Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty
If Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, was who I believed him to be, he was not going to acknowledge it. He probably wouldn’t talk to me. And seeing him was going to mean sitting on a plane for 20 hours and driving another eight. But I needed to try to have a conversation with him, and it had to be face-to-face.
Nakamoto had disappeared in the spring of 2011. I learned about him that summer, when I wrote one of the first magazine feature articles about Bitcoin, the internet-based currency that operates beyond the control of a government or bank. Twelve years later, Bitcoin’s creator remained unknown and his enormous, multibillion-dollar fortune untouched. The modern history of science supplied no precedent for someone who brought a revolutionary technology into the world without taking credit, or spending a penny of the billions of dollars it earned him.
Denied a flesh-and-blood human to venerate, acolytes of Bitcoin had conferred on the pseudonym the halo of legend. In 2022, Kanye West stepped from an Escalade in Beverly Hills wearing a Satoshi Nakamoto baseball hat. In Budapest, adherents unveiled the first statue of Nakamoto, a depiction in bronze of a hooded, spectral figure. A trio of libertarians bought a decommissioned cruise ship, christened it the MS Satoshi, and recruited settlers for the world’s first sovereign Bitcoin-powered society. More than one fellow technologist lobbied for Nakamoto to receive a Nobel Prize.
When I first wrote about Nakamoto in 2011, I couldn’t have foreseen that more than a decade later his identity would remain a mystery. Since then, numerous attempts to unmask Nakamoto had failed, sometimes spectacularly. In 2014, Newsweek confidently identified the wrong guy, a California systems engineer whose real name was Dorian Nakamoto, unleashing a media siege of his house that lasted for days. Even 60 Minutes, with untold resources and a deep bench of seasoned investigative journalists, threw up its hands and declared the challenge “mission impossible.” Yet now, against all odds, I believed I had cracked it.
I was nervous. This was someone who’d gone to great lengths to be unfindable. And what I’d learned about him was disturbing. He was nothing like how people had imagined Satoshi Nakamoto. He’d repeatedly described himself as dangerous. He had guns.
He also owned at least four properties on two continents. I’d initially thought he was hiding out in a remote part of Hawaii’s Big Island, but now, in the summer of 2023, I’d come to believe that he lived in a small beach community on the east coast of Australia.
I was fretting about all this when I met my sister for dinner.
I told her my anxieties. She’d been a TV-news producer for 20 years and had been onsite in Montana with 48 Hours after the FBI raided the Unabomber’s property and arrested him.
She suggested I take professional security people with me. And that I wear a bulletproof vest. And give local police a heads-up.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
Later that night, she texted me: “Couldn’t sleep not sure why.”
It was 4:09 a.m.
“Two thoughts. Maybe doorstep him in a public place if he ever leaves the house. Also might be worth having someone video the encounter (from a safe distance) for evidence.”
Eighteen months earlier, on New Year’s Eve 2021, an email had arrived in my inbox.
“Subject: New information re Satoshi.”
Since writing that early Bitcoin article, I’d periodically receive emails like this. Someone was always shopping a new Satoshi theory.
Usually, I paid little heed to these, which tended to rekindle a fleeting hope of learning something fresh before proving unconvincing. This email had no text, but a link led to a blog post titled “I’m the SpaceX Intern Who Speculated Satoshi Is Elon Musk. There Is More to the Story.” The author, Sahil Gupta, had produced a ripple on the internet four years earlier with another post making the case that Musk was “probably” Nakamoto. Now he presented further evidence: an account of an interaction he’d had with Musk’s chief of staff, Sam Teller. It seemed slight and ambiguous, and I didn’t respond.
Two days later, I received another email from the same address. This one contained a link to Gupta’s detailed case for Musk as Nakamoto. I didn’t know what to make of his arguments, which ranged from vague to highly technical. Still, I wrote back.
Sahil told me that in 2015, when he was an undergraduate at Yale, he’d scored a summer internship writing inventory-management software at the SpaceX rocket factory in Hawthorne, California. Musk was in the office maybe three days a week, and Sahil would see him in the hallways. Sahil was majoring in computer science, and for a senior thesis he proposed a central-bank digital currency called fedcoin in which the U.S. improved the dollar by taking the best aspects of Bitcoin. The paper’s acknowledgments thanked “Satoshi Nakamoto for being a straight up legend.”
While researching the thesis, Sahil steeped himself in cryptocurrency literature, starting with the nine-page white paper where Nakamoto first described Bitcoin. Reading the Bitcoin creator’s writing, he was struck by similarities to Musk’s language. Both spoke of “order of magnitude” reasoning and used the word bloody. Nakamoto talked about money in a conceptual way, as Musk had done when he was an executive at PayPal in the early aughts. Musk, like Nakamoto, had a history of programming in the C++ language and was knowledgeable about cryptography. Sahil began to wonder: Might the inventor of Bitcoin have been in front of us all along, hiding in the dazzle of his own celebrity?
