My timeline post that makes the case that Jack Dorsey is probably Satoshi Nakamoto is being represented here in another format. While I am not 100% certain Dorsey is Nakamoto, the circumstantial evidence is staggering. This post will be updated from time to time. Most critics are quick to dismiss Dorsey on the basis that his politics would not have aligned with Satoshi’s, primarily because of how he ran twitter. Still more assume that Dorsey is not intelligent enough or that he could not have understood the cryptography. They are wrong.
The real Satoshi would have been a cypherpunk and part of the crypotography community with Hal Finney
Jack Dorsey was indeed a cypherpunk member with Finney and others that stand accused of being Satoshi at least as far back as the year 2000. His handle was jak_daemon.
The real Satoshi was an advanced programmer
Jack Dorsey is a highly advanced programmer
- 1991: Dorsey is overseeing a team of 30-year old programmers at Mira publishing. He is only 15 years old at the time.
- 1997: Programmer for Dispatch Management Services Corp
- 1998 – 2000 / 2004 – 2006: Programmer and co-founder at Dnet
- 2002: Creator – SearchGoogle.service tool
- 2005: Cretor – Odeo
- 2006: Creator – Twitter
- 2009: Creator – Square
Dorsey’s username on developer forums include: jakdaemon_, jakd_, crakjakd, jack, and possibly others.
Had Jack Dorsey ever worked on any type of precursor to bitcoin?
Dnet was an e-commerce software that relied on a distributed synchronized database. Dorsey explained the original aim of the project was to make a “web-centric dispatch system that would essentially provide an ATM for couriers, most of whom don’t have bank accounts, so they could easily draw their commissions through the web.”
Dnet later iterated into something new when Dorsey appears to have returned back to the project in 2004. He leaves this part of the story out. Although it was publicly billed as taxi dispatch software, it was actually developing a parallel peer-to-peer networking system with nodes.
Dorsey also founded Square, one of the largest payment processing companies in the world around the same time bitcoin was introduced.
Did Jack Dorsey Have Any Interest In Cryptography?
Jack Dorsey’s business card at least as far back as 1999-2000 touted his interest in crypto, cyberpunk networks, security, pseudonymity and more. It also included his PGP key.
Wasn’t Satoshi Supposedly From Japan?
Based on the time he posted and wrote, most analyses have signaled that the real Satoshi was actually in North America while the idioms he used were almost unanimously American. Satoshi occasionally used a British/Canadian spelling of a word but it was so rare and jarring when it appeared that it looked more like an attempt to obfuscate his origin.
Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey’s favorite fashion designer in 2008, when the Bitcoin whitepaper was released, was Issey Miyake (Japanese) and his favorite restaurant in San Francisco was Nihon (Japanese for Japan). Twitter, which he was CEO of, also opened up a new office in Japan that year. A direct quote from Jack that year is a tweet of him saying “We’re turning Japanese!: http://tinyurl.com/2an79w”
But wasn’t Jack Dorsey already really busy running both Square and Twitter?
Here’s where it gets interesting:
- 2006: Dorsey Becomes CEO of twitter
- October 1, 2008: Dorsey fired from Twitter for focusing too much on hobbies
- October 30, 2008: Dorsey deletes his personal blog that he’d been running for 10 years.
- October 31, 2008: Bitcoin whitepaper is released
- June 2009: Dorsey launches Square, a payment processing company
- July 21, 2009: Satoshi Nakamoto makes the odd admission that he couldn’t contribute much to bitcoin’s development anymore because he was “pretty busy with work” and needed a break from it.
- December 12, 2010: Satoshi makes his last intended public post.
- March 2011: Satoshi updates his profile on the P2P Foundation forum to say he is 35 years old. Dorsey was then 35 years old
- March 28, 2011: Dorsey returns to Twitter as Head of Product and executive chairman
- April 23, 2011: Satoshi sends his last ever email saying, “I’ve moved on to other things…”
- May 23, 2011: Twitter’s tech lead hints that Square will integrate Bitcoin.
- March 31, 2014: Dorsey’s company Square, announces Bitcoin payments.
- November 2017: Square’s CashApp enables Bitcoin purchases
- January 1, 2020: Dorsey founds the Crypto Open Patent Alliance. Its first two members are Square and Coinbase.
- April 24, 2020: Podcaster Lex Fridman asks Dorsey point blank if he is Satoshi Nakamoto. Dorsey replied, “No. And if I were, would I tell you?”
- October 8 2020: Square invests $50 million in Bitcoin
- December 31, 2020: Square reports doing $4.57 billion in bitcoin revenue in 2020, making it the largest revenue driver of its business
- January 1, 2021: Dorsey’s friend Elon Musk, who would later buy Twitter, purchased $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin through Tesla
- April 2021: Dorsey leads COPA to sue someone claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto (Craig Wright, who was later determined by a Court that he wasn’t)
- November 29, 2021: Dorsey steps down as CEO of Twitter
- December 10, 2021: Dorsey changes the name of his company Square to Block
- June 10, 2022: Dorsey releases a new decentralized web platform, Web5
- February 11, 2024: Dorsey wears a Satoshi shirt to the Super Bowl
- February 24, 2024: This blog theorizes that Jack Dorsey is actually Satoshi Nakamoto and reminded readers about the opening lines of the Bitcoin Whitepaper. “Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments…”
- May 2, 2024: Dorsey open’s Block’s Q1 shareholder letter by saying he needs to address the company’s obsession with Bitcoin. “Ultimately, making bitcoin more usable every day means seeing bitcoin as a medium of exchange for the internet, thus solving for the original problem Satoshi stated in the bitcoin white paper,” he wrote. ‘Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments.'”