Nakamoto Research

Code characteristics

“The design and coding started in 2007.”

– Satoshi Nakamoto

What about the Bitcoin source code?

Some engineers who’ve analyzed the code think that Bitcoin is most likely the work of an individual rather than the result of collaboration or teamwork.

In an email thread with Mike Hearn, Nakomoto wrote that he worked on Bitcoin for two years before releasing the source code and whitepaper.

Language

Nakamoto authored original versions of Bitcoin in the C++ language, most likely under Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC 2005 SP1 specifically mentioned in source comment).

Clues in source code comments point to development in a Microsoft Widows environment along with testing on Linux, Apple MacOS, and Microsoft Windows.

Comments

While code is one focus area, the comments within the code are also valuable metadata, which you can study separated from their context to quickly pick out details. Depending on how you capture outputs from the files which make up the source, you could accidentally pull in comments from third-party libraries which just add noise to Satoshi’s actual comments.

You can perform a rudimentary extraction C style comments from source code with an awk command like this:

awk '/\/\*.*\*\// || /\/\/.*/ {print $0}' "${C_SOURCE_FILE}"

Example from within the Bitcoin version 0.1.0 codebase root.

for f in $(find . -type f -name "*.cpp" -o -name "*.h")
  do
  awk '/\/\*.*\*\// || /\/\/.*/ {print $0}' "${f}" >> comments.txt
done

This yields a comments.txt file with a little over 3k lines of raw comments for you to peruse.

Again, this is a naive approach without support handling edge cases. You must actually parse the C++ code with something like g++ with certain options or Python if you want a higher fidelity extraction of comments that properly handles most cases.

Interesting features

The code contains some interesting comment features and peculiar comment styles.

For example, inline comments typically start with 2 forward slash characters, followed by a space, and then the comment text. Many examples of unconventional inline commenting styles with more than 2 forward slashes exist throughout the codebase.

A search of GitHub C++ repositories for similar code comments produces only results from projects which started after the target time-frame of 2009-2010, but no results overlapping with the early Bitcoin era.

Given these unique commenting styles alone, one might wonder if the author wasn’t a professional engineer, or was trying to obscure the fact that they were a professional engineer.

Social commentary and wild observations

Some reviewers have formed contestable opinions on Bitcoin source code quality, ranging from “It’s brilliant code. It’s production-grade C++.” to “So weird to see how shitty the code is.”

Others have pointed out that the code is of the quality expected by academic researchers or scientists from fields possibly other than Computer Science.

“Most CIA and NSA code that has been leaked has been developed on Windows using Visual Studio IIRC. The bitcoin code looks and feels a lot like of their projects but could easily be some NSA programmers side project.”

Any hacker can tell this was a one person project from looking at the code.”

—nadapkoe commenting on HN

Interesting commentary, and this statement by user nadapkoe is their only comment ever on HN, so perhaps nadapkoe is a throwaway account.

  
  ╭───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
  │ ⚠ THIS CONTENT MAKES NO CLAIMS ABOUT THE IDENTITY OF SATOSHI NAKAMOTO │
  ╰───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