When Sahil graduated from college, he decided he wanted to work directly for Musk. After emailing Musk several times, he got a phone interview with Teller, his chief of staff.
As the call with Teller drew to a close, Sahil took a chance:
“Is Elon Satoshi?”
“Teller didn’t say anything for 15 seconds,” Sahil told me.
“Then he said, ‘Well, what can I say?’”
“That was another big clue,” Sahil said. “It’s pretty clear what’s going on. Like, I surprised him. The answer I got is pretty telling.” Later that year, Sahil wrote his “Elon Musk Probably Invented Bitcoin” blog post. He argued that the Bitcoin community, which had been riven by strife over how and whether to mainstream the technology, would benefit from the return of its founder to guide it. A few cryptocurrency blogs picked up Sahil’s theory, and Bloomberg News covered it. For his part, Musk tweeted: “Not true. A friend sent me part of a [bitcoin] a few years [ago], but I don’t know where it is.”
As the years passed and he connected more dots, Sahil became even more convinced that Musk was Nakamoto. He noted that Luke Nosek, a cofounder of PayPal, had once said that the company’s original goal was to develop a currency free from banks. Musk, like Nakamoto, had a history of using two spaces after a period in his writing. Musk regularly flew in and out of Van Nuys Airport, which matched up with perhaps the only security lapse Nakamoto had ever made: Early in Bitcoin’s history, an email from Nakamoto to another software developer inadvertently betrayed an IP address in north Los Angeles. Sahil learned that early Bitcoin coders had considered Satoshi “bossy”; Musk was certainly that.
In late 2021, Musk had recently been named Time’s Person of the Year. SpaceX had successfully docked a capsule at the International Space Station. Musk had even tweeted playfully about dogecoin, a meme cryptocurrency (it subsequently went parabolic in price, then crashed). Sahil felt that the media might now finally be ready to accept that Nakamoto, who was now seen almost universally as a benevolent genius, and Musk were the same person.
Sahil told me he was “99 percent sure” about his theory. He chalked up others’ doubts to prejudice against Musk.
Okay, but Musk wasn’t humble, so why would he deny being Bitcoin’s creator? To Sahil, this was evidence of Musk’s savvy. “Unlike a company that needs marketing, Bitcoin was stronger and could grow faster, in the early days, when it had the aura of an anonymous founder.”
I didn’t know if Sahil was right, but I could relate to his fixation. Bitcoin had recently hit an all-time high of nearly $70,000 for a single coin, and the market value of all bitcoins in circulation had passed $1 trillion. El Salvador had recognized bitcoin as legal tender. In 2011, it hadn’t seemed like such a big deal that no one knew who Nakamoto was. But how was it possible that even now no one knew?
Six months later, I quit my job to devote myself full time to unraveling the mystery that had first beguiled me a decade earlier.
On Halloween 2008, someone going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto had posted a short write-up outlining “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” on an obscure, moderated email list about cryptography informally known as Metzdowd. That none of its subscribers had heard of Satoshi Nakamoto didn’t strike anyone as odd. Metzdowd was frequented by people devoted to secrecy. They were used to aliases.
In his write-up, Nakamoto described a new kind of money. It would run on a network of volunteers’ computers. It would use a transparent public ledger collectively maintained by the network, rather than relying on a bank’s or government’s database of debits and credits. Nakamoto included a link to a more detailed formal description that would come to be known as “the Bitcoin white paper.”
A few members of the list gave Nakamoto feedback on the software he was writing, and he gamely welcomed it. “I appreciate your questions,” he told one in an email, adding, “I actually did this kind of backwards. I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper.” In early January of 2009, Nakamoto released an alpha version of Bitcoin on SourceForge, then a popular site for open-source software projects, which welcome any programmers who want to take part. The first day, according to one early Bitcoiner, 127 people downloaded the Bitcoin software.
A lot of the first participants were programmers who thought money was overdue for a product update. Paper bills and coins faded, wrinkled, tore, got dirty, spread germs. They were available only in fixed denominations, could be counterfeited, and were hard to move in any significant quantity. Bitcoin was durable, unforgeable, almost infinitely divisible. It might finally realize the internet commerce dream of microtransactions. You could send any amount of it anywhere instantly.
Bitcoin, as a currency based on 0s and 1s in a cloud maintained by far-flung, ordinary individuals, was also immune to meddling by central powers. Unlike bars of gold, bitcoin couldn’t be seized. Unlike a bank account, it couldn’t be frozen. Unlike a national currency, it couldn’t be devalued at the whim of a central bank or subjected to capital controls by a dictator.
