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Satoshi Nakamoto could be unmasked if this hacker gets 25 Bitcoins

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A hacker is offering to reveal information that could unmask the anonymous founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.

The hacker, whose name is Jeffrey, claims he managed to get hold of the information by taking control of Nakamoto's email address; [email protected].

“The fool used a primary gmx under his full name and had aliases set up underneath it. He’s also alive," he told Wired. Jeffrey wrote in a pastebin post that he would publish the information if he was paid 25 Bitcoins, equivalent to £7,200.

Yesterday the administrator of the Bitcoin Talk forum Michael Marquardt, wrote:

Today I received an email from [email protected] (Satoshi’s old email address), the contents of which make me almost certain that the email account is compromised. The email was not spoofed in any way. It seems very likely that either Satoshi’s email account in particular or gmx.com in general was compromised, and the email account is now under the control of someone else. Perhaps [email protected] expired and then someone else registered it.”

Jeffrey did not tell Wired how he was able to gain control over the email address. However, on Nakamoto's P2P foundation page, Jeffrey addressed the creator of the world's most  successful cryptocurrency directly:

Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the darknet. Apparently, you didn’t configure Tor properly and your IP leaked when you used your email account sometime in 2010. You are not safe. You need to get out of where you are as soon as possible before these people harm you.

It remains unclear how much information Jeffrey really has on Bitcoin's elusive founder. However, Bitcoin developer Peter Todd tweeted that he had been forwarded old emails from the account from 2011.

The hack comes almost six months after the person assumed to be the real Nakamoto cast himself into the public eye once more to make clear that he was not Dorian Nakamoto, a man incorrectly attributed to be the creator of Bitcoin.