A London businessman accused of fraud in Singapore was ‘revealed’ today to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto at a £500-a-ticket unveiling event in Central London.

Stephen Nour Mollah was presented by event organizer Charles Anderson at the Frontline Club, a prestigious venue that has previously hosted talks with Louis Theroux, Julian Assange, and Alexander Litvinenko.

According to BBC reporter Joe Tidy who attended (some of) the event, the organizers asked for £500 to let him attend and ask questions of the ‘real’ Satoshi. Tidy reportedly declined to pay. 

Read more: Move aside HBO, this indicted Brit may be Satoshi Nakamoto

During the conference, Anderson bizarrely introduced himself as the inventor of Britain’s Got Talent and energy recovery systems in cars. He was also at one point interrupted by Frontline Club staff who insisted that the venue is neither affiliated with nor endorsing the event. 

It’s unclear if the event is a joke, a scam, or a legitimate claim to have revealed Satoshi’s identity. Under the event’s legal notice subheading, it says, “You may rest assured… this is the real thing! Were it not, we would not be placing this under the Legal Notice heading.” 

Mollah and Anderson stand accused in London of fraudulently convincing a would-be investor that Mollah was Satoshi from November 2022 to October 2023. Mollah apparently claimed to be in possession of 165,000 bitcoins in Singapore — worth up to $5 billion during that timeframe.

Mollah has promised to move Satoshi’s genesis bitcoins but not for another few months.

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A British man has said he’s not guilty of fraud after allegedly convincing an investor that he’s Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

According to the Standard, the alleged victim says that Stephen Nour Mollah, 58, “dishonestly” led him to believe that he’s Satoshi Nakamoto from November 2022 to October 2023. He apparently claimed to be in possession of 165,000 bitcoins in Singapore — worth up to $5 billion during that timeframe.

Mollah faces a single charge of fraud along with an accomplice, 67-year-old Charles Anderson, in a private prosecution in London.

Did you know? Satoshi Nakamoto is the director of Coinbase, CoinDesk, and Mt. Gox

Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity has been the subject of speculation for years. HBO’s latest documentary claimed to have identified Satoshi as former bitcoin developer Peter Todd. Hours before its release, however, Todd publicly denied it was him.

The answer was in front of our face all along. Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity was actually revealed on Medium — and, you guessed it, Mollah is the mastermind.

“Hoffman Investigation Team has Found Satoshi Nakamoto, the Elusive Inventor of Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology in London. His Real Name is Stephen Nour Mollah,” the post reads (via Blackdot Solutions).

Read more: Satoshi likely launched 51% attack on Bitcoin during early days

Note the use of Cointelegraph’s logo in the image, and the jarring mix of its signature style with obvious photoshop.

Public records also indicate that Mollah has been registered as the director of over 30 dodgy financial firms in the past decade, including Coinbase Limited, CoinDesk Limited, and Mt Gox Bitcoin Exchange Limited.

Most of these firms were dissolved within two years, displaying little to no activity.

Mollah and Anderson’s trial is set for October 3, 2025 in London.

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Len Sassaman, a famous cypherpunk who committed suicide in 2011, is, according to Polymarket, the most likely candidate to be unmasked as the real Satoshi Nakamoto by a new HBO documentary, due to air this coming Tuesday.

Sassaman, a well-known privacy advocate and cryptography specialist, conducted research for Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography and co-founded an annual conference for software hackers. 

A popular theory put forward by Evan Leung Hatch suggests that Sassaman may be Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator and that his suicide could be linked to Nakamoto’s final message posted two months beforehand. It read, “I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future.”

Leung reasons that Nakamoto left “a slew of uncompleted features” and never touched his bitcoin (worth more than $60 billion today) before his abrupt disappearance. He also points to Sassaman’s work on PGP encryption and remailers, both of which he claims are key to Bitcoin’s development. 

Read more: Satoshi likely launched 51% attack on Bitcoin during early days

His theory even looked at Sassaman’s pattern of late-night tweets and compared them to Satoshi’s late-night posts and code alterations.

This hypothesis seems enough for Polymarket punters and Sassaman has been given a 47% chance of being revealed as Nakamoto in HBO’s documentary. Early Bitcoin contributor and Sassaman associate Hal Finney follows in second on 15%. 

To no one’s surprise, bets for Craig Wright currently give him a meager 2% chance, and Elon Musk, Jed McCaleb, and Dorian Nakamoto, also feature on the list. 