At the heart of Nakamoto’s creation was something called the blockchain, an ever-lengthening record of all transactions (buy, sell, etc.) that had occurred in the system. Approximately every ten minutes, the latest batch of transaction records were bundled into a “block,” and the block was “chained” onto the block that had preceded it using some clever math that made it impractical for anyone to go back and tamper with the block’s contents. This record, or ledger, which in traditional finance would be maintained by an institution such as a government or bank, was maintained by a network of volunteers’ computers, each of which ran the Bitcoin software and stored constantly updating copies of the ledger.
Although Bitcoin was an open-source project — an it-takes-a-village group effort — someone needed to be in charge, and for the first 20 months that was Satoshi Nakamoto. He would release code, other developers would suggest patches, and he would integrate the ones he liked.
Four months after Gavin Andresen, a software developer, began contributing programming code to the Bitcoin project, his dedication and computer-science chops seemed to have won Nakamoto’s trust. First, Nakamoto gave Gavin direct access to the source code. Then, around September 2010, Nakamoto told Gavin that he was getting busy with other projects, and over the coming months he would hand over control of both the code repository on SourceForge and the project’s “alert key,” which allowed the broadcasting of urgent messages to all machines running the Bitcoin software. For an open-source project, these were the closest things to a leadership badge; at that point Gavin effectively became the project’s head developer, guiding a team of five other volunteer coders.
Over the next few months, Nakamoto continued to chime in occasionally on technical questions, but Gavin’s openness chafed against his reclusive tendencies. After PayPal and Visa froze WikiLeaks’s accounts, a faction of Bitcoiners argued that the cryptocurrency could be helpful to the controversial organization. “Bring it on,” someone wrote on a forum called BitcoinTalk. Nakamoto bristled. “No,” he replied. “Don’t ‘bring it on.’ The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin … The heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”
For journalists covering Bitcoin, Gavin had become the natural person to call first. His mild, reasonable manner and willingness to use his real name made him the Bitcoin ambassador Nakamoto had never been. But Nakamoto seemed to grow uncomfortable with Gavin’s interactions with media. In late April of 2011, Nakamoto emailed Gavin: “I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle.”
This turned out to be the last time Gavin heard from Nakamoto. When I first spoke with Gavin that July, he said he hadn’t communicated with Nakamoto “in a couple months.” After Gavin told Nakamoto in an email on April 26 that he’d agreed to give a talk on Bitcoin to the crypto-curious CIA at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Nakamoto never responded. Around the same date, Nakamoto wrote emails to at least one other programmer who’d worked on the project.
Then he went silent. He’s never been heard from again, with the possible exception of a single forum post years later that may or may not have been Nakamoto’s.
Gavin and the other early Bitcoin developers agreed on a few things about Satoshi’s identity. The second place Nakamoto had announced his white paper was the website of the P2P Foundation, an idealistic nonprofit dedicated to peer-to-peer networks of all kinds. In his profile on the site, Nakamoto gave his residence as Japan. But no one believed he was Japanese. His English was flawless. He sounded British. In both the Bitcoin source code and his posts to the BitcoinTalk forum, Nakamoto favored Anglo spellings like colour and optimise.
Nakamoto guarded his identity closely. When registering the domain bitcoin.org, he had done so through a masking service called anonymousspeech.com, which itself had been registered from a temporary-housing broker in Tokyo. That service gave him an email address at vistomail.com, which offered the option of manipulating the date and time an email was sent. A third email address Nakamoto used was from gmx.com, another free webmail provider. In communication, Nakamoto expressed himself with a practiced opacity. He’d answer technical questions but would ignore attempts to draw him out on personal matters.
Nakamoto’s programming style was a bit dated, suggesting he might be on the older side. He used something called Hungarian notation, a convention of variable naming popular among Windows programmers in the 1990s.
Gavin had the impression that the Bitcoin code had been written by a small group or even just one person. When programmers collaborate, they tend to insert regular comments in their code, telling one another what this or that block of instructions is supposed to accomplish. The Bitcoin software contained few of these. Others felt that Bitcoin worked too smoothly from the moment it launched to be the product of a single brain. And the white paper used “we,” which suggested Satoshi Nakamoto must be the catch-all for a group of people or an institution.
Even before Nakamoto evaporated, he was coming to be revered. On April 16, 2011, a BitcoinTalker named Wobber pointed out how varied Nakamoto’s expertise was, and how unusual his behavior — to come up with something so innovative, not take credit for it or exploit his stature, and leave without telling anyone. Someone likened Nakamoto to Zorro or a masked David who’d aimed his slingshot at the Goliath of banks and governments.
Might the name itself contain a clue? Satoshi Nakamoto, roughly translated from Japanese, could mean “central intelligence.” Perhaps this pointed to the role of spies in Bitcoin’s creation. Maybe the National Security Agency was playing a long game, launching an off-the-books financial network it could use either to pay assets in the field, anywhere in the world, or as a honeypot where adversaries would transact with a false sense of security while the spooks at Fort Meade monitored their every move.
