Has Bitcoin’s Elusive Creator Finally Been Unmasked?

A decade and a half ago, some unknown person or persons assumed the name Satoshi Nakamoto and cast Bitcoin loose upon the world. In the beginning, the idea was greeted with idle condescension: check out these grandiose Internet dorks and their digital Monopoly money. Soon enough, these “fake” coins found very real uses—to purchase heroin, launder criminal profits, or solicit murder-for-hire—and the sneering of outsiders turned to scorn. A few years went by and all of a sudden crypto speculators were rolling in Lambos, and normie reproach gave way to jealous ridicule: these were Ponzi schemes for vulgar tech bros. More recently, they’ve become yet another asset class, an increasingly routine hypothecation in any diversified investment portfolio. In all of this, Satoshi Nakamoto’s original achievement has been obscured. Bitcoin presented a genuinely new mechanism for human coördination. For the first time, a community of far-flung strangers could maintain a collective record of its interactions without the supervision of a third party.

The ideas behind Bitcoin were not unprecedented. In the early nineteen-nineties, a group of people who called themselves “cypherpunks” coalesced on esoteric and prescient Listservs, where they collaborated to prepare for and perhaps stave off the coming of the digital panopticon. None of the tools of that era—eCash, B-money, hashcash—really panned out until Satoshi came along. The Bitcoin white paper, which was released in October, 2008, and the Bitcoin code, which followed shortly thereafter, have at times been disdained as clever bits of engineering pastiche. It seems fairer to say that they were works of genius. They also seem to have made Satoshi very rich. In 2011, once the network had reached a critical mass of users, Satoshi disappeared into the ether whence he came. But, before that happened, he had no choice but to do a lot of the “mining” himself. The wallets associated with Satoshi are presumed to contain up to 1.1 million coins, for a total current value of about sixty-nine billion dollars. This fortune has lain dormant since it was minted. The matter of Satoshi’s identity remains the greatest abiding mystery of an otherwise disenchanted era.

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