A few years ago, I met up for coffee in Miami Beach with a person named Keith Rabois. Along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Rabois is a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia — the group that took that company public in 2002 and went on to develop a series of seminal Silicon Valley businesses.
The topic of Bitcoin came up, as it tended to do then. Rabois pointed out that PayPal’s original vision had been similar. “I still have T-shirts with the PayPal logo,” he said, “and on the back: ‘The New World Currency.’” He showed me a video of Thiel speaking in 1999, proposing a world of private currencies exchanged on cellphones, where governments would be forced to cede their monetary sovereignty. “That was the goal of the company, to reinvent finance,” Rabois said wistfully. “Turns out it was really hard.”
Even in 1999, the notion of a digital currency that bypassed nation-states and financial institutions was not a novel one. It had been fermenting for years in an ecosystem of online listservs, Bay Area potlucks and cryptography circles, where a nexus of crypto-anarchists and eccentric programmers experimented with an idea that seemed to them inevitable. It had appeared in the science fiction of Neal Stephenson and in techno-libertarian polemics like William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson’s “The Sovereign Individual.” But creating one that actually worked was, indeed, really hard.
Benjamin Wallace’s “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” is a new attempt to unmask the identity of the figure (or figures) who eventually did so, introducing Bitcoin in 2008 under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Wallace, a writer for New York magazine and Vanity Fair, is well suited to the task. His first article on Bitcoin appeared in Wired in 2011, only a few years into its existence. That year, he attended the first Bitcoin convention, in New York, where a small group of participants tried (and failed) to use crypto to pay for dinner.
As the price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed in the intervening years (and as its primary use case has evolved from being a medium of exchange to a theoretical store of value), the Satoshi puzzle has continued to prove irresistible to journalists. It also represents a particular instance of something like reportorial quicksand, leading mostly to public embarrassment or, more often, a kind of hazy but impassable indeterminacy. Nothing is ever really proved; nobody is ever entirely ruled out. For their part, Bitcoin boosters largely view these investigations as something between dull and blasphemous, a faceless founder being more useful both to the decentralized vision of the protocol and to the quasi-religious dimension that has emerged around it.
Anyone who has followed this story over the years will find this account to be, more or less, a survey of the usual suspects, if an entertaining one. Wallace spends a significant portion of the book, for instance, favoring the computer scientist Nick Szabo, a founder of the Bitcoin precursor BitGold and a longstanding subject of speculation. (The reporter Nathaniel Popper laid out the case for Szabo a decade ago in The New York Times.) Another portion is dedicated to the Australian pretender Craig Wright, whose saga has previously been told memorably and at great length by the novelist and London Review of Books contributor Andrew O’Hagan, Wright’s erstwhile ghostwriter.
Wallace draws up criteria for plausible candidates ranging from “coding quirks” to “emotional range.” He attempts both textual and code stylometry to see if Satoshi’s identity can be sussed out via statistical analysis. Nearly 200 pages in, he is still spinning his wheels: “I was making little headway in my own investigation and beginning to despair.” (A reader could be forgiven for feeling similarly.) When later he writes, “I’d always wondered whether the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto might turn out to be more compelling than its resolution,” one begins to discern the familiar shape of a shaggy dog story.
Most disappointing, perhaps, is that Wallace doesn’t meaningfully delve into some of the more left-field prospects to gain prominence over the years. There is the Bitcoin “lab leak” theory, for instance, in which Satoshi was a cryptology unit at the N.S.A. and Bitcoin an experiment that broke containment. Among other things, these theorists point to a 1996 paper published by the agency, “How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash” — enough to make it no less absurd than certain other possibilities (that Nakamoto is actually Elon Musk, for instance, the first candidate examined in the book).
If Wallace doesn’t close the case, he is an engaging narrator, and his book serves as a useful introduction to one of the century’s true riddles. It’s a mystery that will only become more salient as the current administration explores the concept of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, impishly quoting the community’s neo-“gold bug” ethos at White House crypto summits. Nevertheless, at least for the time being, a riddle is all it stubbornly remains.
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