Paging Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin—you have a call on line #2!

Here’s a sneak peek of my upcoming book:The Devil Takes Bitcoin: Cryptocurrency Crimes and the Japanese Connection

The Devil Takes Bitcoin, a deep dive into the birth of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency crimes, and their relation to Japan, is finally coming out in English in October this year. You can pre-order, even!

I’m hoping the book serves as a history of the rise of Bitcoin and the Icarian fall of the early Bitcoin adopters as the roadblocks were discovered, created, and sorted out—and how it created a whole new world of criminals and corruption. But Bitcoin isn’t evil, per se, and the mythical creator of this OG of virtual currency probably never anticipated creating a modern version of Pandora’s Box. The Pandora Blockchain, if you may.

This chapter gives a preview into one of the first mysteries: who created Bitcoin in the first place? Why does he call himself Satoshi Nakamoto and where did his Japanese name [中本哲史] originate? Is there a hidden meaning in the kanji? Where is he now?

Chapter Two: Searching for Satoshi Nakamoto

Take a Time Machine back to 2008. During the period that Mark [Karpelès, CEO of now-defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox] was discovering Bitcoin, I was discovering new worlds as a journalist. For Mark, being introduced to Bitcoin changed his life. It took two disasters—both occurring almost simultaneously—to change my life. By 2010, Tokyo Vice, my first book, had been published in several languages, and I continued to write about Japan. I had begun working on The Last Yakuza and was continuing to do pretty much everything I’d always done as a journalist. My focus was still on crime reporting, and the yakuza and the harm they did to Japanese society were my main areas of interest. I was also working as a part-time private eye of sorts, doing due diligence on companies infiltrated by or associated with the yakuza and other anti-social forces.

The yakuza were and still are, to some extent, a fascinating subculture of Japan, but then something happened while I was a guest at the yakuza film festival in New York sponsored by the Japan Society. The title of the event, part of the Globus Film Series, was Hardest Men in Town: Yakuza Chronicles of Sin, Sex & Violence, and I had been invited as a speaker.

I gave a lecture on March 10 at 6.00 pm, titled “Yakuza in Popular Media & Real Life: Cracks & Chasms.”

During the event, I got to meet Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of Taxi Driver. Schrader had also created a great gangster film, The Yakuza, produced by Sidney Pollack and starring Robert Mitchum and Japanese yakuza film icon Ken Takakura, in the 1970s.

After coming home to my hotel late, I called a client in Japan who had asked me to look into a listed Japanese company with organized-crime ties. As I was touching base, he remarked, “The building is shaking.”

A few seconds later, I heard bookshelves falling over.

“Jake, this seems like quite an earthquake.”

“Get out of the building. We’ll talk later,” I told him, and he said, “Got it. Will do.”

The phone went dead.

It was March 11, 2011, the day of the Great Tohoku Earthquake. On the same day, the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima started— as a direct result of the forty-year-old water pipes in reactor one falling apart. Phone lines went down. My plane back was canceled. I wondered if everyone I knew and loved was okay. The only means of communication that seemed to be working in Japan was Twitter.

It was around this time that Lucas Wittmann at the Daily Beast reached out and asked me if I could get him anything on the earthquake, any sort of story. I explained to him that I was in New York, not Japan, but trying to get back.

I did manage to reach a few people. One of them was a yakuza boss I considered a friend of sorts, and he told me that he and other yakuza were loading up trucks of food and supplies to take to the devastated areas. I was skeptical, but he sent videos. I realized there was a good story in that—“Yakuza To The Rescue.” It would be the first story I wrote for The Daily Beast.

I talked to Lucas, and started writing as I headed back to Japan—heading back to a place where it seemed that nuclear disaster loomed. I feared the worst. I was worried about my friends and my French roommate Camille, still in Tokyo. I bought potassium iodine, toilet paper, ready-to-eat foods, and other supplies to take back to Japan and give to the yakuza to carry to victims of the disaster; they were responding to the crisis faster and more efficiently than the Red Cross. The potassium iodine was to protect the younger yakuza from thyroid cancer, as they were heading into the radiated disaster zones.

