Who created Bitcoin?

More than 16 years ago, on Halloween Day in 2008, a device named Satoshi Nakamoto WhitePaper sent a peer-to-peer electronic cash system to a cypherpunk email list. Bitcoin launched shortly thereafter; It quickly created a global cultural movement and an industry of several trillion dollars.

Benjamin Wallace wrote a piece about the phenomenon of Wired in November 2011, making him one of the very first mainstream journalists who ever cover the crypto area. Back then, no one seemed to know Nakamoto’s identity, and despite a robust effort, Wallace couldn’t figure it out either.

Entertainingly, the author of “The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s most expensive bottle of wine” (2009) was sucked back in Enigma in 2022 after receiving lasting emails from an ex-Tesla employee who was absolutely convinced that Elon Musk was Nakamoto all the time. Wallace remains free of the special theory, but he establishes his own findings in “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto,” a 342-page investigation to release on March 18.

Read more: Marc Hochstein – Satoshi Nakamoto: The mystery that (probably) will never be resolved

The conclusion? Well, at the end of it, Wallace is forced to admit he couldn’t solve Nakamoto Riddle again. But his occupation provided a thought -provoking study of Bitcoin’s history with special emphasis on cypherpunks whose ideas contributed to the birth of Cryptocurrency. “The mysterious Mr. Nakamoto ”is a perfect job for both crypto -dentists and beginners who are curious to know more about Bitcoin’s origin; In that regard, it is comparable to Laura Shin’s “cryptopia: idealism, greed, lies and the creation of the first major cryptocurrency -dille” (2022), which focuses on Vitalik Barterin and Ethereum’s early days.

Wallace is mixed through a long list of suspects throughout the book. His favorites include Hal Finney, the recipient of the first ever bitcoin transaction; Nick Szabo, who designed a digital currency in the 1990s called “Bit Gold”; Len Sassaman, one of the largest developers and operators of Mixmaster Remailer; The relatively unclear Cypherpunk James A. Donald; And long -time Bitcoin critic Ben Laurie.

One of the things that does “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto“ A funny reading is that you can see Wallace slowly go insane as he jumps back and forth between these names. Every time he narrows it down to a person, a new piece of information rolls in and detonates his theory. Wallace deserves credit for its multifaceted approach to the affair. He uses ample for stylometry for Nakamotos E emails and code, deeply examines the circumstances, interviewing almost all the potential candidates and even learning to code to get a better grip on what Cypherpunks are talking about.

The threatening of the investigation is, of course, the debate over whether Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity even matters in the first place. There has been renewed interest in the question recently, between HBO’s “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” documentary (who came out last fall) and Vaneck’s head of digital assets Matthew Sigel about in February that he believed Twitter -Med Founder Jack Dorsey created Bitcoin.

As Wallace notes, Nakamoto’s identity is one of the great secrets of the 21st century. With Wall Street and the White House that begin to embrace the crypto sector fully, there is perhaps a feeling that it is necessary to put a face on Bitcoin’s Inventor to make the digital asset a little cleaner and safer to integrate into the global financial system.

Nakamoto’s identity is crucial because its discovery would affect the way people see Bitcoin claims Wallace. Crypto people, he says, prefer to think of Satoshi as a kind of promethean figure that released Bitcoin as a gift to humanity before disappearing to the bigger good. But what if Nakamoto was a straightforward criminal like former Cartel Manager Paul Le Roux, who simply can’t access his private keys because he’s behind pillars? Would blackrock and fidelity still run to recommend exposure to cryptocurrency for their clients?

Wallace eventually sits on the idea that Hal Finney is likely to participate in Bitcoin’s creation, but that he probably did not work alone and that no theory is under no circumstances almost impossible to verify without Nakamoto that provided irrevocable proof. But “the mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” is designed intelligently, and the lack of solution does not feel anti -climactic. At the end of the day it is about the hunt.

“What could we possibly learn from Nakomoto’s biography?” Wallace loses at a time after a friend of his suggests that the story would be better without an answer. “That he was a random professor who had had a lucky brainstorm? No, what was most interesting about nakamoto was his Absence. He was defined by what we Didn’t do it Know about him. “