In the wake of the disappointing performance of Bitcoin over the past week, cryptocurrency geeks are getting a strange message from the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, the unknown person or persons responsible for Bitcoin’s birth.
It’s a tremendously fascinating story – this anonymous individual, who is listed on a P2P profile as a 43-year-old Japanese man, originally posted Bitcoin white paper content to a website and from there, the cryptocurrency took off – in fact, that’s putting it mildly.
How this experimental crypto coin went from some anonymous inventor’s idea to a listed asset with a market cap of nearly $70 billion is all in the history books – what’s brand-new is a single word posted on Nakamoto’s profile within the past 48 hours:
The word is “nour.”
This in itself creates quite a lot of consternation for anyone who thinks this is the real Satoshi and wants to decipher what that message means.
Nour is predominantly a name, an Arabic name for either a male or female. It is also translated to mean “light,” which conjures up images of Einsteinian theories of relativity and light waves bouncing around the atmosphere.
Or does it mean that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for Bitcoin’s price route? And if Satoshi Nakamoto chooses now to say something, why couldn’t it be a little less cryptic?
Urban Dictionary is no help at all, and neither are various translation engines on the web.
We simply don’t know what this person meant by the single word message, and we don’t even know if it’s the real Satoshi.
One prominent example of this confusion is Craig Steven Wright, who is currently running game on Bitcoin SV, contending with other market-makers and claiming to be the real Satoshi himself.
Since Satoshi is anonymous, anyone can claim to be him, or her, or them.
Coverage over at Cryptopotato today notes that the last transmission from Nakamoto was back in 2014 in a chat room, when the mysterious party went public to deny the discovery of said identity.
If you’re into Bitcoin trading, you owe it to yourself to understand this puzzle – to know that all of this is based on some person who, if he or she or they were known, would be extremely famous on par with Bill Gates, Elon Musk or any of the substantially less intelligent and innovative world leaders who wrestle for power in a tech-centric world.
For now, many are content to speculate on the strange new signal and what it might mean for a crypto coin that is temporarily down, but in many people’s eyes, decidedly not down for the count.