I think I might have gone with them for a story if I didn’t get back home to Tokyo to discover that I had my own personal disaster waiting for me.

It was eerie enough being one of the few passengers on the plane returning to an almost empty Narita airport and stopping by an empty 7-Eleven on my way home, where all the toilet paper was gone and the shelves bare, but what was waiting for me in my mailbox was even more of a shock.

The results of my extensive medical check-up before leaving for New York had come back. The doctors had found what appeared to be an over-three-centimeter-sized tumor in my liver. Liver cancer.

It seemed like the world was ending all at once. I had an ominous feeling that everything was going bad. It turned out that my gut instincts weren’t so far off. Years later, when interviewing Naoto Kan, who had been prime minister at the time, he told me that he had seriously considered evacuating Tokyo and there had been a serious risk that all the reactors in Fukushima would melt down in succession. It was only the US military and the self-defense forces sharing knowledge and working together that had prevented a great deal of Japan from becoming an atomic wasteland.

On my birthday, March 28, I reconsidered my life and the focus of my work. As I learned more about all the warning signs that had been missed or ignored or covered up before the nuclear meltdown at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO’s) power plant in Fukushima, I had a simple realization.

There were far worse things than the yakuza in Japan. TEPCO was one of them. The Liberal Democratic Party, the political party that had empowered TEPCO to get away with ignoring needed safety measures, and had foolishly promoted nuclear energy in a country in the middle of the so-called ring of fire, was one of them. The yakuza were just one social ill, not the root of all evils.

And so I took a break from studying organized crime and began studying the history of nuclear power in Japan, the accidents that had already happened, and why this one had taken place. I began writing about the nuclear meltdown and related problems.

When the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) took back power in 2012 and began to bring Abenomics (Shinzo Abe’s reworking of trickle-down economics) into play, I watched them turn back the social progress Japan had made. I saw Japan’s press freedom decline from eleventh in the world to number seventy-two. The gap between the rich and the poor grew greater. The nuclear reactors restarted. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe started to try to rewrite history.

The Olympus scandal, involving over a billion dollars of accounting fraud, showed what happened when an honest CEO, in this case, a foreigner, Michael Woodford, tried to do the right thing and expose corruption. In modern Japan, it seemed that no good deed went unpunished. The company and Japan’s mainstream press tried to destroy the loyal employee who wanted to save the company.

Suddenly, I found myself writing about a lot more than just the yakuza. The social injustices, the changes in society, and the problems Japan faced became my areas of interest.

The Atlantic Wire, where I had been writing for years, was shuttered, and I moved on to writing more for The Daily Beast. Swiss journalist Nathalie-Kyoko Stucky (who had formerly worked for Japan’s Jiji Newswire), and I began working together as a team to cover more ground and a wider variety of stories.

We covered cases of Japanese citizens in international marriages kidnapping their children and taking them back to Japan—in violation of the Hague Convention, which Japan wouldn’t sign. We covered the complicated case of a cat-loving hacker who framed three innocent people for making internet threats, just to make fools out of the police. We wrote about the Japanese government’s unpopular support for whaling. We followed up the case of a Japanese journalist harassed for exposing a fixer in Japan’s nuclear industry. We wrote about the Japanese government’s secrecy bills, which had stifled and will continue to stifle the free press. We wrote about people having their palms surgically altered—their life-lines and love-lines—in the hope of changing their fate.

We were a great team, working together for almost three years. And then, one day in February 2014, around the twenty-fourth, I got an email from another reporter in Canada. The subject was “Bitcoin heist in Tokyo?” The text, which made little or no sense to me at first, read:

Hey Jake—

Have you heard anything about this:

http://www.thestar.com/business/2014/02/25/major_online_bitcoin_exchange_mt_gox_vanishes.html

I’m fuzzy on how all this works—but looks like a Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange just disappeared online, taking a lot of people’s money with them…

Looks to be Americans or Brits in charge of it.

Wondering if you’ve heard anything about it—and if there’s any hint of organized crime involved, given Yakuza involvement in financial crime …

Hope you’re doing well.