This is all assuming HBO will indeed reveal Nakamto’s identity. Despite Politco reporting the documentary will do just that, HBO promotional material doesn’t explicitly make the claim, and only asks the question, “​​In the future of money, who holds the power?”

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New HBO documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, will debut this Tuesday on HBO’s internet streaming and TV stations, and according to reports, it will reveal the identity of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

According to Politico Europe’s senior finance editor, Izabella Kaminska, Satoshi will be named by the documentary’s producer and director, Cullen Hoback.

Naturally, the news of the long-awaited unmasking sparked fierce debate within the Bitcoin community, and a number of well-known figures, including Galaxy’s Alex Thorn, weighed in with their opinions on Satoshi’s real identity.

Read more: Satoshi likely launched 51% attack on Bitcoin during early days

Satoshi mined many of Bitcoin’s earliest rewards on a personal computer and is thought to own over 1.1 million of the 19.8 million circulating coins.

While specific details about the supposed upcoming revelation are scarce, if the claims are true, it could have an instantaneous and major impact on the entire crypto industry.

HBO documentary joins long history of Bitcoin conspiracies

Of course, many people are skeptical of the claim that a documentarian with a QAnon filmography credit to his name has somehow solved one of the most important mysteries in modern finance.

Throughout the years, speculators have put forward countless names of people they suspect of being Satoshi. These have included Nick Szabo, Len Sassaman, Hal Finney, Adam Back, David Schwartz, Dorian Nakamoto, John Nash, Wei Dai, David Orel, Dave Kleiman, Paul Le Roux, and Tatsuaki Okamoto.

Guesses even include groups of people like the US Central Intelligence Agency.

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According to new research, it’s likely that Satoshi Nakamoto conducted a 51% mining attack on the network in its first year of existence.

An in-depth data review of 2009 blocks mined by Patoshi — a nickname for a frequent miner who embedded a non-standard use of ExtraNonce within coinbase transaction data — suggests it’s very likely that they used hash power to reorganize Bitcoin’s blockchain. 

In other words, as Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo explained, when Patoshi occasionally took breaks from mining, their computer restart was “so powerful that the miner [Patoshi] simply overwrote blocks found by other miners in their [Patoshi’s] absence.”

A 51% attack is exactly what it sounds like — achieving 51% control of the Bitcoin network, measured by hash rate, to overpower other miners and regain control of new transaction confirmations.

Patoshi — a portmanteau of ‘pattern’ and ‘Satoshi’ — was mining in 2009 when it was extremely likely that Satoshi Nakamoto owned the only computer connected to the network. This has led many people to conclude that Patoshi and Satoshi were the same person.

More detailed analysis by Wicked Smart Bitcoin this week that builds on Lerner’s research also suggests that Patoshi probably conducted a 51% mining attack during 2009.

Because Bitcoin has always been a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain, whichever miner works the hardest earns the right to mint coinbase rewards and add transactions to the ledger. During Patoshi’s breaks from mining, no other miner completed enough hashing work to prevent them from returning and taking back control.

Satoshi’s ‘51% attack’ was an attack in name only

It is important to note that bitcoins had no value in 2009, so the attack was a stress test and not for financial gain.

Although the actions of Patoshi, who was likely Satoshi, meet the definition of a ‘51% attack,’ that term is a poor characterization of what occurred. Again, because bitcoins had no financial value at the time, the conduct was simply for research purposes or inadvertent. 

Indeed, Satoshi had one of the only computers connected to the Bitcoin network in early 2009 during these blockchain reorgs. Among other research pursuits, Satoshi also seemingly tested the Bitcoin network’s Difficulty Adjustment by varying hash power contributions in 2010.

All of these actions occurred while bitcoins were free. To be clear, miners could earn coinbase rewards for mere pennies worth of electricity, and Martti Malmi gave away 30,000 bitcoins via a free website ‘faucet’ throughout 2010.

Read more: High severity bug in Bitcoin Core affects 17% of full nodes

So while it might be true that Satoshi carried out a 51% attack on Bitcoin, it would have yielded no immediate financial gain. To this day, Satoshi has sold nearly zero of the 1.1 million coins mined during the first two years of the currency’s existence.

