❓Satoshi, who the heck are you?

Last week, NASA sent a group of brave explorers to live on Mars… sort of.

The Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) mission simulates life on Mars by putting four humans in a 3D-printed habitat in Houston for a year.

Who?

Four paid volunteers who we hope get along really well:

• Kelly Haston, a biologist
• Ross Brockwell, a structural engineer
• Nathan Jones, a physician
• Anca Selariu, a US Navy microbiologist

Selection criteria was the same as for any astronaut, requiring a combination of STEM, piloting, and/or military experience.

And they’re inside a 3D-printed habitat?

Yep. Icon, a company that builds 3D-printed homes, created the 1.7k-square-foot Mars Dune Alpha out of its proprietary building material, Lavacrete.

Inside are four tiny private bedrooms, workstations, a medical area, communal lounge areas, a kitchen, two bathrooms, and a place to grow food.

Outside is a 1.2k-square-foot area called the “sandbox.” It’s filled with red-dyed sand to mimic Mars’ surface during simulated spacewalks.

What are they doing?

This is the first of three yearlong missions planned inside the Mars Dune Alpha.

The participants’ 378–day stay will help NASA understand how to best serve human needs — e.g., nutrition, exercise, personal hygiene, mental health — on real missions to Mars in the future.

NASA will also study how the group copes with isolation in a confined space with limited resources, equipment failure, and other stressors.

Wanna see more? Here’s a video of the habitat from NASA.

There are no secrets online — except the identity of the person who developed bitcoin.

In October 2008, a paper by “Satoshi Nakamoto” was published online proposing “a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash” that would bypass financial institutions.

The byline has been an internet legend for nearly 15 years now, because, well, who is that? Somehow, we still don’t know.

More fakeouts than a bad horror movie

Ever since this person (or people?) invented the source code behind bitcoin, sleuths have continually tried to make a positive ID. Per Markets Insider, they’ve all been thwarted.

• A 2014 Newsweek article looked into physicist Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, but he denied involvement.
• A 2015 New York Times article pointed to computer scientist Nick Szabo. Szabo also denied it.
• In 2016, researcher Craig Steven Wright said he worked with computer scientist Dave Kleiman to invent bitcoin — only to have prominent crypto experts tear those claims down.
• Internet theories tying Nakamoto to Steve Jobs and Elon Musk have similarly been debunked.

Whoever they are, they’re rich

Crypto wallets associated with the name are estimated to hold 1m+ bitcoin tokens. At the currency’s 2021 peak, that haul would’ve been worth ~$70B.

That fortune hasn’t been traced to anyone, and there are otherwise very few clues to follow, per Forbes:

• Time stamps on Nakamoto’s old posts and emails led people to assume they primarily lived in the UK or the US.
• They “favour” British spellings, which doesn’t mean a whole lot.
• Their last email was sent in April 2011 and suggested they’d “moved onto other things.”

For now, the most solid things we’re left with: a blown mind — and a legacy. The “satoshi” remains bitcoin’s smallest denomination, with 100m satoshis equaling one bitcoin.