Is Satoshi Nakamoto a real-life Hari Seldon?

Perhaps you've read Isaac Azimov's Foundation Trilogy, in which there is a character called Hari Seldon? Seldon invents a new science, psychohistory, which allows him to predict the collapse of the galactic empire, and set up a new civilisation on a planet called Foundation, to preserve human knowledge.

When I look at how Bitcoin has progressed over the last four years, I can't help thinking there's a bit of Hari Seldon in Satoshi Nakamoto. The whole history of Bitcoin reads like a science fiction novel, and the prescience in the system is remarkable.

Firstly the anonymity - no one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Various journalists and investigators have tried to profile him, and have come to the conclusion that he's probably British (even though the first post was in US English, the rest were in UK English), the time stamps on his bulletin board posts fit GMT if he was following a typical "get up in the morning, go to bed in the evening" pattern of living, And probably an academic, as his programming style isn't that of a professional coder. But perhaps there's already some misdirection going on there - pick a top layer false identity with a Japanese name, and then under that have a second false identity that makes you look like a British university professor. Who knows how many further layers there could be?

Why would the inventor of Bitcoin keep his (or perhaps her?) identity hidden? Perhaps it's modesty, or perhaps the inventor was supposed to be working on something else and was putting work time into Bitcoin. Or perhaps Satoshi was playing the long game - presumably as the first Bitcoin miner there wasn't much competition for the 50 coins every ten minutes. In the first four years of Bitcoin, coins were being generated at a rate of over 50,000 a week. Satoshi could well be sitting on a pile of at least a quarter of a million Bitcoins (if not many many more). At current prices of about 50 euros a coin, that's over 12 million euros. If you're a multimillionaire, it's better to be anonymous than a public figure; less money needs to be spent on security and bodyguards for starters.

Or perhaps Satoshi was worried about what would happen to him when Bitcoin started overtaking Government currencies. In today's political climate the inventor of something that could possibly one day wipe out the dollar could easily be labelled a "fiscal terrorist".

Then there's the interplay between the rate of Bitcoin mining reduction, mining power and the value of Bitcoins. For the first four years or so the reward for mining Bitcoins was 50 coins, and initially there were very few miners. But Bitcoins were not worth anything, so anyone putting time and computing power into it were either doing it because they were highly optimistic about the cryptocurrency's future, or because it seemed like an interesting thing to do. As the price increased from mere cents per thousand Bitcoins to dollars, and then on to tens of dollars per Bitcoin, the computing power expended on mining increased, the technology improved from CPU to GPU to FPGA and now ASICs, and then the number of Bitcoins per mining reward halved. Three variables that interact and could easily have gone terribly out of balance (and still could in the future, I suppose). But in general it all meshes together rather nicely. And the number of Bitcoins in the mining reward are scheduled to halve again and again until 2140, when the full amount will have been allotted. That's a very long term plan. For comparison, think back to what the world was like according to the history books in 1878...

So, is Satoshi relaxing on the deck of a yacht, enjoying his millions and congratulating himself on a plan well executed? Or is he a bemused elderly university lecturer in north London, packing his brief case every morning and heading off to give his daily mathematics lectures to unsuspecting undergraduates? I wonder if we'll ever know.