As Wicked Smart Bitcoin summarized to Protos, “While Satoshi shepherded Bitcoin through its first year of existence, it looks like he may have conducted some real-world stress tests such as the reorgs in May 2009 and purposefully orchestrated downward difficulty adjustment in May 2010.

“None of these acts seemed malicious in nature but were rather to check the integrity and robustness of the system he had built.”

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A UK judge has branded litigious computer scientist Craig Wright an arrogant liar who frequently uses ‘technobabble’ and isn’t ‘nearly as clever as he thinks he is.’

The damning comments were made by Mr. Justice Mellor in a written judgment to accompany the March verdict in the civil lawsuit brought by the non-profit Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) that asked the court to rule that Wright didn’t create the world’s most famous cryptocurrency.

Wright has been attempting to convince the world that he is Bitcoin’s creator ever since he claimed to the Australian Tax Office in 2013 that he controlled in excess of 1 million bitcoins. He has subsequently sought on multiple occasions to shut down anybody who challenges this view.

It was hoped that such a ruling would prevent the famously litigious Wright from continuing with separate lawsuits against a number of Bitcoin developers and prominent crypto companies, including Coinbase, Block, and Kraken.

In the judgment, Mellor confirms his view that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, did not author Bitcoin’s whitepaper in 2009, and did not create the ‘Bitcoin system.’

However, he will likely find it far more difficult to take that approach in the future following the outcome of this high-profile case and its accompanying no-holds-barred judgment. Mellor also stated that:

• “In both his written evidence and in days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am entirely satisfied that Dr. Wright lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly.”
• “Dr. Wright resorted to further lies and evasions. The final  destination frequently turned out to be either Dr. Wright blaming some other (often unidentified) person for his predicament or what can only be described as technobabble delivered by him in the witness box.”
• “I do not believe that Satoshi would ever have resorted to forgery in his attempt to prove he was Satoshi. He would not have backdated documents or altered the clock on his computer(s), for the simple reason that there was and is no need for him to do so.”
• “The arrogance he [Wright] displayed was at odds with what comes through from Satoshi’s writing. In short, in his writing and attitude Dr. Wright just doesn’t sound or act like Satoshi.”

Read more: Craig Wright hits COPA trial with 164,000 pages of evidence

Wright’s cross-examination in court threw up a number of bizarre moments. These include Qudos Bank CIO David Bridges claiming that Wright had become “very annoying” but was probably Satoshi because he was interested in “Japanese stuff,” Wright attempting to submit a box of old papers that his wife had apparently found, and his claims to have destroyed the hard drive containing Satoshi’s private keys while high on sedatives.

Wright also didn’t do his case any favors when he mistakenly referred to Satoshi in the third-person.

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Satoshi Nakamoto’s earliest confidante and first recipient of a bitcoin payment, the late Hal Finney, is many people’s pick when asked who is Bitcoin’s creator. Finney was the earliest and most influential user of the network and back when 1 bitcoin was virtually worthless, he famously predicted that one coin might someday rally to $10 million.

On the other hand, some people think that Finney was simply talking to and sending money to himself.

Now that the highest copyright court in the world has entered a final judgment against the most notorious self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator, Craig Wright, it’s once again anyone’s guess who created the world’s foremost crypto.

However, Bitcoin historian and multi-publication editor Pete Rizzo doesn’t think the judgment against Wright puts Finney back in the frame. Indeed, he published a full explanation of why he believes Finney and Satoshi Nakamoto are not the same person.

Seven reasons Pete Rizzo says Hal Finney is not Satoshi

To support his argument, Rizzo cites research conducted by Jameson Lopp. First, according to Lopp, Finney was probably physically away from computers at times when Satoshi was online. According to Rizzo, Finney likely lived in a different time zone to Satoshi and a comparison of their computer activities indicates that they had different schedules altogether. If they were the same person, there are many days when Lopp finds it difficult to see how they could have slept.

Rizzo also cites an email from Finney indicating that Finney disliked HashCash’s design. Finney was one early critic of using computing power and electricity to secure that system. If Finney really created Bitcoin, he probably would have ignored the earlier HashCash. However, the real Satoshi endorsed and borrowed elements of HashCash while designing Bitcoin.

Recently surfaced Satoshi emails from the COPA v. Craig Wright trial imply that Satoshi, unlike Finney, knew that Bitcoin would attract global criticism for its electricity consumption. However, Satoshi considered it less of a waste than the resources used by the legacy financial industry.

