Over a decade ago, Satoshi Nakamoto invented bitcoin but chose to keep his/her identity a secret. Over the years, many Satoshi Nakamotos have come up only to fall short of proving their identity when put to the task. In the past few months, that identity has seemingly remained quiet without attracting any ‘noise’ from commentators.
But, on November 11, Grin privacy-centric coin got an anonymous 50 bitcoins donation to its General Fund. That transaction sparked a strange rumor that the generous individual behind it was Satoshi.
That donation was announced the same day by Grin on Twitter. The donation was made via Coinbase crypto exchange by a donor who insisted on remaining anonymous as reported by Grin dev Daniel Lehnberg in a forum post.
Working Freely and Independently
Lehnberg even said that he interacted with the donor briefly but he upheld the donor’s desired anonymity. However, he shared some of the donor’s edited comments including statements such as:
“Our motives are not economical! It’s about the technology and the protocol. Please put it to good use for the development of GRIN. You keep working as you did in the past […] This is what we are honouring right now with these donations so that you can work freely […] without economic dependencies.”
Some of the crypto media outlets found the unusual nature of the donation to be not quite adequate. They responded by confecting the latest rumor that Satoshi Nakamoto was behind that donation.
The Satoshi theory was fed by a Telegram group chat message from Litecoin founder Charlie Lee. He revealed that the donated coins were mined in 2010 and later transferred from a wallet that had been entirely idle for about 9 years. Nonetheless, Lee has since then confirmed the message was “just a joke.”
Privacy Developments
Previous reports revealed that Grin is a privacy coin that uses scalability and implements the privacy-focused Mimblewimble protocol. That protocol is named after a fiction tongue-tying curse originating from the famous Harry Potter novels.
Interestingly, Mimblewimble is in part a variant of the Confidential Transactions cryptographic protocol. This protocol enables for transactions to be obfuscated yet verifiable to achieve enhanced privacy and prevent double-spending.
Grin underwent a hard fork this summer representing the network’s first such event since its launch in mid-January 2019. The fork was meant to introduce tweaks to its consensus algorithm to achieve bigger resistance to ASIC miners.
Last month, the Litecoin Foundation published two new draft improvement proposals. These proposals were designed to work toward the development of privacy features for the network by integrating Mimblewimble.
