What Does Satoshi Nakamoto Look Like? AI Provides Some Answers

We used AI to speculate what the mysterious creator of Bitcoin looked like. Here are the results.

By Jason Nelson

Image: Midjourney

The greatest unanswered question in crypto (aside from when will the U.S. create intelligible rules and regulations) is: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? While some have claimed to be the enigmatic creator of Bitcoin and others have had their lives turned upside down by media speculation, the mystery continues.

So I figured that now that AI appears to know and see all, maybe it could give us a glimpse into what Satoshi may look like.

I started with ChatGPT4, which doesn’t generate images but is the AI text engine that is eating the world these days. I asked it what prompt I should use for its sister AI, Dall-E. It recommended: “Generate a series of artistic renderings that imagine the possible appearance of Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. Feel free to explore various styles, ethnicities, and time periods while incorporating visual elements related to cryptocurrency and technology in the illustrations.”

Cool, cool. I fed that into Midjourney, curious to see what would come out.

The first one that popped out was a Jedi Knight, an Obi-Wan Kenobi-type character. Clearly, Midjourney has been watching too much Star Wars:

The next one looked equally mythic:

But then it went on a different tangent and coughed up a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Dumbledore:

For some reason, all of these Nakamotos have beards, which is weird. Or maybe that’s how Midjourney interpreted “mysterious?” Whatever.

Next, I fed that prompt into DALL-E and got this, which is definitely worthy of a T-shirt:

Then for giggles, I used the same prompt but asked for a photo:

WTF? Battahoch? Battahoch. Even ChatGPT4 was baffled: “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t find any information on the term 'Battahoch.' It could be a typo or a word from a fictional work, a specific subculture, or a term that has not gained widespread recognition.”

But let’s not stop there. A thriving movement in Web3 says, “Satoshi is Female,” I asked Midjourney and Dall-E to imagine what this mysterious woman might look like.

Definitely mysterious in a kind of Botticelli/Venus-y way. And there were two almost anime-like treatments:

Some theories suggest that Nakamoto is a collective of people interested in digital money back in the days of the cypherpunks mailing list when Nakamoto first contacted Hal Finney about his new creation. Proponents of the “Satoshi is a group of people” theory include Finney, Blockstream CEO Adam Back, OG cryptographer Nick Szabo, and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin in that group. Suitably prompted, here’s what the Satoshi Conglomerate looks like:

Wow, Lubin really looks like Walter White.

Finally, I tried running the usual suspects through Playground, and what it produced was, well, the stuff of bad dreams:

In fact, I am sorry I ever started down this path.