly confident – to the point of being arrogant – that the techie guys could not have access to my HDD data. That’s why I left the HDD inside the laptop and didn’t take it out. The laptop came back by courier a few days later and it contained a new HDD and, of course, the bitcoins weren’t there! But what could I do? I tried to go into my old laptop and see if I could do some magic, but I could not. At that time, retrieval software was limited and I was having a dose of my own medicine. In hindsight, I should have had bought a £30 GBP printer to at least print my private keys.
Then there’s his writing style. Jeff Garzik co-founder of Bloq, which develops blockchain technology for use by companies, used to exchange emails with Satoshi before he disappeared.
During an interview regarding Bilal, Jeff said, “The writing style does not strike me as the same” and the same point was raised by experts who have compared the blog with Satoshi’s other writings.
Jeff added,
The litmus test is always pretty definite and easy to prove or disprove, it’s signing something with a digital signature.
So, Bilal joins the hall of shame with other Faketoshis and will stay there until he can provide concrete evidence that he is in-fact the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
