Why was the genius programmer who developed Winny arrested?

Who is Kaneko Isamu?

Kaneko Isamu was a genius programmer who died young in 2013. He is known for the development of the software Winny, which will be described later, and the Winny incident, which remains in the history of the Japanese Internet and IT.

Even now, many people are saddened by Kaneko's talent, and a movie about Kaneko and the Winny incident starring Masahiro Higashide will be released in 2023. It has even been said that "if the Winny incident had not happened and if Kaneko were still alive, the history of Japanese IT might have changed dramatically."

There is even a theory that Kaneko is the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. This is because Winny, which Kaneko invented, has many similarities to the blockchain.

It is also the reason why many people think that it would not be surprising if Kaneko had invented the blockchain. It is predicted that if Kaneko had not been caught up in the Winny incident and had still been active at the forefront of the Internet industry, Japan's IT history would have been very different.

What is Winny?

So, what kind of software was Winny, developed by Kaneko?

Winny is a P2P file sharing software developed in 2002. In the early 2000s, Internet lines were being developed worldwide, and the culture of Internet users exchanging and sharing large data files was gradually spreading.

Many software programs called file sharing software were created that were specialized for such purposes, and Winny was one of them.

Winny was a system in which computers connected to the network around the world were used as file transfer relay points, and it was a system in which it was impossible to determine who was transferring data from who to whom, who the sender of the data was, or what data was stored on the computers used as relay points.

In other words, users were anonymous and became senders and receivers of data to each other.

From another perspective, this system can be said to use the large-scale network called Winny, which is operated by multiple computers, as a virtual file storage system. This huge network is maintained by multiple computers distributed around the world.

In addition, computers around the world can be data senders and relay points, and Winny's network has the characteristic of never going down (stopping operation).

P2P software existed before Winny, but it is no exaggeration to say that Winny was the first to be successfully used by many people as a practical P2P network.