No, Linus Torvalds is not Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto

Posted by EditorDavid

on Saturday February 05, 2022 @06:34PM from the mistaken-identities dept.

ZDNet reporter Steven Vaughan-Nichols has solved the mystery of whether Linus Torvalds is Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto: no.

But what's interesting is why the reporter had to ask in the first place: In a GitHub Linux kernel repository, it appeared Torvalds had changed a single line in the Linux Kernel. The change: 'Name = I am Satoshi....' Torvalds himself has been suspected of being Nakamoto several times over the years. But no one who knows him well, and I consider myself one of those, have ever thought he was the Bitcoin mastermind. It's just so, so not Linus.

So, while many people were discussing the "evidence," I decided just to ask Linus. Here's what he had to say.

"I'm afraid that is just a jokester taking advantage of how GitHub works — it shares git objects between different repositories, so you can use the SHA1 'name' of an object to specify something you did in your own tree, and then use my repository as the web name, and make it look like your object is in my tree...." Torvalds went on, "So the "torvalds/linux" part of that URL is basically just empty noise, designed to fool people into thinking it's in my tree. You could replace it with [another] GitHub repository name — the actual relevant part is just the SHA1 hash part...."

"So no," Torvalds concluded, "I'm sadly not the owner of a huge stash of original bitcoins."

And, there you have it, folks. Nakamoto's real identity remains a secret.

Late last year Vaughan-Nichols also reported on what happened when Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin suggested Torvalds sell an NFT of the 1991 email that first announced Linux to the world .

"An amused and appalled Torvalds replied, "I'm staying out of the whole craziness with crypto and NFTs. Those people are cuckoo!"