I had no idea what Bitcoin was. At first glance, I thought maybe they were rare coins of some kind, being sold online. I read the link to the article that had been sent to me. I started researching Bitcoin. I went back as far as I could on Google, and found the original white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. It sort of made sense to me.

I was intrigued. I had no idea that someone had created a viable digital currency, and was even more surprised that it had apparently been invented by a Japanese man named Satoshi Nakamoto—although no one knew who he was.

I also realized that if Mt. Gox collapsed, that would be a huge story. In fact, the crash of Mt. Gox might signal the end of Bitcoin itself. Even I could figure out that the impact would be huge. There were rumors that half a billion dollars’ worth of bitcoin were missing. Some papers were reporting 700,000 missing bitcoins.

I called up Nathalie, and we began trying to follow the story. She located a bitcoin aficionado meet-up in Shibuya, and we crashed the event, asking Mt. Gox customers about their feelings, and talking to experts on cryptocurrency who had come to the meeting.

And, out of sheer dumb luck, one of the people I spoke to was not only working for Mt. Gox, but he knew who I was. We had a mutual friend. And after she vouched for me, he told me everything he knew. He introduced me to another source. Meanwhile, Nathalie hunted down the leaked Mt. Gox document that gave some idea of how bad the situation might really be.

The Daily Beast was becoming interested in the problem as well. We hustled to get the story done, and we were right on target. We reported the number of missing bitcoins more accurately than any other news agency, and we had gained an insight into the poor management of the company. We ran our story just four hours before the firm declared bankruptcy.

On March 6, 2014, the newly revived Newsweek published a cover story titled “The Face Behind Bitcoin.” They claimed to have tracked down the legendary founder, and confronted him at his modest home in a suburb of Los Angeles.

So I noticed, of course, when Newsweek ran that story one month after ours. It was shortly after I read it online that I got an email from John Avlon, the acting editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. He wanted me to call him.

Now, usually, when the editor-in-chief asks you to call him, that’s not a good thing. So it was with trepidation that I made the a phone call to New York. However, Avlon wasn’t angry with me. He wanted my help.

“Look, Jake,” he said, “as you know, The Daily Beast and Newsweek used to be together, part of the same company, but we’ve split up. Now, of course I wish Newsweek the best of luck. If they’ve successfully identified the elusive creator of Bitcoin—great for them. Incredible story. But if they haven’t … let’s find out. If we can nail the story, that would be awesome.”

Phone in hand, I bowed slightly. Force of habit. I replied, “Will do my best.”

Avlon asked, “Isn’t he Japanese? Nakamoto?”

I replied, saying only what I knew: “John, it seems like he has a Japanese name. It’s not a common name, not with those Japanese characters. But whether he’s really Japanese or not, nobody knows.”

John laughed. “Well, maybe you can find him in the phone book. Good luck!”

And so began my second deep dive into the world of Bitcoin.

Newsweek claimed to have located the digital currency’s legendary inventor, Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, living in a Los Angeles suburb. But the sixty-four-year-old Japanese American denied his involvement, and has continued to do so, saying he was simply misunderstood by the reporter, Leah McGrath Goodman.

She had been contacting people with Nakamoto’s name, but all her supposed leads were clearly not leading her to the founder. However, she traced one individual with a name that almost completely matched: Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, who lived in Los Angeles. He wouldn’t answer her calls, so she went to Los Angeles to confront him directly.

He replied, “I am no longer involved in that, and I cannot discuss it.”

And that was enough proof for her.

After the story was published, the media swarmed Dorian’s home. Immediately, some holes started to appear in Goodman’s theory. For one thing, Dorian didn’t even have a working internet connection in his home. A cryptocurrency genius without internet access should have seemed fishy.

On March 9, Dorian gave an exclusive interview to the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, where I had first started as a reporter years earlier. Nakamoto [Dorian] flatly denied being the creator of Bitcoin, and said, “I had never heard of Bitcoin until a few weeks ago.” Dorian explained that when he replied to Goodman’s accusation in his driveway, he prefaced his famous comment by saying, “Even if I was hypothetically involved …” He had thought the reporter was asking him about classified work he had previously done for the US military.

