International Man of Mystery 

There is perhaps no one more enigmatic than Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. Operating under a pseudonym and still anonymous to date, it has been more than 10 years since the author published his academic whitepaper.  

Titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” and uploaded onto bitcoin.org on 2008, Nakamoto set out to solve the problem of fiat money – conventional money, according to Satoshi, relied too heavily on trust.  

The author wrote: “The root problem with conventional currencies is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” 

To make this happen, Nakamoto worked together with a few other notable developers, though he was sure to make changes to the source code himself. The coder worked with them till 2010 before he withdrew from the project, making it an open-source software that anyone can view, use or contribute to the code.  

Today, in honour of the mysterious founder, there is even a statue in Budapest dedicated to Satoshi Nakamoto.