The mysterious founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, could be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics 2016.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, is an award for outstanding contributions to the field of economics. This year's winner was Angus Deaton for his "analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare".
Nakamoto could be a real name or pseudonym for a person or group who created Bitcoin - a digital currency - in 2009. Nakamoto was involved in the development of the open source software until 2010 before handing over and fading from the community.
Nakamoto has one white paper titled, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", which was posted on the Internet in May 2009. Most Nobel nominees have been published several times in numerous respected journals.
Bhagwan Chowdhry, a finance professor at UCLA Anderson School, wrote a piece on Huffington Post about why he decided to nominate Satoshi Nakamoto for the prize.
When the professor was asked to nominate someone, he says his thinking steered towards looking for an individual whose ideas were likely to have a disruptive influence in the 21st century.
"The name of the inventor of Bitcoin suddenly jumped up in my consciousness and I have not been able to get it out of my mind since then, Satoshi Nakamoto."
Chowdhry says the invention of Bitcoin is "nothing short of revolutionary".
He says the implications of Bitcoin are immense. "This will likely create an open, decentralised, public infrastructure for moving money as easily as e-mail, but with security and nearly zero transaction costs.
"But beyond demonstrating the possibility of creating a reliable digital currency, Nakamoto's Bitcoin protocol has spawned exciting innovations in the fintech space by showing how many financial contracts can be digitised, securely verified and stored, and transferred instantaneously from one party to another."
When Nakamoto 'left' the Bitcoin community he had over $100 000 000 worth of Bitcoins in his account. This money has not been touched since.
Chowdhry is among a few hundred people asked to nominate names for the Nobel prize.
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