A deep dive into Bitcoin's enduring riddle: the identity of its inventor
CRYPTOCURRENCY
The Mysterious Mr Nakamoto
Benjamin Wallace
Atlantic, $45
In 2008, a white paper was published entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. It explained how existing technologies like proof of work, public key encryption and peer-to-peer network architecture could be assembled into a decentralised digital currency - the Bitcoin. The author, whose name was given only as Satoshi Nakamoto, had been active on internet forums and had built an implementation of the so-called Bitcoin - leaving clues to his identity - in code and word.
Then one day he disappeared. Over the past 16 years, the identity of the paper's author has been the matter of widespread speculation - with possible candidates running in the hundreds, mostly nerds, freaks and weirdos, along with a few starry-eyed optimists. It's generally assumed that Nakamoto is a mister but could be a group. And owing to Nakamoto's use of British English, this rogues' gallery even includes a few Australians - a bigot and a conman, most likely a serial liar.
The Mysterious Mr Nakamoto, by former WIRED writer Benjamin Wallace, journals a 15-year search for Nakamoto's true identity. From the beginning, his book shines less as a hunt than as an excuse to tell Bitcoin's florid history.
The general idea of cryptocurrency emerged from an online group called the Cypherpunks, of which Nakamoto was a member. These were a mix of crunchy Bay Area hippies who somehow found common cause with their ideological opposites: Randian libertarians. Both could agree that the post-global financial crisis bailouts were proof of rot in an antiquated system that new technologies could replace.
Today it takes an effort to cast one's mind back to an era of tech utopianism when technology was a solution to, rather than an entrenchment of, societal problems.
The belief was that recent advances in cryptography would provide anonymity while decentralisation would avert concentration of power and limit the financial corruption that had led to the crisis. Wallace notes similar efforts existed to Bitcoin but failed to catch on. Bitcoin was unique in its intuitive understanding of market and human psychologies.
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