In Hungary, a bronze monument honoring Bitcoin's mysterious inventor has been erected.
According to the statue's designers, it is the first in the world to honor Satoshi Nakamoto, an alias for the Bitcoin inventor or inventors, whose individuality is unknown.
The statue was presented at a technological park in Budapest, Hungary's capital, which also has an Apple founder Steve Jobs memorial.
Andras Gyorfi, a Bitcoin columnist and the project's founder, described Satoshi as "the founding father of the whole cryptocurrency business." "He has been the deity of our market since he invented Bitcoin and blockchain technology."
The statue of Nakamoto has a simple face and is dressed in a bronze sweatshirt with the Bitcoin logo on it. It is also highly polished, giving it the appearance of a mirror in which spectators may see themselves.
Its designers, sculptors Reka Gergely and Tamas Gilly sought to depict a human figure while maintaining Nakamoto's anonymity.
"It was a big challenge. It is challenging to make a portrait sculpture of a person that we don't know exactly what they look like," Gilly reported The Associated Press. "I hope that through the language of sculpture, I have managed to convey the basic idea of Bitcoin, that it belongs to everyone and no one at the same time."
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Bitcoin was developed in 2008 to circumvent conventional financial institutions by creating safe technology for peer-to-peer internet transactions without the need of middlemen such as banks.
Nakamoto - a pseudonym that may allude to a person or group of individuals of unknown gender, age, or country origin - wrote the company's first white paper released that year.
According to Gyorfi, the organizers of the monument project invited Nakamoto to the unveiling in the hopes of finally discovering the Bitcoin inventor's real identity.
Even though the event drew hundreds of people, no one claimed credit for creating the cryptocurrency that has drawn tens of millions of investors.
