Was Satoshi Nakamoto Pleasant To Work With? No, Says Developer

Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, remains the best-known pseudonym in the cryptoverse, and this mystery is one many people are content to leave unsolved. Still, every time something new about the mysterious creator surfaces, the community wants to know – at least to add some level of humanity to their hero.

Although she/he/they vanished – not quite in a puff of smoke – there are some proverbial breadcrumbs left behind, especially in Bitcoin’s whitepaper. He also posted in some forums and exchanged emails with some early Bitcoin developers. One of them was Laszlo Hanyecz, best known for buying two pizzas using 10,000 Bitcoins, now worth USD 77 million, which brought the Bitcoin Pizza Day to life as some sort of holiday.

According to Business Insider, Hanyecz had been mining bitcoins on his laptop and he expressed interest in contributing to the cryptocurrency’s development online. The developer claims that over the coming year, Nakamoto sent him tasks to complete.

Hanyecz calls Nakamoto paranoid, bossy and kind of weird. “He seemed very paranoid about people breaking the software. He kept calling it ‘prerelease,’ and I was helping him get it to release,” he explains. Apparently, Nakamoto consistently gave him a weird feeling.

He says the Bitcoin creator treated him like a full-time employee, although he did the work for Bitcoin for free and as a side gig, since he had a full-time job already.

Also, Nakamoto wasn’t too thrilled with Hanyecz’s mining, either. “He said, ‘Well, I’d rather not have you do the mining too much,’” Hanyecz said. “He was trying to grow the community and get more commerce use cases. He fully recognized that mining would become a thing where a few people would get wealthy.”

Still, the developer says he has deep respect for both Nakamoto’s project and the person or team behind the name.