Bitcoin is the first implementation of a concept known as “cryptographic currency”, first described in 1998 by Wei Dai in the “Cypherpunks” email list, where he proposed the idea of a new type of money using cryptography to control its creation and transactions, instead of having a centralized authority doing so. The first specification of the Bitcoin protocol and testing of the concept was published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 in an e-mail list. Satoshi abandoned the project at the end of 2010 without revealing much about his person. Since then, the community has grown exponentially and has numerous developers working on the Bitcoin protocol.

Satoshi’s anonymity has often raised unjustified suspicions, many of them caused by the lack of comprehension regarding the open code on which Bitcoin is based. The Bitcoin protocol and its software are openly published and any programmer from anywhere in the world can review it or create its own modified version of the software. As with current programmers, Satoshi’s influence has been limited to having the changes it made adopted by the others and, therefore, he did not control Bitcoin. Thus, learning the identity of the inventor of the Bitcoin is just as relevant as knowing who invented paper.  

Source: www.bitcoin.org