Jack Dorsey is not Satoshi Nakamoto

Lately some folks have been pushing a half baked narrative that Jack is Satoshi; you can find their arguments here:

and here:

Here we go again...

It's true that Jack was a cypherpunk and a programmer, but that's the strongest "evidence" available to support this theory. Everything else is circumstantial if not outright mental gymnastics via numerology.

I will once again point out that Satoshi hunting is a dick move, and thus I once again find myself interested in discrediting said dicks. If you're going to post a Satoshi claim, you should put as much effort into trying to disprove your own thesis as you do trying to improve it. Otherwise, you risk looking like a fool.

The funny thing about Jack is that, unlike most cypherpunks, he was an extremely public individual who posted what he was up to on nearly an hourly basis. During 2009 and 2010, Jack posted over 6,200 tweets - this gives us a much larger data set to work with compared to Satoshi, who created fewer than 1,000 timestamped events during the same period.

A Little Common Sense

During the time period of 2009 & 2010, Jack Dorsey was not only Chairman of the Board of Twitter, but also the CEO of the fledgling startup Square. It's quite clear that he was an extremely busy person not only overseeing multiple companies, but traveling around the world meeting important people, doing press interviews, speaking at conferences, promoting philanthropic causes, and more.

His activities do not fit the profile of someone who had the time and mental bandwidth to also be building a completely new financial system from scratch while maintaining perfect anonymity.

Persona Characteristics

The first version of the Bitcoin software was Windows only, meaning that Satoshi developed it on Windows. I'm sure Jack used Windows at some point in his life, but he has been a die-hard Apple fan ever since the original iPhone came out. You can find many posts where he refers to various Apple devices he uses. I personally recall speaking with him several years ago and learning that he doesn't even use laptops or desktops, but sticks to iPhones and iPads. It appears that may have even been true back in 2010. While reading through his 6,200 tweets I saw many referencing Apple products but none regarding Microsoft or Windows.

Jack Dorsey worked with the US Federal Government to visit several countries (Iraq, Mexico, Russia) on behalf of the US tech industry. Does anyone truly believe that Satoshi Nakamoto, who was extremely wary of gaining attention from governments, would be working directly with them?

Silicon Valley execs join State Department delegation to Iraq | News & Culture in Silicon Valley, CA

News & Culture in Silicon Valley, CA

Most of my evidence in this report is based upon timestamps and meatspace activities. Jack was bi-coastal in 2009 and 2010, frequently alternating between San Francisco and New York City, because those were the locations of Twitter HQ and Square HQ.

What does his tweet posting timestamp distribution look like in comparison to Satoshi's public activities? Here we can see that Satoshi held a pretty consistent schedule that would make sense for someone living in the Pacific time zone.

Jack, on the other hand, has less consistent sleeping patterns, which one would expect from someone who is bouncing back and forth between time zones 3 hours apart. He's also clearly more of a night owl.

Thanks to Jean-Christophe Gatuingt at Visibrain for helping me collect the data for this chart!

Proving a negative is a challenging quest in any realm. How does one prove that someone could not be Satoshi? I think the best we can do is to show that the person was out and about doing things while Satoshi was known to be sitting at a keyboard. This was the basis of my debunking the Hal theory by showing that Hal was running a race while Satoshi was sending emails and bitcoin transactions.

Hal Finney Was Not Satoshi Nakamoto

A compilation of evidence that Hal Finney and Satoshi Nakamoto were different people.

Cypherpunk CogitationsJameson Lopp

Inconsistencies in Activity Gaps

Satoshi had 2 lengthy gaps in their public activity:

1. From 2009-03-04 16:59:12 UTC to 2009-10-21 1:08:05 UTC
2. From 2010-03-24 18:02:55 UTC to 2010-05-16 21:01:44 UTC

We can see that Jack Dorsey kept posting during those periods - a prolific tweeter, Jack averaged 8.5 tweets per day and rarely missed a day.

While this doesn't prove anything, it's yet another difference in the characteristics of Jack and Satoshi.