There were many inconsistencies with the theory that Dorian could be Nakamoto, and Newsweek chose to ignore them. For instance, the real Nakamoto mined himself a fortune and had an estimated net worth of $500 million to $1 billion at the time. Dorian’s house was being foreclosed, and, due to his many medical problems, he was openly in need of money.

The Bitcoin community had, early on, hypothesized that Nakamoto was not Japanese, due to the fact that he never used Japanese. In fact, he wrote well in English and used British spelling. Dorian’s strongest language was by far his first: Japanese. In an interview with the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper and my former employer, Dorian also added what everyone else was thinking: “The designer of Bitcoin would never [logically] use their real name.” After all, Nakamoto had labored to anonymize all of his personal information online.

The interview, which was a huge scoop for the Yomiuri, took place on March 9 and was published online on March 10 at 2.41 p.m., Japanese time.

There has been some question as to the uniqueness of the name “Satoshi Nakamoto” in Japan and in the US, and whether that added credence to the Newsweek article’s claims.

In the original 2008 paper that launched the virtual currency, there are no kanji representing Nakamoto’s name. Kanji is a system within written Japanese (one of three systems) that uses Chinese characters. Because of the limited number of phonemes in Japanese, the language is riddled with homonyms. For example, the following kanji can all be read as “hashi” in Japanese: 箸 (chopsticks), 橋 (bridge), 端 (the tip, or edge), or 波子 (a train station in Shimane prefecture). Most native Japanese people’s names are expressed entirely in kanji. It can be challenging to distinguish individuals or subjects without knowing the kanji characters.

The first appearance of the kanji for Satoshi Nakamoto was in 2011, in a translation of the original essay posted on bitcoin.co.jp, which is part of the loosely connected federation of Bitcoin enthusiasts. The kanji characters shown there are 中本 (Nakamoto) 哲史 (Satoshi).

Experts contend that there are possibly 40,000 Nakamotos (中本) in Japan. However, in a database search I undertook of over 150 local newspapers and magazines going back twenty years, there were only fourteen hits, and only two people with the name 中本哲史 still alive. One article was about a thirteen-year-old middle-school student, back in 2003. The other was about a teacher and baseball coach in his forties.

Even though I felt like an idiot, I called every single Satoshi Nakamoto I could find. Most of the people I called had no idea what Bitcoin even was, and, to be honest, I didn’t really either. I knew how it worked in the same way I understood how my Subaru worked—which is to say, vaguely.

I contacted all those associated with bitcoin.co.jp to try to figure out why he or someone would choose to use that specific kanji. The translation of the essay was created on October 11, 2011, at 6.03 pm, according to metadata embedded in the file. It was not clear whether Nakamoto had been consulted about the correct kanji use. It was not clear whether the translator had simply selected the kanji on their own. It’s not even clear that the translator was not Satoshi.

While I was trying to hunt down Satoshi Nakamoto in Japan, the mystery deepened in cyberspace.

On March 7, the person we assume is the real Nakamoto posted through his long-dormant account at the P2P Foundation (“The Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives” on p2pfoundation.net), the site where he first published the Bitcoin software and the essay explaining it, a simple message: “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

But that doesn’t mean that Dorian could not have done it himself, if he was the cyber genius behind Bitcoin.

Prior to this message, Nakamoto had remained silent since February 18, 2009, when he responded in a comment to another P2P member.

I didn’t know where to look next for information on the mysterious Nakamoto, but I was beginning to suspect it wasn’t in Japan.

Japanese cops have a saying, “Go back to the scene of the crime one hundred times.” It’s the distant cousin to the cop adage of the English-speaking world, “The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.” Take a close look where the perpetrator was last seen: that’s where you’ll find clues.

Where is the original essay, if it exists? Why would Satoshi replace it with a later version—if he did at all? There were many questions, and answers were few and far between.

One thing I was certain of was that no one had any idea who Satoshi Nakamoto really was, or if he was even Japanese.

I wanted to share notes with someone, so I asked Ms. Hiroko Tabuchi, who worked on the story at the New York Times, to form a loose alliance with me. We’d both reached the same conclusion: anyone could be Satoshi Nakamoto.

