In late 2008 during the depths of the global financial crisis, someone going by the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto registered a website domain and posted a nine-page white paper describing the technical workings of something called Bitcoin, a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” to an obscure moderated mailing list frequented by privacy-obsessed computer nerds. In January 2009, this shadowy Nakamoto figure released an alpha version of the open-source software for Bitcoin to the masses and then spent the next two years engaging in online discussions to answer questions and troubleshoot glitches with the new blockchain-based decentralized technology. In 2011, he (or she or they) abruptly went dark and disappeared into the ether, leaving the world with a self-perpetuating digital money-printing machine.
In The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto, Benjamin Wallace, author of the 2009 bestseller The Billionaire’s Vinegar, chronicles his dogged multiyear search to find Bitcoin’s creator. First bitten by the “Where’s Satoshi?” bug when he penned an article on Bitcoin for Wired magazine in 2011, Wallace has not been able to shake the nagging question over the intervening years. A decade later, he picks up the gauntlet again, quitting his day job as a magazine writer to devote himself full time to the hunt for Nakamoto.
This time around, Wallace takes a systematic approach to the task at hand, leveraging his skills as an investigative journalist. He organizes his search efforts around a spreadsheet of roughly 100 likely suspects, drawn mainly from the community of so-called cypherpunks that sprung up during the 1990s, an eclectic group whose common interests included cryptography (the science of secret writing), privacy enhancing technology, and electronic cash. Wallace describes the cypherpunks as libertarian in philosophy, although leftist would be a more accurate label given the group’s core antigovernment and anticapitalist beliefs. The group included hackers, video gamers, tax scofflaws, and convicted criminals, many with interesting extracurricular intellectual pursuits such as transhumanism and cryonic reanimation. While most were “extraordinarily smart people” and “self-educated polymaths,” some also fell on the autism spectrum.
Before setting out on his quest, Wallace teaches himself how to do basic coding and forces himself to transact using Bitcoin so that he can speak the native language. He also marshals the power of machine learning to aid in his search, using stylometry to analyze both the software code and text words (roughly 60,000) left behind by Nakamoto and then cross-checking for similarities with the body of work produced by his prime candidates. The extra effort is well worth it since one of the book’s strongest suits is its ability to translate the esoteric Tetris-like digital world of Bitcoin using plain language and terminology easily understood by a wider nontechnical audience — no mean feat for a self-described “liberal arts chump” like Wallace.
As the author works his way methodically through his target rogues’ gallery and confronts each cypherpunk suspect in turn, he is met by repeated denials (“I am not Satoshi”) and the occasional unsubstantiated claim by an opportunistic scammer. Interestingly, many of the people he interviews try to warn him off from his pursuit, concerned about what he may discover and how it might undercut the mythology about Bitcoin, which has now taken on cult status in both the technology and financial worlds.
Over the course of his search, Wallace also succumbs to this religious fervor and slowly moves from being an objective reporter to another protector of the Bitcoin faith. In the closing chapters of the book, as Wallace begins to acknowledge that — spoiler alert — he will not get his chance to personally say domo arigato to “the holy founder of this world-changing technology,” he does his best to compose a happy ending built around his conjecture that Nakamoto was likely a composite of several morally upright members of the cypherpunk community.
Wallace’s overriding desire that “a good man had created a great thing” may explain why he never pursues one of the more obvious Nakamoto leads: What role (if any) did the U.S. government (or another state actor) play in the development and rollout of Bitcoin technology? Early on, the author notes that the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory created the anonymizing software that enabled the dark web. A Department of Homeland Security official, speaking at a 2019 cryptocurrency conference, dropped a deliberately misleading clue about Nakamoto’s identity. One interviewee opines that Bitcoin was “created by the government of ‘a major power.'” Wallace even ruminates that Nakamoto may have been “a team at the NSA,” but then never follows up because this would be the worst-case “Bad Satoshi” outcome, which must be avoided at all costs.
While never getting his man, Wallace’s journey does provide enlightenment for his readers by providing an insiders’ take on Bitcoin from Nakamoto’s fellow crypto travelers. Such perspective is highly revelatory as these cypherpunks discuss the stark contrast between Bitcoin’s original promise — an “internet-based currency that operated beyond the control of a government or bank” — and the reality of what it has become nearly two decades on. In 2025, Bitcoin is still not widely used as a transactional currency since it is “difficult to buy, to store, to use, and to hold onto.” Not so private or secure, many outstanding digital coins have been lost or stolen, with one cypherpunk referring to Bitcoin as “a ghetto of criminality and fraud.” Most embarrassingly, Bitcoin is not immune from the “fiat system” since it must be converted into U.S. dollars or other paper currencies, which necessitates oversight by government and integration with traditional financial institutions.
Rather, Bitcoin has evolved into a purely speculative type of financial investment. As of this writing, Bitcoin has an estimated total market capitalization of more than $2 trillion, with every mined unit currently valued at roughly $105,000, up from a starting price of just $0.00099 in 2009. Its price is extremely volatile, and its fair value cannot be determined based on fundamental analysis. The only data point that crypto champions have to go on is the fact that the total outstanding supply of Bitcoin has been arbitrarily capped by algorithm at 21 million, of which 19.9 units have already been mined, with Nakamoto reportedly owning the first 1.1 million Bitcoins issued, commonly referred to as the Genesis Block.
Bitcoin is an illiquid digital asset (“invisible money … backed by nothing”) that is poorly understood by most investors, although this has not stopped financial regulators from approving liquid investment vehicles such as ETFs to allow more unsophisticated market participants to gain exposure to it. As one Google engineer puts it, Bitcoin has become “a great way to separate suckers from their money.”
Wallace’s book should be required reading for every investor (both institutional and retail) in Bitcoin, a Rashomon-style financial asset, complete with origin story. At the very least, it will help prepare the legions of Bitcoin proponents for the inevitable day when the mysterious Mr. Nakamoto starts selling his block of vintage Bitcoins.
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto
by Benjamin Wallace
Crown, 352 pp., $32
Paul Tice is a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics and author of The Race to Zero: How ESG Investing Will Crater the Global Financial System.