It wasn’t a totally crazy idea. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory had birthed the Onion Router, the anonymizing software known as TOR that enabled the dark web. The FBI would later secretly create its own line of encrypted phones and a messaging service, ANOM, that were unwittingly adopted by organized criminals, resulting in more than 800 arrests. And in the summer of 1996, researchers in the Cryptology Division of the NSA’s Office of Information Security Research and Technology had internally published a paper, later made public, titled “How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash.”
You could also read Nakamoto’s name as a portmanteau of big tech-company names — SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, MOTOrola — so maybe a corporate cabal was behind it. Redditors pooled their deciphering skills, also finding Satoshi Nakamoto to be an anagram of, among other phrases, “Ma, I took NSA’s oath” and “So a man took a shit.”
Dan Kaminsky, who’d shot to prominence as a young programmer in 2008 when he discovered a technical glitch that could have undermined the entire internet, thought Nakamoto might be a group at a bank. “I suspect Satoshi is a small team at a financial institution,” Dan told me. “I just get that feeling.”
But Kaminsky added that he didn’t think that Satoshi’s identity “is that critical to what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is larger than Satoshi.” This jibed with a sentiment I’d heard voiced more than once: The whole idea of Nakamoto as an unknown pseudonymous entity who’d dematerialized was an integral part of Bitcoin’s design.
At the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Satoshi Nakamoto was, in absentia, everywhere. The Nakamoto Stage, where the keynotes and most important panels took place, was flanked by illuminated screens featuring a rotating display of snippets from his writings. They had the Dianetics-like quality of being banal to outsiders and profound to insiders.
Imagine if gold turned to lead when stolen.
I’m sure that in twenty years there will either be very large Bitcoin transaction volume … or no volume.
The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity.
Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder turned venture capitalist, emerged stage right and threw a wad of hundred-dollar bills into the front rows: “It’s kind of crazy that this stuff still works, you know?” Bitcoin was a warning, he said, that the fiat system was over.
What stood in the way of the crypto revolution, Thiel said, were “the enemies of this movement,” among whom he enumerated Warren Buffett, JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. Thiel told the crowd that the enemies he’d named were “extensions of the state.” Bitcoin, by contrast, wasn’t a company and had no board. “We do not know who Satoshi is,” Thiel added for emphasis.
We do not know who Satoshi is. Back in 2011, he’d been the no-name coder of an experimental money that was of interest mainly to a fringe community. Ten years later, he was the mythic founder of a project with a $1 trillion market capitalization, making it the ninth-most-valuable asset in the world, just below Tesla and above Meta. Whoever Nakamoto was, he was fantastically rich. Through some clever analysis of the early blockchain, a computer scientist named Sergio Demian Lerner had estimated that, at the time, Nakamoto held some $40 billion worth of bitcoin (today the figure is much higher). Nakamoto was by far the largest holder of the currency.
When the crypto exchange Coinbase went public in the spring of 2021, one of the risk factors listed in the prospectus the company filed with the SEC was the public identification of Nakamoto. It wasn’t hard to think of scenarios where who Nakamoto was — and what his motives and intentions were — might be relevant. In the Bitcoin realm, the Nakamoto mystery was coming to be seen as necessary — a feature rather than a bug. To be truly decentralized required that Bitcoin have a virgin birth. Depriving it of a human figurehead, a flawed individual with a particular identity that might be palatable to one group but not to another, gave it the best shot at being taken up en masse.
And so the Nakamoto alias had come to be hallowed. While some people conjectured that the Bitcoin creator had gone to ground mainly for his own protection, lest he be prosecuted for tax evasion or physically attacked for his coin stash, the common view was that he’d acted selflessly. The most zealous Bitcoiners treated inquiries into Nakamoto’s identity as a sort of blasphemy, as if they were Scientologists being asked about Xenu.
In the summer of 2022, I tacked a spreadsheet of the hundred-plus candidates who’d ever been proposed as Satoshi Nakamoto onto my office wall. Most of the leading candidates were cypherpunks whose names had been floated as possible Satoshis many times over the years. There were more obscure names from adjacent fields like math, cryptography, and economics. Some were programmers involved early on with the Bitcoin software project. Others were creators of newer cryptocurrencies. Many were just Famous Smart People: Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Musk.
