Appendix B: Key Figures Profile

Adam Back: British cryptographer and inventor of Hashcash. The Proof-of-Work (PoW) concept used in Hashcash was later adopted by Satoshi Nakamoto as Bitcoin's core consensus mechanism. He is the co-founder and CEO of blockchain company Blockstream and an important contributor to the Bitcoin Core community.

Gavin Andresen: American software developer who was chosen by Satoshi Nakamoto as Bitcoin's "successor." After Satoshi's "disappearance" in 2010, Andresen became the primary maintainer of Bitcoin's core code and founded the Bitcoin Foundation. He later became a major advocate for the "big block" scaling solution.

Hal Finney: American cryptographer and core figure in the cypherpunk movement. Besides Satoshi Nakamoto, he was the first person to run Bitcoin software and received the first Bitcoin transaction in history. He is highly respected for his contributions to Bitcoin's early development and his optimistic spirit.

Jed McCaleb: American programmer and entrepreneur who founded the Mt.Gox exchange but quickly sold it. He later co-founded Ripple, then left due to ideological differences and founded Stellar. He is one of the most prolific and controversial serial entrepreneurs in the cryptocurrency field.

Mark Karpelès: French programmer who was the second owner and CEO of Mt.Gox exchange. During his tenure, Mt.Gox became the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, but ultimately collapsed in 2014 due to mismanagement and hacking attacks, triggering a major crisis in Bitcoin's history.

Nick Szabo: American computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer who first proposed the concept of "smart contracts" in 1994 and designed the Bit Gold system in 1998. Bit Gold is conceptually considered Bitcoin's most direct predecessor. Due to his theoretical contributions and the high similarity to Bitcoin, many suspect he is Satoshi Nakamoto himself, though he denies this.

Ross Ulbricht: Founder of the darknet marketplace "Silk Road" under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts." Silk Road was the first platform to adopt Bitcoin as a payment tool on a large scale, promoting Bitcoin while also bringing significant negative controversy. He was arrested in 2013 and later sentenced to life imprisonment.

Satoshi Nakamoto: The pseudonymous founder of Bitcoin who published the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 and launched the Bitcoin network in 2009. After contributing to the project for about two years, he completely disappeared from the community in late 2010, and his true identity remains a mystery.

Vitalik Buterin: Russian-Canadian programmer and writer, co-founder and spiritual leader of Ethereum, known in the community as "V God." At age 19, he wrote the Ethereum whitepaper, proposing the revolutionary concept of building a Turing-complete, general-purpose smart contract platform, ushering in the blockchain 2.0 era.

Gavin Wood: British computer scientist, one of Ethereum's co-founders and former CTO. He wrote Ethereum's technical "Yellow Paper" and led the development of Ethereum's first functional implementation. He later left Ethereum, founded Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation, and created the Polkadot project, dedicated to solving cross-chain interoperability issues.

Charles Hoskinson: American mathematician and one of Ethereum's early co-founders. He left due to disagreements with Vitalik over whether the project should be non-profit. He later founded blockchain engineering company IOHK and launched the Cardano project, known for its rigorous, academically-driven development approach.

Wei Dai: Chinese-American cryptographer and early member of the cypherpunk movement. He proposed the b-money concept in 1998, an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system. B-money was one of the first schemes to systematically articulate PoW and distributed ledger concepts, explicitly cited by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin whitepaper.

David Chaum: American cryptographer hailed as the "father of digital cash." He proposed the eCash concept and its core technology "blind signatures" in the 1980s. His DigiCash company was the first commercial attempt in the digital cash field. Though it ultimately failed, his pursuit of privacy and anonymity profoundly influenced later cypherpunks and Bitcoin.

Charlie Lee: Chinese-American former Google engineer and founder of Litecoin. Litecoin is one of Bitcoin's earliest and most famous "fork coins," called "digital silver," aimed at providing a faster and more lightweight payment experience than Bitcoin.

Jihan Wu: Chinese entrepreneur and co-founder of mining giant Bitmain. Bitmain was once the world's largest Bitcoin mining machine manufacturer and mining pool operator, making Wu one of the most influential figures in the Bitcoin community. He is a major supporter of Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Brian Armstrong: American entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, one of the world's largest compliant cryptocurrency exchanges. Coinbase's successful IPO and compliant operations provided an important bridge for ordinary users and institutional investors to enter the crypto world.

Changpeng Zhao (CZ): Canadian-Chinese entrepreneur and founder of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. Binance rapidly rose with its rich product offerings, low fees, and strong market operations, profoundly impacting the global cryptocurrency market landscape.