On April 7, 2022, PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel delivered the keynote speech at the annual Bitcoin Conference in Miami. He railed against the so-called enemies of Bitcoin, like Warren Buffett and Larry Funk, whom he called “extensions of the state.”
The true believers of bitcoin, unlike these corporate stooges, weren’t part of a company and had no board.
“We do not know who Satoshi is,” Thiel told the crowd.
He was referring to Satoshi Nakamoto, the man who invented bitcoin, and had become an “elusive figure who might or might not exist,” writes Benjamin Wallace in his book “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto” (Crown), released on March 18.
Back in 2008, Nakamoto was just the “no-name coder of an experimental money that was of interest mainly to a fringe community,” writes Wallace.
When he first introduced bitcoin, its market value was $0.00099, or one-tenth of one cent.
But by 2022, it was hovering around $42,000 per bitcoin. Nakamoto’s creation had become “the ninth most valuable asset in the world, just below Tesla and above Meta,” writes Wallace.
But then in the spring of 2011, Nakamoto disappeared. He stopped communicating with the outside world.
He owns just over 1 million bitcoin, worth $100 billion (at least), putting him in the top 20 of the world’s richest people. But as of this writing, he remains a complete unknown.
Why has Nakamoto gone to such lengths to avoid the spotlight?
“The modern history of science has provided no precedent for someone who conceived a revolutionary technology and brought it into the world without taking credit,” writes Wallace.
It’s a fascinating mystery in a world where mysteries are rapidly ceasing to exist. We’ve long since known the identity of Bob Woodward’s “Deep Throat” secret source, and of Joe Klein, the “anonymous” author who penned “Primary Colors,” the scandalous account of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.
But Nakamoto had somehow become the “mythic founder of a project with a $1 trillion market capitalization,” writes Wallace, despite nobody having any clue who he was or what he looked like.
Bitcoin was first introduced on Halloween 2008, in a nine-page white paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” outlining Nakamoto’s design that didn’t rely on a bank’s or government’s database of debits and credits. In the beginning, it was mostly embraced by programmers who believed conventional currency was badly in need of an update.
Bitcoin “was immune to meddling by central powers,” writes Wallace. “Unlike bars of gold, bitcoin couldn’t be seized. Unlike a bank account, it couldn’t be frozen. Unlike a national currency, it couldn’t be devalued at the whim of a central bank or subjected to capital controls by a dictator. Unlike credit cards and bank wires, it didn’t involve excessive transaction fees.”
As time went on and bitcoin was slowly embraced by the mainstream, Nakamoto became almost as famous as his creation. Over the last few years, rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, sported a baseball hat with Nakamoto’s name, a bronze statue of Nakamoto was erected in Budapest, and MS Satoshi, a cryptocurrency cruise ship, recruited settlers “for the world’s first sovereign Bitcoin-powered society,” writes Wallace. Several economists and technologists have argued that Nakamoto, despite being shrouded in secrecy, deserves a Nobel Prize.
Details on Nakamoto are sketchy at best. He claimed in online profiles to be Japanese, but none of his followers believe that. “His English was flawless, with the supple confidence of a native speaker,” writes Wallace. “He sounded British, or at least from a Commonwealth country.”
Nakamoto also went to extreme lengths to conceal his identity, from using an email server that manipulated the date and time that his emails were sent, to dodging personal questions even from his closest collaborators.
There have been plenty of theories. Some suspected that Nakamoto was actually Neal Stephenson, the novelist whose “Cryptonomicon” had anticipated digital money. Or Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks. Or even Elon Musk, who one SpaceX intern argued must be the bitcoin creator because they both “spoke of ‘order of magnitude’ reasoning and used the word ‘bloody.’ ”
Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen said “he didn’t think Nakamoto even had a computer science background,” writes Wallace. “It made him think that Nakamoto might be a professor.” Gwern Branwen, a security researcher and dark web analyst, wrote that Nakamoto “could be anybody.”
Because bitcoin was just a clever bundling of existing technologies, “Satoshi need have no credentials in cryptography, or be anything but a self-taught programmer,” Branwen suggested.
Why had Nakamoto even gone into hiding? Bitcoiners wondered if he’d disappeared to avoid being prosecuted for tax evasion, or to avoid criminals trying to steal his vast bitcoin fortune. “The common view was that he’d acted selflessly,” writes Wallace. “The most zealous Bitcoiners treated Nakamotology as a sort of blasphemy, as if they were Scientologists being asked about Xenu.”
It was also possible that Nakamoto could be several people. After all, the bitcoin white paper had used “we” rather than “I.” Some noticed that Nakamoto’s name could be a portmanteau of big tech-company names: SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, MOTOrola. “So maybe a corporate cabal was behind it,” writes Wallace.
Wallace tracked down many of the biggest suspects, and they all denied being the reclusive genius. From amateur cryptographer Wei Dai (“Satoshi is not me,” Dai assured the author) to Bit Gold creator Nick Szabo (“[Nakamoto] has made a great contribution to the world and in return I want to respect his privacy,” Szabo told him) to Hal Finney, a cypherpunk diagnosed with ALS (“I wish I had created something as potentially world-changing as bitcoin,” he said. “Under my current circumstances, facing limited life expectancy, I would have little to lose by shedding anonymity. But it was not I.”)
But many in the bitcoin community are fine with the mystery. In fact, they relish it. At the first bitcoin conference in New York in 2011, the hottest merch was a T-shirt that read “I AM SATOSHI.” The question of the bitcoin creator’s identity and whereabouts “loomed over the conference,” writes Wallace. “Might he be here among us?”
Nakamoto’s anonymity is largely seen as “a feature rather than a bug,” writes Wallace. “To be truly decentralized required that bitcoin have a virgin birth. Depriving it of a human figurehead — a flawed individual with a particular identity that might be palatable to this group but not to that one — gave it the best shot of being received on its own terms and taken up en masse.”
To this day, the real Nakamoto has yet to step forward. And that’s likely the only way we’ll ever learn the truth. There’s no treasure chest to discover by piecing together the right clues.
“The closest anyone else could theoretically get would be if Nakamoto had made a misstep or confided in someone,” writes Wallace. “But as years passed, the trail, if there was one, grew ever fainter.”
That might be exactly as Nakamoto wants it. Maybe, writes Wallace, he’s made it impossible to find him “by throwing out his machines, his private keys, and his passwords to email accounts and never telling anyone his secret.”
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