For a number of years, the consensus leading candidates have generally been considered to be Nick Szabo, Adam Back, and Hal Finney. Szabo, a programmer who had advocated for decentralized money years before Bitcoin appeared, had conceived a kind of Bitcoin precursor called “Bit Gold” in the late nineties. He had the necessary technical skills, and there were superficial similarities between his writing style and Nakamoto’s. But he has always denied being Satoshi, and no definitive evidence linking him to Nakamoto or to Bitcoin’s early development has ever been produced. Adam Back’s name was mentioned in the Bitcoin white paper as the creator of another cryptocurrency precursor, Hashcash, and his email address is one of the first to have been contacted by Nakamoto. He, too, denies being Nakamoto, and his writing style matches up less closely than Szabo’s. Hal Finney, a legendary programmer and cryptographer, received the first-ever Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto. But Finney, who also denied being Satoshi, was diagnosed with ALS in 2009, declining rapidly to the point where he was physically incapacitated. If ever Satoshi were to be unmasked, Finney is the most hoped-for candidate among Bitcoiners because of his tragic-heroic story and his general aura of kindly benevolence — and also because, being conveniently deceased (he died in 2014), he can’t create unsavory press with unsavory behavior or associations.
There had always been the faction hostile to inquiry about Nakamoto’s identity. Last fall, when an HBO documentary posited that a libertarian Canadian computer programmer and crypto enthusiast named Peter Todd was the most likely candidate, the Bitcoin community reacted not just with strong skepticism about the documentary’s conclusion but with anger that such a project had even been undertaken. He has made a valuable contribution, so his wishes for anonymity should be honored. What matters is not the person but the idea, the code.
But Nakamoto had plunked his gizmo in the public square, so I felt it was reasonable to inquire who’d put it there and why.
I combed through the 60,000 words Satoshi Nakamoto had left behind. He wrote in a plain style, rarely opining or showing personality. Whenever I found the slightest hint of individual style, I’d add it to a list of Nakamoto-isms, which eventually included more than 200 words and phrases. Wet blanket. Sweet. Clobbering.
I wrote a computer program, the Satoshitizer, which trawled through the archived writings of various suspects, scanning for Nakamoto-isms and generating tables of statistics. I could instantly rank an archive using more than a dozen criteria, including users of Nakamoto-isms, users of e-cash terminology, and discussers of software tools employed by Nakamoto.
One day in late April 2023, I found myself thinking about a word I’d seen in Nakamoto’s writings: hosed.
Given Nakamoto’s tendency to write in a style stripped of personality or association with any particular milieu, hosed stood out. I hadn’t recently heard the word, in its sense of screwed or wrecked, and vaguely associated it with turn-of-the-1990s surfing or fraternity lingo.
I went back through my scraped archives and noted each time someone used the word. I looked at Metzdowd. In the three years leading up to October 31, 2008, when Nakamoto first announced Bitcoin there, the word had been used four times. Twice it was by the same person: James A. Donald.
Though Donald hadn’t played much of a role in the public discussion of Bitcoin, he’d had a cameo in its early history as the first person on the discussion list to respond to Nakamoto. Donald’s response had been a technical criticism related to Bitcoin’s scaling potential, and after a few exchanges with Nakamoto he’d dropped out of the conversation. He was just one of many cypherpunks who’d been interested in digital money.
At that point, Donald was only No. 42 on my Suspects spreadsheet, far below the consensus leading candidates and on the list at all primarily because he was a cypherpunk and libertarian who had coded in C++. But intrigued by the “hosed” coincidence, I went back and looked at the lists of rare words the Satoshitizer had compiled. I wanted to see whether Donald had used any other rare Nakamoto-isms.
He had. Donald showed up as the only person on any of the two decades’ worth of lists I’d scraped who had ever used the word fencible — in the sense of stolen goods “able to be fenced.” This was a word Nakamoto had used once, in the expression non-fencible. And it appeared in a post by Donald on the cypherpunks list in October of 1998. My brain started pinging. The verb fence was common enough slang, but the adjective fencible was an oddity. A Google search turned up hardly any instances on the internet. When I queried the archives of the daily New York Times, which went back to 1857 and included more than 13 million articles, fencible, in the sense I was interested in, hadn’t appeared once.
Unlike, say, trusted third party or zero-knowledge proofs, which are unexceptional in conversations among digital-cash or crypto experts, fencible and hosed weren’t words unique to cryptography or even to computer science. They were more revealing of someone’s voice.
I began looking more closely at Donald. He had a slippery internet presence. Websites variously declared that he was Canadian, that he had died, and that “James A. Donald” wasn’t his real name. In his posts, he almost never revealed personal details, but a few were strewn here and there. He was Australian but had lived in Silicon Valley for many years. Like Nakamoto, he sometimes used American spellings and other times used Commonwealth spellings.
Ideologically, Donald had fused a libertarianism so extreme that it was really anarcho-capitalism with a fervent conviction in the world-changing power of cryptography. “So guys, that is the plan,” he wrote in 1996. “We destroy the state through higher mathematics. We do this by replacing the current institutional mechanisms of corporations with cryptographic mechanisms. This will give more people the opportunity to evade and resist taxes.”
