I am Ryoshi

Much as we all may be in love with SHIB, we still don’t know jack about its creator - one named Ryoshi. Let’s pull on our tinfoil hats for a sec and imagine that Ryoshi is none other than a “Satoshi Nakamoto reborn”. After seeing Bitcoin abused by the devious whales and billionaires, Satoshi must’ve denounced his creation, now becoming Ryoshi and giving his vision of a decentralized community a second shot, this time with a brand new token - SHIB.

An intriguing story, albeit one that smells of drivel.

After a lot of research of the measly few facts available on this mysterious person, we've been able to narrow it down some and draw a picture of who might be lurking behind that name.

He’s unlikely to be Japanese.

We all know Ryoshi means “fisherman” in Japanese.

Also, by virtue of his name and his own statement, we know he’s a guy.

However, take this one with a pinch of salt - Ryoshi could very well be pulling our legs posing as a guy (while actually being a girl), same as we could tell you we’re a bunch of lizard people. But we’ll settle for him being a guy for now.

Now, by logic Ryoshi must be an alias. Otherwise, why use your real name if above all you want to stay under the radar? That, and because people today are all about cloak-and-dagger stuff.

Now, can you imagine a Japanese guy actually picking “fisherman” for his alias? It’s likely Ryoshi simply liked the way the name sounds in English without knowing/caring about its real meaning. Which rules out Ryoshi being from Japan.

However, it doesn’t rule out his having visited the place at some point, where he met a friend of his.

The way that sentence is structured hints at Ryoshi not being from Osaka, rather he was there for the devcon, like others.

Western then?

For all we know, he could be from Alpha Centauri. However, it’s not what Ryoshi writes on his blog, it’s how he writes it that gives us a clue. If one’s attentive enough, it’s easy to spot Ryoshi using vocabulary that is rather too “native” and “cultural” to be used by someone from outside an English speaking country.

Examples are:

…rumor bois tried to spread, they are way too centralized and will always be so.

Notice Ryoshi making a joke, referring to “boys” as “bois” and using the American spelling of the word “centralise”. Now, this doesn’t rule out the guy just being a savvy internet dweller, who’d picked up lots of Western slang over the years.

Here’s another one.

“wen shibaswap”

Another example of what is clearly an “overly native” thing to say, courtesy of Ryoshi’s official Twitter account.

“We Do it for teh ppl.”

Urban Dictionary has its own opinion on the usage of the word ‘teh’.

Hodler?

What we know for sure is that looking for Ryoshi among the top whales holding SHIB is pointless, since the guy made it clear in his 2021 blog that he doesn’t have any tokens in his possession.

Or does he? According to his 2020 blog, Ryoshi said he did in fact buy a portion of SHIB the same year, which contradicts his 2021 statement that he “still to this day owns 0 SHIB” as in “never did and still don’t”.

How to interpret that kind of contradiction is up to everyone. 

Dev?

Ryoshi is not on the current dev team. After founding SHIB, he pretty much handed it over to the community to run and develop as they see fit.

More than that, he has been awfully inactive on social media since 2021. His last post on Twitter dates back May 29, 2021.

Could be he made good on his promise to quit one day, leaving the community to develop autonomously.