Read Protos’ full coverage of Bitcoin’s highest-profile lawsuit: COPA v. Craig Wright.

Finney also indicated that there were other things he would have done differently if he were actually Bitcoin’s creator. Finney questioned Nakamoto’s decision to reserve 200 bytes of data space for backwards compatibility, for instance.

Not only that, Satoshi occasionally seemed to ignore questions posed by Finney, including one 2010 post in which Finney posited that other blockchains’ native coins could be traded against bitcoin on exchanges and/or grant privileges on those native chains. Rizzo questioned why someone talking to themselves would waste time with dead-end questions.

Read more: Craig Wright trial reveals never-before-seen emails from Satoshi Nakamoto

Rizzo also drew attention to the skills of a duplicitous Finney. Rizzo said that an expert coder was unlikely to have possessed the writing and acting skills needed to pull off such a convincing, life-long act and he dismissed the idea that Finney could have so masterfully orchestrated Satoshi as a sock puppet while also coding Bitcoin, writing, and working.

Finally, Satoshi seemed unaware of Wei Dei’s work on B-Money, another cryptography project. Finney, in contrast to Satoshi, frequently communicated with Wei Dei.

In summary, Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo believes that Hal Finney is not Satoshi Nakamoto. In his view, like millions of other Bitcoiners, Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity is indeterminate. In any case, neither of them leads Bitcoin anymore. Satoshi stopped speaking in 2011. Finney passed away in 2014.

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On March 6, 2014, Newsweek published a piece postulating that Dorian Nakamoto was Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. This week, 10 years on from the publication of that article, reporters have returned to check in on Dorian’s life.

Although Dorian has categorically denied being Satoshi, he’s still received considerable support from the Bitcoin community. A funny photograph of Dorian’s ‘not me’ facial expression has proliferated as a meme and there’s a Rare Pepe card of Dorian’s face — one of the first NFTs on bitcoin, minted on Counterparty in 2016 — which has resold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Of course, there are a few people who still believe he’s Satoshi.

Why people believed Dorian Nakamoto was Satoshi

There were many peculiarities about Dorian that prompted Newsweek reporter Leah McGrath Goodman to name him Bitcoin’s “mystery man behind the cryptocurrency.” 

Not least of all the fact that Dorian’s middle name is Satoshi and his last name is Nakamoto.

Dorian also lived within two miles of Hal Finney when Finney was emailing Satoshi. (Finney was the second node operator on the Bitcoin network and received Satoshi’s first bitcoin remittance.)

He also had a secretive career. He studied physics at California State Polytechnic University and completed classified work for the government. His opaque, technical background matched one of Bitcoin’s rumored origins: that Satoshi is a government agent.

Moreover, Dorian’s mannerisms and media avoidance matched what one would expect from a retired founder. When approached by reporters, he exhibited strong reluctance to even discuss Bitcoin, which would make sense if he had, as Satoshi explained, “moved on to other projects” and no longer wanted to discuss it.

Nakamoto’s friends described him as intensely private and paranoid, revealing that he often used anonymizing email services. He even retained legal counsel to protect his privacy and once seriously considered suing Newsweek for disrupting his peace.

Dorian’s bitcoin hodl made him a multi-millionaire

After Newsweek’s 2014 article, Dorian denied being Satoshi. “I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it,” he told reporters. “It’s been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection.”

Read more: A brief introduction to Bitcoin lore and Easter eggs

Nevertheless, the Bitcoin community found him endearing. To help Dorian with legal costs to protect his privacy, Bitcoiners donated about $34,500 worth of bitcoin in 2014. 

One of the most impressive (and Satoshi-like?) parts of a 10-year Newsweek retrospective on Dorian Nakamoto is his impressive ability to not sell his bitcoin. Indeed, Dorian kept hold of all the 2014 bitcoin he received from donors and as a result of his decade-long hodl, owns about $4 million worth of bitcoin today.

Newsweek inadvertently gave Dorian Nakamoto millions

Since claims to the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto are a dime a dozen, most longtime Bitcoiners don’t believe that Dorian created Bitcoin.

Dorian’s unwelcome doxxing was a long time ago and in subsequent years, he’s kept a low profile. However, despite this, the event lives on, immortalized as a Rare Pepe and internet meme. Amusingly, his face still dominates Google image search results for ‘Satoshi Nakamoto.’