He had a particular interest in digital money. “Eventually people will bypass the banks, directly transferring funds to each other,” he wrote in 1995. On Metzdowd, between 2006 and 2009, Donald employed more of the e-cash vocabulary Nakamoto used than any other poster.
I examined Donald’s programming style. In the late 1990s, he’d promoted a piece of communications encryption software called Crypto Kong. He’d written it in C++, the language Nakamoto used for Bitcoin. Using the Wayback Machine, I found an archived copy of the source code. Crypto Kong bore other similarities to Bitcoin. Like Nakamoto, Donald had coded the software for Windows and, more esoterically, used the Hungarian notation that Nakamoto did. Like Nakamoto, Donald used sweeping lines of slashes to separate sections of code. Like Bitcoin, Crypto Kong used elliptic curve cryptography to generate private-public key pairs.
I gleaned more information about Donald. He was born in 1952, so was now over 70 — fitting the profile of an older programmer that various early Bitcoin developers had noted Nakamoto’s coding style suggested. Donald wasn’t on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, at least under his own name. His $2.8 million Palo Alto house was blurred on Google Street View, as was his $400,000 Austin house. This was an option you could exercise only by submitting a formal request to Google (or perhaps by working at Google, as one of Donald’s two sons had). There were no easily found photographs of him. Like Nakamoto, Donald used a privacy-focused email provider, Switzerland-based Proton Mail. He had a blog titled Jim’s Blog, untethered from his last name. He had spent, he’d told the blog’s readers, “a lot of time off the grid.” Click-click-click. The tumblers were falling into place.
I now began to think about the significance of Donald’s response to Nakamoto being the first. I pictured Nakamoto in 2008: He’d just launched his work of genius into the world and … crickets. So he decided to both nudge things along (while also creating a useful misdirection) by lobbing a criticism at himself.
Jim’s Blog revealed a few more clues. In the run-up to October 31, 2008, Donald had been focused on the financial crisis. His post on October 11, titled “The Cause of the Crisis,” began: “The bailout will fail.” This was notable because the London Times headline embedded in the Bitcoin Genesis block, the first block in the chain produced by Satoshi, had been “Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout.”
I found further coincidences. Donald owned several pieces of property in Hawaii. On June 19, 2008, a few months before Satoshi Nakamoto began communicating with the world about his invention, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser had run an obituary for “Satoshi Nakamoto,” a veteran of World War II who’d died at 84. Could Donald have lifted the name when casting about for a pseudonym?
Though “Jim” rarely mentioned any details that betrayed his identity or location, he revealed things about his beliefs in various posts. Before he was a libertarian or crypto-anarchist, he’d been a radical leftist. At age 15, he’d joined the Spartacists, a faction of Trotskyites, but “I became disillusioned with the sparts, and disillusioned by participatory democracy—and none too keen on representative democracy either.” At 17, he joined two other radical groups, the anarcho-socialists and the Maoists, “mostly because these were the two groups most hated by the trots.” Eventually he concluded that freedom lay in property rights, and he became an anarcho-capitalist.
I spoke with people who’d known him when he was a graduate student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. Bob Hewitt, who was on the department faculty, interviewed Donald as part of the application process. Donald had come from Melbourne, and Bob recalled him as “bohemian”; asked whether he’d arranged for a place to stay in Sydney, Donald said he’d sleep under a bridge. He was “a friendly kind of guy,” Hewitt said, “just strange.”
Donald never completed the Ph.D. program. Every student was supposed to give a colloquium, but “no one understood what he was saying,” Hewitt recalled. “We couldn’t say he was brilliant, but he was certainly incomprehensible when he tried to explain his paper.” Donald ended up dropping out after his dissertation, “Assumptions of the Singularity Theorems and the Rejuvenation of Universes,” was rejected.
He started writing software for Apple computers, then moved to the U.S. and programmed video games for Epyx. Later, he worked at database companies.
Poring over Jim’s Blog, I saw that Donald had an authoritative understanding of Bitcoin and its vulnerabilities; he clearly took a long, historical view of it as a stepping stone toward a particular future he wanted. Bitcoin, he wrote, “is a prototype that is prematurely being used as the final system.”
I’d never shared the presumption, prevalent in the Bitcoin world, that Nakamoto must be a benign figure. I’d always felt that the Bitcoiners who elevated Nakamoto to semi-divine status were indulging in wishful projection: that he was selfless. That he was humble. That he had come from the future to exalt humanity. Hal Finney had made for a particularly appealing Satoshi Nakamoto because he lived up to that image.
