All I've heard is naive theory of a lone man doing this, covering all his tracks like a covert agent yet not being one. A brilliant lone cryptography researcher whom no one ever heard of, never published anything before, who managed to obfuscate his activity from all his family and friends.
Nick Szabo and/or Hal Finney is the most credible theory outside of deep state theories. I have heard some pretty outrageous dark horses mooted, like Perelman, which I generally discount out of hand, but there's a pretty strong stylometric case for Szabo+Finney.
Those two guys were closest technologically (of well known public cryptographers) and Finney was first miner.
But it doesn't fit the personalty of Finney who is very chatty and loves humanity. He even wrote layman explanations of Chaum research papers, so he cares about the common man.
I don't know about Szabo. He was pitching "cypto bit gold" I believe in 2005? Why would he suddenly stop being public and go underground? In that case, do we know who he really works for any way.
Any way, this is going way off topic of the thread. All that matters is what is actually happening with Bitcoin.
We can see the Bitcoin results empirically. Centralization is no longer a theoretic outcome. And merchants taking BTC as a facade for fiat is growing faster than adoption.
And this impacts the valuation of Bitcoin.
I wish someone would do a regression analysis fit on the data so we can confirm empirically that rate of adoption (not nominal adoption size) is slowing. And hopefully be more precise.