In fact, I decided, just to see what would happen, to declare myself as being Satoshi Nakamoto. Maybe the real Satoshi Nakamoto would be outraged, and would contact me. It was a shot in the dark.

On Twitter (now known as X, albeit uncommonly), you have your decided handle username, and then you can alter your other name to whatever you wish. My unchangeable username is @jakeadelstein—not very mysterious. But in the nickname section, I chose to rename myself Satoshi Nakamoto. In English, at first. I encouraged my friends and other Bitcoin fans to change their twitter account names to Satoshi Nakamoto. And then odd things started happening.

By March 7, I had already begun getting requests from foreign journalists asking me, “Is that you Satoshi-san?” My reply: “We are legion. Satoshi Nakamoto is many. :D” Some of us in the Nakamoto clan even composed an ode to the mysterious genius:

Imagine (You’re Satoshi Nakamoto)

Imagine no fiat currency

I wonder if you can

Just a world of #bitcoin

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people living with no cash

Imagine no double spending

It isn’t hard to do

No ATM fees to pay for

And no central bank too,

Imagine libertarians living life in peace, you

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

Buy yourself some bitcoin

Before it hits a million times 21

By the end of the week, I had convinced a solid number of people, in echoes of the movie Spartacus, to declare, “I am Satoshi Nakamoto!” We had twenty people claiming the name Satoshi Nakamoto, until finally Twitter banned anyone else from doing it.

I submitted my findings to The Daily Beast, and it was published on March 11, 2014, with the title, “Mysteries Continue to Swirl Around the Identity of Bitcoin’s Creator.” I wish it was a little snazzier, less meteorological, but I don’t get to make the headlines.

Avlon loved the piece because it essentially proved, to him at least, that Newsweek was dead wrong. This is how it ended:

Rashomon, anyone? The classic Kurosawa film has become the go-to cliché for anyone who mentions confusing events. But, this time, it actually perfectly sums up this tangled narrative. The film presents several contradictory accounts of the murder of a samurai in a forest thicket. The accounts include those of a released prisoner, a woodcutter, a Buddhist mendicant priest, and even the ghost of the dead man himself, who questions whether there is an objective truth to be found at all. Just so with Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity seems increasingly lost in a cyber thicket that no one can penetrate.

Only one thing is for certain—Japan has become the epicenter of the still unveiling Bitcoin mystery.

For me, the mystery was just beginning. I needed to go back to the start and find everything I could about the man that nobody knew. And this is what I found:

On August 18, 2008, the domain “www.bitcoin.org” was registered through anonymousspeech.com, a website that never reveals the name of its clients. This may have been the first appearance of the word “bitcoin” ever.

On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published “Bitcoin: A Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System” on the online forum P2P Foundation. The paper was revolutionary. It proposed a formula for creating a monetary system that could operate over the internet, without any bank, without any central node—electronic money. The idea had been floated before, but never the way that Satoshi proposed it. Essentially, he had come up with a system for creating digital gold. It was in theory, a flawless system. It had been designed so that, like gold, there would be scarcity, with the number of Bitcoin being capped at 21 million bitcoins (BTC), making it inflation-proof, and also making it difficult to forge Bitcoin. In addition, every single bitcoin transaction would be logged in a public ledger, to be called the blockchain, thus also ensuring that forgery would be next to impossible.

It was a nine-page proposal. The proposal was fascinating, but, without any software to back it up, it was just an interesting theory.

The P2P posting didn’t tell us much about Satoshi, but it did tell us one thing—his birthday was April 5, 1975—meaning he would be thirty-three years old when the paper was published. (He will be a quinquagenarian in 2025 when this book comes out.) The P2P forum required some measure of disclosure to log in, but most of us assumed that he fabricated his name and his birthday as well. It doesn’t really matter to the Bitcoin community, which celebrates his birthday the way Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on December 25.

At this point, I realized that Bitcoin’s public history wasn’t all that useful to me. What I really needed to know was how it works, and why it was created in the first place.