Donald did not. On his blog, Donald espoused a dark ideology called neoreaction that had beguiled certain people in Silicon Valley. Neoreactionaries believed that society had been hijacked by what they called the Cathedral — academic and media and bureaucratic elites. They disdained efforts to achieve social justice. The best way forward, they argued, was to jettison democracy and restore a monarchy. Donald’s particular flavor of neoreaction also incorporated an overtly Christian element and a generous dose of paranoia; he attributed the COVID pandemic to a Jesuit conspiracy.
Along with his baroque politics, Donald produced a regular feed of racist, homophobic, and misogynist opinions and offensive language. He was so abrasive that, in 2014, even Slate Star Codex, an influential Silicon Valley blog with a history of tolerating discussion of taboo subjects like IQ science, had banned him. But on his blog, hosted on a relatively uncensorable domain in Laos, he advocated “whipping a woman on the buttocks or upper back” to keep her in line and argued that “very few rape accusations are true.” Donald had a substantial following in the red-pilled, alt-right blogosphere.
If Donald was Nakamoto, wasn’t it obvious why he’d chosen a pseudonym when launching Bitcoin? He wanted his work of genius to be taken on its own terms rather than dismissed because it was his. He had hidden not because Bitcoin could be a risk to him but because he could be a risk to Bitcoin.
I wondered whether there were crypto people who knew or suspected that Donald was Nakamoto. If Nakamoto were a harmless private citizen like Dorian Nakamoto, “Satoshi deserves his privacy” would be at least a reasonable position to take. If Nakamoto were a dissident living under an autocratic regime, I’d want to protect his secret too. But if Nakamoto were Donald? It would undermine the narrative of Bitcoin’s inventor as a crypto Christ who’d passed up fame and treasure for the sake of a higher good. Was it possible that some of the Satoshi-deserves-his-privacy people, recognizing that it would be a PR calamity for Bitcoin to have been invented by a far-right whackjob, were really just safeguarding the reputation of their religion and the value of their investments? In June 2020, the HashCash founder Adam Back, himself long suspected by some of being Satoshi, had tweeted: “Maybe we should get mentally prepared to disown Satoshi. Nuke the nym from orbit, just to be safe.”
“Satoshi’s identity doesn’t matter,” Ray Dillinger, who along with Hal Finney had done code review for Nakamoto before Bitcoin’s launch, wrote. “The protocol is what it is. If it’s a third-world dictator, a homeless guy living under a bridge in Belize, a Bedouin working from a cell phone as she traverses Bir Tawil on a camel, or a pushcart vendor in Nairobi, the protocol is exactly the same as it would be if it were a cryptanalyst working for the NSA or someone at a ‘troll farm’ drawing a salary from the GRU, or a well-known Security researcher or Cypherpunk. ‘Satoshi’ doesn’t exist outside that protocol. Satoshi is just a hat somebody wore while they were developing it. And it doesn’t matter who was wearing the hat.”
I wrote to Jim Donald asking for an interview. Several days later, to my surprise, I heard back from him. “Email discussion would be convenient,” Donald wrote, but he might be able to talk over phone or video. He’d have to let me know in a few days.
Two months later, Donald still hadn’t made himself available for a live conversation. Should I travel all the way to Australia to find him in person? One thing that gave me pause about Donald as Nakamoto was that Nakamoto, in his communications, displayed a recognizable range of emotion. He could be appreciative (“Many thanks”), compassionate (“poor thing”), humble (“my apologies”), and modest (“I’m better with code than with words”). I scrolled through years of Jim’s writings, squinting for a trace of empathy or gratitude or enthusiasm, hoping to see an exclamation point, or an apology, or a moment of sympathy or fellowship. Instead, I saw only flatness.
But of all the cypherpunks preoccupied with digital cash, only one had ever said they knew Satoshi’s identity. “I know who Nakamoto was,” James Donald had written in a comment on a comment on a post on Jim’s Blog, “and what his political and social goals were.” If true, this would make him the only person on record who credibly possessed this knowledge. I decided I needed to see him.
Though Donald had spent most of his career in California, he clearly owned or had owned a house in Australia. Looking through real-estate assessment records for his various U.S. properties, I’d found that for a couple of years in the aughts, a house he owned in Austin was registered to him at a street address on the northeastern coast of Australia. In more recent assessments, the U.S. properties were registered to him in the same Australian town, though now only a PO box was given. I knew his wife had died in 2016, and using the Find a Grave site, I found a photograph from the Australian town’s cemetery of a plaque memorializing her. Five years later, he’d posted a small photo on his blog of what appeared to be the view from his deck: In the foreground was a small glass and a jug of what he described as homemade moonshine. In the distance was a gleaming blue sea, the horizon disrupted by a couple of small islands. I compared this view with other ocean-view images taken from the same town, and they seemed to match.
I found a private investigator, Daniel Quinn, who lived within a reasonable drive of the seaside town where I suspected Donald was. I sent Quinn the house address and a 20-year-old photo of Donald I’d found on an abandoned college blog of one of his sons.
