The twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff claim to have known Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.
The Bogdanoffs are former theoretical physicists, now essayists and presenters on French TV, but their claims have been widely doubted. Indeed, the editor-in-chief of the French newspaper Journal du Coin, Hellmouth Banner, claims that the twins “in terms of credibility, are equivalent to a scientific version of the Kardashian family”.
They recently participated in the TV show Non Stop People, and then in L’heure des PROS, during which they claimed to have participated, as mathematicians, in the elaboration of part of Bitcoin’s code, in particular the so-called “predictive code”.
In Bitcoin’s original code, and in Satoshi Nakamoto‘s whitepaper, there is actually no clear reference to the “predictive code “, so it is not clear what the twins are referring to.
The twins claim that in the early 1990s, almost two decades before the release of the first version of Bitcoin v0.1.0, they worked together with François Mizzi, the inventor of the touchscreen, whose lab included a Japanese scientist, Soïtchiro Shimoda.
According to their statements, Shimoda was “someone close to the mythical person or a group of people” called Satoshi Nakamoto, and the twins often discussed ideas about a digital currency with him.
The Bogdanoff twins and that “physical” bitcoin
They also added that Satoshi Nakamoto himself gave them two “ancient bitcoin” in “physical form” when the Bitcoin protocol was created in 2008.
This claim is perhaps the most absurd, because there are no actual bitcoin in physical form, other than commemorative metal medallions.
They have also been the subject of much controversy over the years, including the veracity of their academic credentials. There has even been a recent court case alleging that they defrauded a bipolar millionaire.
In the cryptocurrency industry, the Bogdanoffs are better known than people might think, because in 2018 a successful gag was published as part of a series of parody videos on the YouTube channel Bizonacci , which portrayed the Bogdanoffs as all-powerful market players conspiring against a crypto trader.