The best answer I’ve ever read came from a federal court case in the United States. This is the testimony of special agent Tigran Gambaryan of the IRS. He’s known as the Blockchain Wizard for his ability to decipher the public ledger of Bitcoin and track down criminals who use the currency to launder money or steal bitcoin from hacked accounts:

Bitcoin is a form of decentralized, convertible virtual currency that exists through the use of an online, decentralized ledger system (the blockchain). The currency is not issued by any government, bank, or company, but rather is generated and controlled through computer software operating via a decentralized network.

To acquire bitcoins, a typical user will purchase them from a Bitcoin seller or “exchanger.” It is also possible to “mine” bitcoin by verifying other users’ transactions. Bitcoin (BTC) is just one form of digital currency, and there are a significant number of other varieties of digital currency.

Bitcoin exchangers typically accept payments of fiat currency (currency which derives its value from government regulation or law), or other convertible virtual currencies in order to obtain bitcoins. When a user wishes to purchase bitcoins from an exchanger, the user will typically send payment in the form of fiat or other convertible virtual currency to an exchanger, usually via wire or ACH for the corresponding number of bitcoins based on a fluctuating exchange rate.

When a user acquires bitcoins, they are sent to the user’s Bitcoin address. This is somewhat analogous to a bank account number, which is comprised of a case-sensitive string of letters and numbers amounting to a total of twenty-six to thirty-five characters. The user can then conduct transactions with other Bitcoin users, by transferring bitcoins to their Bitcoin addresses, via the internet.

Little to no personally identifiable information about the payer or payee is transmitted in a Bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin transactions occur using a public key and a private key. A public key is used to receive bitcoins and a private key is used to allow withdrawals from a Bitcoin address. Only the Bitcoin address of the receiving party and the sender’s private key are needed to complete the transaction, which by themselves rarely reflect any identifying information.

Think of it this way: the Bitcoin public key is like a safety deposit box at a Swiss bank. Anyone who knows the number can go to the bank and put money in the box. The private key is the combination to the safety deposit box; only the person with the combination can access the money.

All Bitcoin transactions are recorded on what is known as the blockchain. This is essentially a distributed public ledger that keeps track of all Bitcoin transactions, incoming and outgoing, and updates approximately six times per hour. The blockchain records every Bitcoin address that has ever received a bitcoin and maintains records of every transaction and the known balances for each Bitcoin address.

Digital currencies, including Bitcoin, have many known legitimate uses. However, much like cash, bitcoins can be used to facilitate illicit transactions and to launder criminal proceeds, given the ease with which they can be used to move money anonymously. As is demonstrated herein, however, in some circumstances bitcoin payments may be traced to accounts at traditional financial institutions using the blockchain.

On January 3, 2009, Satoshi put his money where his mouth was, and the first bitcoin was created, or “mined” as they like to say in the Bitcoin world. This first block of data is known as the genesis block. And in that block, there is a clue to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto and the philosophy that drove him to create a new currency. Embedded in the block of data, he had quoted a January 3, 2009 article from the Times of London, titled: “Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks. Billions may be needed as lending squeeze tightens.”

The world financial collapse and the Lehman Brothers shock was still reverberating throughout the world. The newspaper headline included in the code wasn’t just random. It was a way of declaring the value of Bitcoin—by referencing a huge bailout of the banks by the British government.

A few days after Satoshi mined the first Bitcoin, on January 9, Satoshi released the Bitcoin source code and his Bitcoin software (“the Bitcoin client,” as computer geeks would like to say). The software was downloaded by a software engineer and notable advocate of cryptography and digital privacy, Hal Finney, who was fifty-two at the time.

Finney had been a cypherpunk in the 1990s. The cypherpunks, a play on the words “cyberpunks,” were activists advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Now, in an era when China uses closed-circuit cameras, massive wiretapping, and facial-recognition software to track every movement and thought of its people, the cypherpunks seem very prescient.

Hal Finney worked with Satoshi to get the software and the system up and running. One of the things about Bitcoin that many people don’t understand is that while Satoshi Nakamoto conceived it and created it, he worked with other software developers for years to make Bitcoin run perfectly. It has always been a group effort. In fact, only about 15 percent of the code in Bitcoin nowadays was originally from Nakamoto.

Hal Finney described those early days as follows in a post he made in March 2013:

When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.

