**Two Antagonistic Responses**

What do Satoshi Nakamoto and Nicolas van Saberhagen have in common?

I'm not saying they're the same person, but rather that there is a characteristic that unites these two cryptographic developers.

They both share the same shadow: they choose to disappear so that their work can speak for itself.

Answer 1: the cypherpunk

Satoshi publishes Bitcoin and vanishes once the network is up and running.
Nicolas van Saberhagen appears only as the author of CryptoNote and also fades into anonymity.

They are united by that rare combination of technical genius, privacy maximalism, and zero interest in capitalizing on fame. They create game-changing infrastructure and, instead of climbing onto the pedestal, they break the pedestal and move on.

Both understood that, in decentralized systems, the figure of the creator is at risk of capture and cult status. And so they erase themselves.

A decision as cold as it is elegant.

Answer 2: the conspiracy theorist

Both developers are part of a government team (NSA or similar) that installs blockchain technology with different focuses: a traceable and untraceable ledger.

Like the precursor to the internet, ARPA, created in the late 1960s by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Tor, created by the US Naval Research Laboratory in the mid-1990s, to control them in ways we don't even know yet.