A statue honoring the mysterious creator of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto has been unveiled in Budapest, Hungary.
Unveiled on 16 September, the statue is located in Graphisoft Park, a business park in the Hungarian capital that is also home to statues of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Hungarian mathematician László Rátz.
The statue shows Nakamoto with an expressionless face and hoodie that features the Bitcoin logo. The statue’s face is polished to a mirror-like finish allowing viewers to see themselves in Nakamoto. According to its creators, sculptors Tamas Gilly and Reka Gergely, this was done to convey that Bitcoin “belongs to everyone and no one at the same time.”
The unveiling of the Satoshi Nakamoto statue is the culmination of an initiative that Bitcoin journalist Andras Gyorfi conceived in March 2021. The effort was funded by Hungarian cryptocurrency organizations and private citizens who made Bitcoin donations to support the initiative.
According to Gyorfi, the statue is both a show of respect to the anonymous creator or creators of Bitcoin and an effort to promote the adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
“We think of Satoshi as the founding father of the whole cryptocurrency industry,” said Gyorfi. “He created Bitcoin. He created the blockchain technology. He’s the god of our market”.
The mysterious creator of Bitcoin
In October 2008, a paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System authored by Satoshi Nakamoto was published to a cryptocurrency mailing list. The paper was revolutionary and outlined a solution to the double-spend problem that had held the proliferation of digital currencies back.
A few months after releasing the landmark paper, Nakamoto launched Bitcoin as open-source code and mined the starting block of the chain, known as the genesis block.
Unsurprisingly, organizations and individuals from around the world clamored to learn more about Nakamoto. There was only one problem. He didn’t exist. Not as Satoshi Nakamoto, at least. The creator or creators of Bitcoin had used Nakamoto as a pseudonym.
Over two decades of searching has got us no closer to finding out the true identity of Nakamoto. And no credible individual or individuals have come forward to claim the mantle. It is a mystery that may never be solved.
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