Specific Event Conflicts

Note that comparing some of the following timestamps gets tricky because I keep track of Satoshi's activity in Pacific Time, any embedded tweets will display the time in your computer's configured time zone, and any screenshots of forum posts are in default UTC time.

On Nov 6 2009, Jack had lunch with venture capitalist Fred Wilson.

5 minutes after the above tweet, Satoshi Nakamoto committed code to the Bitcoin SourceForge repository.

On Nov 27 2009, Jack was furniture shopping with Alyssa Milano.

35 minutes before this tweet, Satoshi posted to BitcoinTalk:

On December 9 2009, Jack met the mayor of Paris.

18 minutes later, Satoshi posted to BitcoinTalk:

On February 26 2010, Jack was attending a long Square meeting.

Although we don't know exactly when this meeting began, it ended by 10 PM Eastern time. Meanwhile, Satoshi had made 2 forum posts at 6:17 and 6:48 PM Eastern time.

On May 20th 2010, Jack was driving to dinner with family.

10 minutes later, Satoshi posted to BitcoinTalk:

On May 26 2010 Jack met with Newark Mayor Cory Booker .

This meeting was nicely timeboxed by before and after tweets.

During this meeting Satoshi made two posts to BitcoinTalk and was working on creating a translation template file he attached to one of the posts.

On July 10 2010 Jack gave a presentation at Square.

This presentation was also nicely timeboxed with before and after tweets.

While Jack was on stage, Satoshi posted about upgrading Bitcoin signatures to a quantum computer resistant scheme to BitcoinTalk:

On July 14 2010 Jack met with the president of Chile for 1 hour.

Satoshi posted a dozen times to BitcoinTalk on July 14, and this one particular post happened while Jack was meeting with the President.

On July 21 2010 Jack was giving demos of Square at the Chicago Apple Store.

While Jack was giving demos Satoshi made 2 posts on BitcoinTalk:

On July 28 2010 Jack attended a San Francisco Giants baseball game.

We can see here that the game started at 7:15 PM Pacific time. Although we don't know exactly when Jack arrived at the game, we can see Satoshi was posting to BitcoinTalk right before the game began:

On August 14 2010, Jack had lunch with Scott Harrison.

Right as Jack was finishing up lunch, Satoshi posted that he had solved an issue with compiling the Bitcoin software.

On August 22 2010 Jack was driving down the highway.

Satoshi posted 5 times to BitcoinTalk within a 1 hour window of Jack's tweet.

On Sept 19 2010 Jack walked for 4 hours from 1 PM Pacific to 6 PM Pacific.

During this time window, Satoshi posted twice to BitcoinTalk and made a code commit.

Potential Objections

“Jack could have scripted these activities.”

Sure, but Occam’s Razor applies. If the goal was to sow disinformation, why didn't he choose better times with stronger evidence? While performing this research, I came across several examples where Jack was being video recorded for either a press interview or a keynote / panel at a conference, but the closest Satoshi activity was an hour or two off from conflicting with Jack's appearance. Are we supposed to believe Satoshi chose to only create weak disinformation when he could have created strong disinformation?

"Jack could have been posting from his mobile phone."

Sure, but once again, consider the risk / reward. Is it reasonable to believe that Satoshi would be logged into the BitcoinTalk forum and posting from his phone while he was in public? Such that if someone saw his screen or gained possession of his phone for any reason, they would see what was happening on it? Given what we know of Satoshi's focus on privacy, this is simply not believable.

This is Good for Bitcoin

Some will surely claim that the prior points do not constitute incontrovertible proof that Jack was not Satoshi. Indeed, proving a negative is often an impossible task and no single piece of evidence I show is proof beyond all doubt. But I find the aggregate of all the evidence to provide so much doubt that a reasonable person would conclude that it's far more likely that Satoshi was someone else.

It is better for Bitcoin that Satoshi not be a man, for men are fallible, fickle, and fragile. Satoshi is an idea; it is better that all who contribute to Bitcoin be an embodiment of that idea. As such, I pose to you that it is to the benefit of Bitcoin that we crush any myths of Satoshi’s true identity.