https://img.leopedia.io/DQmZMpMVwA58cXVMnwTYbz732CSx9kLqwDurC4f3tyMqdyG/1000057110.jpg 

We are all fans of a good mystery, and there is no mystery in the crypto world bigger than the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto (is he a single person, or is he a group? ). I don’t know.

What we do know is a lot about where Satoshi’s heart was when he created Bitcoin and we can see that through the early days of what would become the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, but there’s one story that is often forgotten – a story that could’ve changed the course of Bitcoin.

This incident happened September 8, 2014, long after Satoshi had handed his Bitcoin to the early development team, and yet someone managed to hack into Satoshi Nakamoto’s email account.

The hacker is known to have taken his job pretty seriously and issued a warning in writing under the user account skyglarr23 saying that in case they didn’t pay a ransom in Bitcoin, he’d reveal Satoshi’s true identity.

There were massive implications. Think about it, revealing Satoshi 's identity would have made everything about Bitcoin - the person (or persons) behind the cryptocurrency to been openly vulnerable to government pressure, legal proceedings and media scrutiny. The very heart of Bitcoin 's decentralization would have been open to attack

But the real danger wasn’t just this. I think if Satoshi had been revealed his identity, they may have been forced to follow the regulations, possibly questioned by authorities (or worse) or even forced to change the code of Bitcoin. The fundamental principle of Bitcoin being free from central control would have been damaged.

Also, there's the market impact. Bitcoin's value has always been rooted in something fundamental, the legend of one guy who created something that was revolutionary (and then disappeared), and attacking that could have ended up killing Bitcoin's reputation, and probably crashing the market

The security implications were just as bad. If someone could hack Satoshi’s email, what else would they be able to see? Could they have found information about Bitcoin’s early development? Or worse, could they have found private keys to the supposedly one million Bitcoins Satoshi supposedly owns? This is a good chapter of Bitcoin history. It shows how close we were to solving one of the biggest mysteries in tech. But more importantly, it shows how resilient Bitcoin is against both technical and social attacks.

The story of the 2014 hack is a nice reminder why Satoshi’s decision to be anonymous was not just a personal choice, it is one of the core design features that make Bitcoin truly revolutionary, it’s a lesson in decentralization and the value of being pseudonymous in this digital age.


Posted Using [INLEO](https://inleo.io/@thelastdash/the-hack-that-could-have-destroyed-bitcoin-7dd)