The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has reportedly responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from a journalist implying that Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was a “third party individual” for whom it could neither confirm nor deny it had records.
According to an Aug. 13 X post by investigative journalist Dave Troy, the FBI issued a ‘Glomar response’ to his request for information on Satoshi — neither confirming nor denying the law enforcement agency had records identifying the pseudonymous Bitcoin (BTC) creator. Troy said he intended to appeal the FOIA response but claimed the FBI had made an “interesting assertion” by implying Satoshi was a “third party individual.”
“I submitted as a broad general subject request, with full context, so it is the bureau and not me that is asserting that this is an individual,” said Troy. “[M]y intent is not to establish the identity behind the pseudonym, but rather to get what info the bureau may have on the subject. If that helps establish identity somehow, fine, but that’s not my primary question.”
Since the release of the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, many have been speculating as to Satoshi’s true identity, whether it be one person or a group of people who helped create the original cryptocurrency. To this day, no one has definitively proved who Satoshi may be, but some have posited that early BTC contributor Hal Finney was one possible contender. Finney died in 2014.
According to Troy, “there should not be any problem releasing his file if the bureau thought Finney was Nakamoto.” A similar FOIA request made to the FBI and US Central Intelligence Agency in 2018 resulted in a similar response, neither confirming nor denying any records on the BTC creator existed.
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Australian computer scientist Craig Wright, who has long suggested he was Satoshi, could face perjury charges in a UK court for his statements. In July, after roughly eight years of claims that he was the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator, Wright issued a legal disclaimer to his website that he was not Satoshi.
Little information is known about the true Satoshi. Their profile on the P2P Foundation platform suggested a birthday of April 5, 1975. The last communication between the BTC creator and developers in 2011 said they had “moved on to other things.”
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