Ripple Chief Technology Officer David “JoelKatz” Schwartz has opined that the keys to Satoshi Nakamoto’s estimated $70 billion Bitcoin fortune are likely lost forever.
The conversation stems from a recent article by renowned investigative journalist John Carreyrou.
After an 18-month investigation, Carreyrou concluded that Adam Back, a 55-year-old computer scientist and cypherpunk veteran, is the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto.
However, prominent voices within the Bitcoin community have vehemently rejected this theory due to a lack of a definitive “smoking gun” and have argued that the findings mostly regurgitate information that is already widely known.
The billionaire paradox
One of the key arguments against the theory that Back is Satoshi revolves around his current financial behavior.
Nakamoto’s genesis wallets contain roughly 1.1 million Bitcoin. This makes the inventor worth over $70 billion at current market prices.
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Colorado Governor Jared Polis recently pointed to this glaring paradox on X (formerly Twitter) while weighing in on the matter.
“He doesn’t seem to show in any way that he is worth $70 billion, in fact he seems to be hustling and scrapping together funds from VCs for his company.”
The “embarrassing” lost key theory
Political commentator Josh Barro offered a hypothetical scenario to explain why the inventor of Bitcoin might be strapped for cash despite sitting on a mountain of digital gold: “What if he is Satoshi Nakamoto but also he lost the keys, a super embarrassing fact he doesn’t want to admit?”
This theory caught the attention of Schwartz. The Ripple veteran did not explicitly support the idea that Back is Satoshi, bu the agreed with the underlying premise. “It does seem likely that whoever Satoshi Nakamoto is or was, nobody alive today has access to the keys,” Schwartz stated.
Schwartz on his own Satoshi rumors
Schwartz has himself been considered a Satoshi candidate. The theory might be plausible due to Schwartz’s technical chops, but it is ultimately false. The Ripple veteran stated that he did not actually discover Bitcoin until 2011.
“I certainly could have been part of Satoshi,” Schwartz previously noted in a Reddit forum. “Nearly everything Satoshi did is within my capabilities. But, sadly, I didn’t find out about Bitcoin until 2011.”
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