Who created Bitcoin?
More than 16 years ago, on Halloween Day of 2008, an entity by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto sent out the whitepaper for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system to a cypherpunk email list. Bitcoin launched shortly thereafter; it quickly spawned a global cultural movement and a multi-trillion dollar industry.
Benjamin Wallace wrote a piece on the phenomenon for WIRED in November 2011, making him one of the very first mainstream journalists to ever cover the crypto space. Back then, nobody seemed to know Nakamoto’s identity, and despite robust efforts, Wallace couldn’t figure it out either.
Amusingly, the author of “The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine” (2009) was sucked back into the enigma in 2022 after receiving persistent emails from an ex-Tesla employee who was absolutely convinced that Elon Musk was Nakamoto all along. Wallace stays clear of that particular theory, but he lays out his own findings in “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto,” a 342-page investigation set for release on March 18.
The conclusion? Well, by the end of it, Wallace is forced to admit that he failed to solve the Nakamoto riddle once again. But his obsession yielded a thoughtful survey of Bitcoin’s history with a special emphasis on the cypherpunks whose ideas contributed to the cryptocurrency’s birth. “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” is a perfect work for crypto veterans and beginners alike who are curious to know more about Bitcoin’s origins; in that respect, it’s comparable to Laura Shin’s “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” (2022), which focuses on Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum’s early days.
Wallace shuffles through a long list of suspects throughout the book. His favourites include Hal Finney, the recipient of the first-ever bitcoin transaction; Nick Szabo, who designed a digital currency in the 1990s called “bit gold”; Len Sassaman, one of the main developers and operators of the Mixmaster remailer; the relatively obscure cypherpunk James A. Donald; and longtime Bitcoin critic Ben Laurie.
One of the things that makes “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” a fun read is that you can watch Wallace slowly go insane as he bounces back and forth between these names. Each time he narrows it down to one person, a new piece of information rolls in and detonates his theory. Wallace deserves credit for his multi-faceted approach to the affair. He makes abundant use of stylometry for Nakamoto’s emails and code, deeply investigates circumstantial evidence, interviews almost all of the potential candidates, and even learns to code to get a better grasp of what the cypherpunks are talking about.
Looming over the investigation, of course, is the debate over whether Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity even matters in the first place. There has been renewed interest in the question lately, between HBO’s “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” documentary (which came out last fall) and VanEck’s head of digital assets Matthew Sigel stating in February that he believed Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey created Bitcoin.
As Wallace notes, Nakamoto’s identity is one of the great secrets of the 21st century. With Wall Street and the White House beginning to fully embrace the crypto sector, there is perhaps a feeling that putting a face on Bitcoin’s inventor is necessary to make the digital asset a little cleaner and safer to integrate into the global financial system.
Nakamoto’s identity is crucial because its discovery would impact the way people see Bitcoin, Wallace argues. Crypto folks, he says, prefer to think of Satoshi as a kind of promethean figure that unleashed Bitcoin as a gift to mankind before disappearing for the greater good. But what if Nakamoto was an outright criminal like former cartel boss Paul Le Roux who simply cannot access his private keys because he’s behind bars? Would BlackRock and Fidelity still race to recommend exposure to the cryptocurrency to their clients?
Wallace eventually sort of settles on the idea that Hal Finney probably took part in Bitcoin’s creation, but that he likely wasn’t working alone, and that in any case any theory is almost impossible to verify without Nakamoto providing irrevocable proof. But “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” is crafted intelligently and the lack of resolution does not feel anti-climactic. At the end of the day, it’s all about the chase.
“What could we possibly learn from Nakomoto’s biography?” Wallace muses at some point, after a friend of his suggests the story would be better without an answer. “That he was a random professor who’d had a lucky brainstorm? No, what was most interesting about Nakamoto was his absence. He was defined by what we didn’t know about him.”
