Who created Bitcoin?
More than 16 years ago, Halloween Day of 2008, an entity with the name of Satoshi Nakamoto sent the technical document for an electronic cash system between pairs to a Cypherpunk email list. Bitcoin threw himself shortly after; It quickly generated a global cultural movement and a multimillionaire industry.
Benjamin Wallace wrote an article about the phenomenon for Wired in November 2011, which makes it one of the first main journalists to cover the cryptographic space. At that time, no one seemed to know Nakamoto’s identity, and despite the solid efforts, Wallace could not solve it either.
Funny, the author of “The Vinegar of the billionaire: the mystery of the most expensive wine bottle in the world” (2009) was absorbed by the enigma in 2022 after receiving persistent emails from a former Tesla employee who was absolutely convinced that Elon Musk was Nakamoto all the time. Wallace remains away from that particular theory, but establishes its own findings in “The mysterious Mr. Nakamoto”, a 342 -page investigation for its launch on March 18.
Read more: Marc Hochstein – Satoshi Nakamoto: The mystery that (probably) will never be resolved
The conclusion? Well, in the end, Wallace is forced to admit that he could not solve Nakamoto’s riddle once again. But his obsession produced a reflexive survey of Bitcoin’s history with a special emphasis on cypherpunks whose ideas contributed to the birth of cryptocurrency. “The mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” is a perfect job for cryptographic veterans and beginners, just as they are curious to know more about the origins of Bitcoin; In that sense, it is comparable to “The Cryptopes: idealism, greed, lies, and the creation of the first great madness of cryptocurrencies” (2022), which focuses on the first days of Vitalik Bugerin and Ethereum.
Wallace crosses a long list of suspects throughout the book. His favorites include Hal Finney, the recipient of the first 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 dark cypherpunk James A. Donald; and Bitcoin’s critic for a long time Ben Laurie.
One of the things that “Mr. Nakamoto“ A fun reading is that you can see Wallace go crazy while bouncing between these names. Every time he reduces him to a person, new information enters and detonates his theory. Wallace deserves credit for its multifaceted approach to the matter. It makes abundant use of style for emails and the Nakamoto code, deeply investigates the circumstantial evidence, interview with almost all potential candidates and even learn to encode to obtain a better understanding of what Cypherpunks are talking about.
It is coming about the investigation, of course, it is the debate on whether the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is even important in the first place. Lately he has renewed interest in the question, among the documentary “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” of HBO (who came out the past fall) and the chief of digital assets of Vaneck, Matthew Sigel, said in February that he believed that Twitter co -founder Jack Dardsey created Bitcoin.
As Wallace points out, Nakamoto’s identity is one of the great secrets of the 21st century. With Wall Street and the White House that begin to completely embrace the cryptographic sector, perhaps there is a feeling that it is necessary to put a face in the Bitcoin inventor so that the digital asset is a little cleaner and more safe to integrate into the global financial system.
Nakamoto’s identity is crucial because his discovery would affect the way people see Bitcoin, Wallace argues. Cryptographic people, they say, prefer to think of Satoshi as a kind of figure promises that unleashed Bitcoin as a gift for humanity before disappearing for the greater good. But what would happen if Nakamoto was an absolute criminal as the former head of the poster Paul Le Roux who simply cannot access his private keys because he is behind bars? Blackrock and Fidelity would continue to run to recommend exposure to cryptocurrency to their customers?
Wallace finally forms the idea that Hal Finney probably participated in the creation of Bitcoin, but that he was probably not working alone, and that in any case any theory is almost impossible to verify without Nakamoto providing irrevocable evidence. But “Mr. Nakamoto” is prepared intelligently and lack of resolution does not feel anti -limitic. At the end of the day, it is the persecution.
“What could we learn from Nakomoto’s biography?” Wallace reflects at some point, after a friend suggests that the story would be better without an answer. “What was a random teacher who had had a rain of ideas luckily? No, the most interesting of Nakamoto was his absence. Was defined by what we No know about him. “
