Benjamin Wallace On Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin's Creator

Benjamin Wallace's new book is The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto.  

It's the greatest whodunit. Whoever created Bitcoin became the world's richest person, yet we don't know who he is. In fact, we don't even know if it's one person.

There have been other cases where identities have been hidden for a while:

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  Mysterious Whistleblowers (Deep Throat)

  
  


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  Mysterious Authors (Ferrante, Klein, Publius)

  
  


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  Mysterious Artists (Banksy)

  
  


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  Mysterious Spies / Hackers (Cambridge Five, QAnon figureheads, Cicada 3301)

  
  

However, nothing tops the enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto. Watch my interview with Benjamin Wallace on the WanderLearn Show:

Watch the Video Interview
Questions for Benjamin Wallace

1. In 60 seconds, tell us why we should be curious about who Satoshi Nakamoto was.


2. What's the percentage chance that Satoshi Nakamoto is more than one person?


3. What's the percentage chance that Satoshi Nakamoto is dead?


4. Assuming he's alive, what's the percentage chance that Satoshi Nakamoto will voluntarily reveal himself in his old age or via a dead man's switch video?


5. Who are your top 4 candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto?


6. If those 4 candidates are in a pie chart, how big is the 5th piece of the pie: the Someone Else slice? 


7. Although Nakamoto's OPSEC was impeccable, is it realistic to believe that he faked his Britishisms, his double-spacing after periods, and potentially running his prose & code through a stylometry mixer because he was certain that Bitcoin would become a multi-trillion-dollar asset?


8. What new insights have you had since you wrote the book?


9. What's the percentage chance that we will definitively solve this mystery like we solved the Deep Throat mystery? Or will the ending be more like Forrest Fenn (e.g., a partial conclusion because we know the treasure was found and by whom, but we don't know where)? 


10. What surprised you in your investigation?


11. It seems you want Nakamoto to be Hal Finney, but it's hard to believe he didn't tap into the fortune when his life was on the line. And why not admit to being Nakamoto when he was on his deathbed? Perhaps to protect his family from assaults? Perhaps because he collaborated with someone else and doesn't want to unmask him. But then he could admit that he was part of the Satoshi team and leave it at that.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

In his book, Wallace writes that any plausible Nakamoto candidate should have the following characteristics:

• Software tools


• Coding quirks


• Age


• Geography


• Schedule


• Use of English


• Nationality


• Prose style


• Politics


• Life circumstances (How had Nakamoto found the time to launch Bitcoin? Why had he left the project when he did?"


• Resume ("I'm not a lawyer.")


• Emotional range (humble, confident, testy, appreciative)


• Motivation to create Bitcoin


• Rationale, and the foresight and skill, to create a bulletproof pseudonym (Who would bother wiping a crime scene clean before it was a crime scene? Who was already that good at privacy in 2008?)


• Monkish capacity to renounce a fortune

Although this list severely restricts who Satoshi Nakamoto could be, it still leaves countless possibilities.

Wallace, who has been trying to crack this mystery for 15 years, has yet to meet a candidate who checks all the boxes.

Wallace refrains from declaring that he has solved the mystery, even though countless "detectives" have already done so.

He interviews people who tell him, with 100% certainty, that Satoshi Nakamoto is:

• Nick Szabo


• James A. Donald


• Adam Back


• Hal Finney


• Peter Todd (according to HBO)


• Elon Musk


• Numerous other options

It's tempting to select what you think is the most viable candidate, throw in a heavy dose of confirmation bias, and declare, "Mystery solved, Sherlock!"

Plenty have done so.

It requires great restraint to resist the temptation of calling it a day, and instead, persevere pugnaciously like Wallace has in what is the greatest whodunit of the 21st century. 

Many suspects seem highly implausible. Elon Musk, for example, is a bombastic self-promoter who would love to proclaim he was