Bitcoin is on its course “to the moon” as its current price trajectory shows.
Each BTC is worth $53,800 dollars as of this moment and while its price fluctuates BTC is being adopted by mainstream financial entities, including PayPal.
The quest for Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin creator, is ongoing and a recent article at Bitcoin.com speculated that Russian fintec entrepreneur, Sergey Nazarov, is Satoshi Nakamoto.
How did the article’s author reach that conclusion?
Sergey Nazarov is not Satoshi Nakamoto – Photo by Roger Brown from Pexels
By misinterpreting the WHOIS information for the domain name SmartContract.com.
Registered on October 28, 2008, the domain’s registration date is only days before Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper was published on Halloween 2008.
Would that make Sergey Nazarov, founder of Chainlink, a prime “suspect” regarding the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto?
By digging into the WHOIS history of the domain SmartContract.com we see that it was originally registered in 1999 but dropped and it was re-registered in 2006, only to drop again two years later.
Nothing from the domain’s registrant data indicates that Sergey Nazarov owned or operated the domain in late 2008. Nazarov’s name appears in the domain’s WHOIS only on October 1, 2014, indicating that he acquired the domain name SmartContract.com for his business, Smart Contract, which he launched in September 2014.
It’d be impossible for Sergey Nazarov to have been Satoshi Nakamoto, as he only joined the cryptocurrency universe in 2011.
Moral of the story: without access to historic WHOIS data that DomainTools provides, it’s easy to jump to conclusions and associate a domain name’s original owners with the current one.
