There’s a brand new book on the block, which I wish I had written: who is Satoshi Nakamoto? It’s actually not called that. It’s called: The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto by Benjamin Wallace, but you get the idea. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin when his/her/their white paper was published in 2008.
The whole point being peer-to-peer exchange of value with no intermediary (bank or government) involved.
Interestingly, this is now Donald Trump’s passion, after he gained notoriety in the NFT (non-fungible tokens) space. Why is that interesting? Well, because we now have government supporting tokens and currencies that are created to avoid governments. Bit of a friction there surely?
Anyways, back to the book. Reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, there are some really interesting notes. Specifically, Mr. Wallace has tried to track down this mysterious person called Satoshi Nakamoto. Many people have. Did he succeed?
He starts with Nick Szabo, a computer scientist and an early theorist of “smart contracts” (that is, agreements that are automatically executed by computer code), who once proposed a currency he called “bit gold.” He has often been suspected of being Satoshi Nakamoto himself. Mr. Szabo denies it. So did Hal Finney, another computer scientist who received the first-ever bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto. So does a guy living near Los Angeles, who is named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto.
Mr. Wallace interviewed more people who denied being Satoshi such as Ben Laurie, a British open-source pioneer and inventor of an anonymous digital cash called Lucre; Ray Dillinger, a cypherpunk and early digital-money enthusiast who says that people who want to know Mr. Nakamoto’s real name are “idiot[s]” and “hysterical children”; James A. Donald, who once declared his ambition to “destroy the state through higher mathematics” and whom Mr. Wallace tracks down at his remote Australian beach house.
They all deny being Satoshi Nakamoto.
An HBO documentary last year claimed that Peter Todd, a Canadian developer, invented it ... but he also denies it. In fact, the only person who has positively claimed that he is the man is Craig Wright, an Australian computer whiz who, in 2016, convinced reporters that he was the real deal by apparently demonstrating access to Mr. Nakamoto’s private encryption keys. But many observers were skeptical and, last year, was told by the UK High Court to stop lying about his claims to have invented bitcoin.
The thing is, even with all of Mr. Wallace’s investigations – he is a New York Times bestselling author, features writer at the New York magazine and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair – he does not discover who Satoshi Nakamoto is (spoiler). No one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is … although some claim it translates to Central Intelligence in Japanese.
Would the CIA launch a decentralised currency that governments cannot control? Well, interestingly, there is a 1990s white paper from the US National Securities Agency (NSA), talking about the wonders of crypto. Written by NSA staff ten years before the launch of bitcoin, the paper is titled ‘How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash’, where what is detailed looks a lot like bitcoin. It even has this disclaimer thrown in:
“This research Essay was prepared by NSA employees in furtherance of the study of cryptography. The contents of the report do not necessarily represent the position or policies of the U.S. Government, the Department of Defense, or the National Security Agency. The authors are mathematical cryptographers at the National Security Agency's Office of Information Security Research and Technology.”
Hmmm ... was it NSA, CIA or FBI? Who know but maybe that’s why Donald Trump wants to be the crypto-President?
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...