During the past decade, Dorian appears to have moved on – just as the real Satoshi Nakamoto moved on. 

Both are still hodling bitcoin, though.

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In a crowded and overheated courtroom on Monday, Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) presented evidence that Craig Wright is pretending to be Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

The London High Court case stars Wright in the role of defendant for a change. COPA members Coinbase, MicroStrategy, and more are suing to stop Wright’s litigious spree against Bitcoin developers.

Led by a grant from Jack Dorsey, COPA alleges that Wright not only failed to produce conclusive evidence of his identity, but also made errors in his alleged forgeries. Wright will appear in court throughout the week to make his most public conviction that he is, in fact, Satoshi.

Wright’s flopped evidence

On the opening day, COPA presented evidence that Wright has made factual errors in his arguments. The 54-year-old claimed that he wrote the original Bitcoin whitepaper in LaTeX — but experts testified that whoever wrote the whitepaper did it in OpenOffice. Typographical binary codes within the PDF were cited as evidence.

COPA also alleges that Wright’s supposed “2007 time capsule” contained documents that were added, modified, or deleted in September 2023. Wright knew how to “roll back” his computer’s clock to make it look like the files were created in 2007, COPA argued, but failed to scrub the evidence.

Wright was further accused of relying on ChatGPT to forge documents when pressed for time. These alleged forgeries have played a role in his other lawsuits, like Kleiman v. Wright. Presiding judge Bruce Reinhart wrote in 2020, “Craig Wright has produced forged documents in this litigation… I have previously found that Dr. Wright gave perjured testimony in my presence.”

Read more: Craig Wright bounces check in embarrassing lawsuit

Trolling the legal troll

Wright attempted to terrorize his most vocal critics, COPA argued, by continuously filing lawsuits against those who questioned his claims. Founding members have funded COPA to give defendants in his cases — often Bitcoin developers — the resources needed to fight back in court.

In the UK, a defendant is often required to prove that the statements were true to successfully defend against a libel case. Despite these high hurdles, Wright has often had difficulty gaining traction in UK court cases. For example, he won an award of only £1 in his case against Peter McCormack, who accused Wright of being “a liar” and “a fraud.”

However, McCormack came out on top when the UK’s Supreme Court rejected Wright’s appeal, saying that there was no “arguable question of law” to do so.

Wright similarly filed a case against Roger Ver. However, a judge tossed that case on the grounds that Wright was “forum shopping” — a common tactic for plaintiffs looking for a friendly jurisdiction.

Read more: Craig Wright loses Peter McCormack case ahead of COPA decision

Even with his failures in court and alleged document forgeries, Craig Wright does not want to give up on his claim that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. “I conceived Bitcoin, and I unveiled it to the world,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter) a few weeks ago. “However, in BTC, they’ve torn it asunder. I’ve chosen to forsake BTC because I won’t allow it to exist in a grotesque form, both in its physical embodiment and its underlying connotations.”

Despite these words, Wright offered to settle with COPA before this month’s High Court case in London commenced. COPA rejected his dubious terms.

Wright will be simmering in an overcrowded courtroom until February 13, defending his right to sue more Bitcoin developers.

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A previously inactive X account allegedly belonging to pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto listed various cryptocurrencies on Sunday, following a supposed ownership mix-up.

The X (formerly Twitter) account with the @Satoshi handle was created in May 2018. It lay dormant for five years between October 2018 and October 2023 until it posted “Hello world” last week. It was called out by X’s community note system.  

On Sunday, the account posted again, sharing various wallet addresses alongside the hashtags of cryptocurrencies $XRISE and $SATS. 

Most users said that the account was hacked, while others noted that the posts might be a rug pull. One user, however, decided to buy into one of the cryptocurrencies listed by the supposed Satoshi account.

“I do not care: I bought,” they said, before later admitting that they “exited with 70% loss instead, appreciate the tipoff.”

Read more: ‘Satoshi’ X account tweets for first time in months, community notes shuts it down

The account’s current owner is unknown at the time of writing. According to Andy Rowe, a supporter of Craig Wright, the account was jointly shared by himself and Wright during its dormancy years.  

However, Rowe says hackers gained access to the account on New Year’s Day. He claims the account was then repeatedly sold to different buyers in an apparent scam where the seller would contact X’s support and regain control of the account while keeping the profits.

The new posts promoting $SATS and $XRISE have since been deleted.

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