miner from the second week of the blockchain’s life says hi

A brand-new member of the BitcoinTalk forums shared a signature proving that he was involved in mining Bitcoin (BTC) just one week after the network launched.

A Nov. 15 forum topic asked other users to sign a message with the addresses that they mined their oldest blocks with and post it. A user named “OneSignature” posted a signature made with an address attributed to a public key which was involved in mining block 1018, just one week after Bitcoin was born.

Users on the form were excited to see a user that was involved since the very early days of Bitcoin still be active on the forums where much of its community still lives. Multiple users suggested that the user may even be Satoshi Nakamoto — Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator — himself.

A search using open source username footprinting software Sherlock reveals a total of nine accounts using the same username as the BitcoinTalk user. After investigating each one of them, one that particularly stands out is a Twitter account.

The Twitter account in question uses “OneSignature” as its username and “Andy” as its public name, follows 28 accounts, is followed by just one account and was created in October 2009. The accounts privacy settings hide nearly every information — including tweets, followers and followed accounts — but the profile image gives a few hints to the account owner’s interest in Bitcoin.

Not only an image reading “Don’t trust anyone” is something that crypto experts would expect a Bitcoiner to have as their profile image, but a reverse image search reveals that the image is much more closely related to the space. When looking for the image source, Google shows results from Twitter account @SatoshiPlus_ — a profile with a clear cryptocurrency focus.

The OneSignature Twitter profile may be completely unrelated to the BitcoinTalk forums user, but the aforementioned hints make it seem likely that they are indeed the same person. Other accounts found with that name is a now-inactive Canadian Chess.com account, a cosmetics-focused 2009 blog, an unused WordPress blog created in 2011.

A more interesting find is a YouTube account apparently owned by a man interested in Chinese music, dogs and watches who found himself amid 2011’s United States — presumably San Francisco — Bay Area ice rain. The man — who in one video was in company of presumably Asian-language speaking people in a home — has seen a couple of interesting comments appear under his video over the last 24 hours.

“Are you Satoshi?” is the question raised by YouTube user I Hodl in a comment posted under an 11-year old video showing Ice Rain in the aforementioned Bay Area. A similar crypto-focused comment appeared under a video showing a Chihuahua puppy play fight with a Shiba Inu, the dog race shown in the Doge meme that inspired Dogecoin (DOGE). I Hodl wrote a comment referencing Dogecoin clone Shiba Inu (SHIB):

“What are the odd[sic] of Satoshi also creator of SHIB.”

So far the identity of BitcoinTalk’s OneSingature remains a mystery, and it may very well remain a secret forever.