I've spent more time on ID'ing the character(s) known as 'Satoshi' than is good for me and think I have a fair idea who they are, but it isn't bullet-proof. Even if I had it I would not publish their names here. HN'ers are smart enough to do their own work without having it done for them, and clearly those people prefer to be anonymous, so if you do figure it out better keep it to yourself.

The section on Satoshi's identity found in the Wikipedia article [1] for Bitcoin seems rather persuasive:

Investigations into the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto have been attempted by The New Yorker and Fast Company. Fast Company's investigation brought up circumstantial evidence that indicated a link between an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name which was registered 72 hours later. The patent application (#20100042841) contained networking and encryption technologies similar to bitcoin's. After textual analysis, the phrase "...computationally impractical to reverse" was found in both the patent application and bitcoin's whitepaper. All three inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Identity

Did any, or all three, of those individuals all of a sudden become wealthy over the past couple years? I imagine whoever created BTC is a multi-millionaire now due to having all the initial mined coins.

If they were smart enough to stay anonymous this long, they are smart enough to not suddenly park a bentley in their parking spot at the office.

Those initial coins have mostly not been used. You can verify that for yourself.

This is actually one of the strangest things about it tbh. How can there be over 1 million unsold early adopter bitcoins? They can't all be lost and the people who held on to them through the $250 peak have some serious self-restraint

Why is this strange? The early clients did mining by default in the background, and per-block difficulty was very slow. It does not take very many people playing with it for a few weeks and throwing away wallets to get to 1 million lost bitcoins

I read on bitcointalk.org (so take with a grain of salt) that a new wallet was used for the initial blocks, so there are 50 coins in each of ~40k wallets.

It's entirely possible that early on they used throw away wallets while testing and the alleged $100m in "early coins" are all inaccessible.

The client uses a new address for each block.

Maybe they're (a) not particularly interested in money and/or (b) waiting to see how the legal situation for Ⓑ turns out in another decade or so.

>"the people who held on to them" //

Or person presumably?

To be fair, only braindead or highly misinformed people thought Stuxnet could have been high school students. No one who looked at it thought that.