Satoshi Nakamoto's True Age Remains Mystery Despite Clues

Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, has a listed birthday of April 5, 1975, which would make him 50 years old this year. However, the true age of Nakamoto remains a mystery, as the date is widely believed to be a reference to President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102, which made it illegal for US citizens to hold physical gold. This order was reversed by President Ford in 1975, suggesting that Nakamoto may have chosen this date to symbolize Bitcoin’s potential as a form of digital gold outside of government control.

Nakamoto’s only posts on the P2P Foundation forum were to share the first version of Bitcoin, Bitcoin v0.1, in February 2009. He had already mined the genesis block about five weeks earlier and had released the software via the Metzdowd cryptography mailing list. If today were really Nakamoto’s birthday, he would have been 32 when he started coding Bitcoin in 2007. However, there are several clues that suggest he could have been older.

One such clue is Nakamoto’s use of double-spaces after sentences, a practice that was common during the typewriter era but fell out of favor with the arrival of personal computers in the 1990s. This suggests that Nakamoto may have learned to type in the 1980s or even the 1970s, making him a baby boomer born in the 1960s. This would put him in his mid-forties when he started coding Bitcoin and around 65 years old today.

Another clue is Nakamoto’s coding style, which includes the use of Hungarian notation and defining classes with a capital C. These practices were popularized by Microsoft in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had fallen out of favor by the time Bitcoin was written. This suggests that Nakamoto may have had more than 20 years of C++ experience by the time he came to write Bitcoin, making him in his early-to-mid forties in 2007 and close to 60 today.

Nakamoto’s cultural references also provide clues about his age. In a post on the Bitcointalk forum, he referenced the Hunt brothers’ attempt to corner the silver market in the late 1970s, suggesting that he may have been alive during that time. Early Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn has said that Nakamoto’s coding style suggested that “he came of age as a developer in the ‘90s and then stopped. He did not keep up with the evolution of the industry.”

Despite these clues, the true age of Satoshi Nakamoto remains a mystery. Whether he is 50 years old today or in his mid-sixties, born in an entirely different month, he will have a birthday this year. We just don’t know when. As the Bitcoin Historian Rizzo puts it, “Satoshi Nakamoto was a person of intent. Given the fact that we know so little about them, in an age when our entire lives are digital, not to mention that we can track the lives lived of millions to the hour, it remains remarkable how little is known at all about Satoshi Nakamoto.”