A few days later, Daniel sent me a surveillance report. “The yard is in a very unkempt state with very long grass and overgrown shrubbery and trees, he’s definitely not a plant lover.” He attached a photo of James’s house and the patchy driveway it shared with two other homes. There was a lonely palm tree near the curb, and up the hill was a bungalow on stilts, set amid the overgrowth, with a deck looking out at the Coral Sea.
Daniel didn’t see James that day, but several weeks later, I awoke to a message: Daniel had managed to get a photo of a man standing in the house’s doorway. He was a clear 20-years-older match to the man in the photo I’d sent. Same dense beard, though now it was white. Similar large metal-rim glasses. Same fleshy nose. Three days later, I was on a plane to Australia.
There was a screen door and no doorbell, so I knocked on James’s doorframe. My mouth was dry from nerves. While I wasn’t convinced that James himself was necessarily Nakamoto, I thought he might have been part of Nakamoto. In any case, he was the sole remaining person I knew of who claimed to know who Nakamoto was.
I worried about how he’d receive me. James had gone out of his way to be unfindable.
Crossing his porch toward the front door, I could see Donald sitting at a computer in the living room and wearing headphones. His latest blog post, put up just a few hours earlier, was a rambling screed about how Georgians (as in the country of Georgia) don’t want “their Churches destroyed or turned into shrines of Gaia and gay sex, their old and beautiful buildings bulldozed and replaced by demonic postmodern eyesores.”
Western NGOs were working to see “Georgia faggotized and thrown into the meat grinder against Russia.”
When he didn’t respond to my knock on the doorframe, I knocked directly on the front door. A moment later James opened it and stepped outside in black long johns and a red camouflage long-sleeved shirt.
I started talking. I’d sent him an email and —
“Oh, I’m rather sporadic at reading my emails,” James said. I reminded him of our exchange the prior year and of the book I was writing.
“Ah, right,” James said.
I said something about how I’d have been remiss if I didn’t make every effort to speak with him.
“Okay,” James said. “Well, the short of it is that I can’t even tell you what I don’t tell you.” His tone was pleasant, bemused.
I pointed out that he’d publicly insisted he knew who Nakamoto was and what his social and political goals were. Could he elaborate?
“No, sorry.”
“Okay … Do you really know? Or do you sort of think you have a strong idea of who it might be?”
“I have a very good idea of who it might be, but I don’t actually, uh, no.”
“Do you think it was Hal Finney?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Is that just because you’re respecting his privacy?”
“I’m not allowed to tell anyone anything, and I’m not allowed to tell people what I’ve already told ’em.”
Could I buy him a beer while I was in town?
“Ah,” James said. “In wine there is truth. And I’m obligated not to tell people the truth.”
“Lunch?” I offered.
James laughed. “Look,” he said. “I have a tendency to talk too much, and I have a big tendency to talk too much after a few drinks, so I’m sorry.”
I tried to keep the conversation going — giving him my contact information along with a previous book I’d written — but his answers became monosyllabic.
“Well, I can understand why you’d live here,” I said, gesturing at his stunning view.
“Yeah,” James said, looking down.
I thanked him and made my way back down the hill.
I’d spent 15 years trying to identify Satoshi. In pursuit of this quest, I’d learned to code, recruited a machine-learning expert and a stylometry specialist and a private investigator, and made a 37-hour journey for a three-minute encounter. I was pretty sure no one had spent as much time as I had in trying to solve this. I was starting to feel a kinship with Sahil Gupta, who couldn’t be persuaded that Nakamoto was anyone other than Elon Musk. At some point, I needed to stop.
Perhaps someday AI will allow us to definitively identify Satoshi. But I am now convinced that, barring some unpredictable declassification of a government secret, we will likely never know beyond a reasonable doubt who he was. Memories fade. People die. There is no paternity test for Bitcoin, no way to prove who Nakamoto is unless he comes forward and demonstrates that he has the relevant private keys, or at least non-forged contemporaneous documents supporting his story. As years pass, the trail, if there was one, grows fainter.
I felt some relief in accepting this. I remained dazzled by the achievement of Nakamoto’s invention — but almost equally by the perfection of his vanishing. As a utopian project, Bitcoin had never stood a chance. But as a new asset class, it has proved resilient. Its price continues to rise and fall, and rise again, reaching a new all-time high above $109,000 in January. (As of this writing, it’s at $85,000.) Fidelity now advises retail clients to allocate a small portion of their investment portfolios to cryptocurrency. The spread of blockchain technology feels inevitable.
Satoshi Nakamoto was something that whoever was behind the pseudonym could never be — an idea that, without a body or a history to drag it down, would live forever.
Excerpted from The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto by Benjamin Wallace (Crown), out March 18.
