Where did Bitcoin come from?

Bitcoin was ‘invented’ by a person or group of people using the name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’. Does anyone know who this really is? Despite many articles and investigation to unmask the person(s), there is still no conclusive evidence of who they are. Does it matter? Not at all. Satoshi designed the entire Bitcoin system in an ‘open source’ manner - this means the code is available for everyone to inspect and see, so there are no hidden secrets, and no influence on it from the creator. Over time many others have also worked on this code so it’s already very different from the initial outline Satoshi proposed.

It’s also worth mentioning that there is a common misconception that Satoshi invented Bitcoin all by himself. Like many big breakthroughs in the sciences, Satoshi’s invention was built on the shoulders of giants. For the past few decades many top scientists, engineers and mathematicians were involved in research around cryptography, systems and so on. Satoshi managed to pull all of this work together into one coherent plan and then helped to start implement it. If you read the Satoshi whitepaper you’ll even notice that he references all the other work on which he relied to complete his invention.