After a few days, bitcoin was running pretty stably, so I left it running. I mined several blocks over the next few days. But I turned it off because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me. In retrospect, I wish I had kept it up longer, but on the other hand I was extraordinarily lucky to be there at the beginning.

Of course, many people believed that Hal Finney might actually be Satoshi Nakamoto. But Finney always denied this. In fact, in October of the year that Bitcoin was born, he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a debilitating disease, and his health began to deteriorate with astonishing rapidity. Bitcoin wasn’t the most pressing thing on his mind.

He wrote in his 2013 blog post, at a time when he was already close to being completely paralyzed:

The next I heard of Bitcoin was late 2010, when I was surprised to find that it was not only still going, bitcoins actually had monetary value. I dusted off my old wallet and was relieved to discover that my bitcoins were still there. As the price climbed up to real money, I transferred the coins into an offline wallet, where hopefully they’ll be worth something to my heirs.

When he wrote those words, he only had a few months to live. He seemed to know his time was limited, and he was already thinking of his legacy. He wrote, “My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech savvy. I think they’re safe enough. I’m comfortable with my legacy.”

Satoshi Nakamoto, in the early days of Bitcoin, stored an estimated 1 million BTC for himself in various accounts—roughly 5 percent of all bitcoins that will ever be in circulation. Hal Finney died on August 28, 2014, and his body was put in cryogenic suspension. For those who believe that Finney was Nakamoto, it should be noted that since his death, there have been no postings and no emails from the real Nakamoto.

However, in late summer of 2014, as I was still working on the Mt. Gox story, it suddenly seemed like there might be one person who finally had the answer.

On September 8, a hacker who went by the name “Savaged” took over Nakamoto’s email account, hosted on GMX.COM, which also now runs MAIL.COM.

The alleged hacker posted on Pastebin (a network bulletin board) a notice: ‘SATOSHI DOX [DOCUMENTS] FOR SALE.’

The hacker promised to publicize the essential details of Satoshi’s identity if 25 BTC were sent to a designated bitcoin address. At the time, 25 BTC were worth about $24,000.

Many people thought this was a hoax until a Bitcoin Talk forum administrator posted an announcement on the forum after 9.00 pm on September 8. He confirmed that Satoshi’s email account had been taken over.

Within hours of the announcement that Satoshi’s emails had been hacked, another message appeared on the P2P Foundation bulletin board:

Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the darknet. Apparently, you didn’t configure Tor properly and your IP leaked when you used your email account sometime in 2010. You are not safe. You need to get out of where you are as soon as possible before these people harm you. Thank you for inventing bitcoin.

Like everyone else who had an interest in the elusive Nakamoto, I was glued to my computer waiting to see what would happen next. I made a phone call to Avlon, and told him that this could be big news. Everyone waited for the next page of the story, and then … GMX deleted the entire mail account.

Nakamoto’s identity was not revealed to the world, and the email provider, a company based in Germany, wouldn’t clarify what happened.

Did the hacker manage to save all the mails before GMX shut down the account? How much information was really in the account to begin with? Only the hacker knows, and they haven’t spoken since September 10, 2014. Another dead end.

Every time there’s another theory professing that X is Satoshi Nakamoto, or in some cases when an individual comes forward claiming to be Satoshi, I have followed up. None of them pan out. Here are the usual suspects:

1. John Nash

One of the greatest mathematicians in history and the subject of the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind. He is no fan of Keynesian economics, but then again, he couldn’t code a game of Pong. He’s also dead.

2. Neil King and company

Fast Company reported that on August 15, 2008, three days before bitcoin.org was registered by the real Satoshi Nakamoto, King, Vladimir Oksam, and Charles Bry filed an encryption patent that resembled the structure of Bitcoin. The smoking gun was the phrase “computationally impractical to reverse,” also a phrase in Satoshi’s white paper. And that’s about it. I don’t buy it.

3. Shinichi Mochizuki

A reclusive Japanese mathematician, but not a computer programmer. I tracked him down once at a conference, and he just laughed at the suggestion.

4. Wei Dai

A Cypherpunk and also an early advocate of digital currency. He’s denied it as well, and his writing style isn’t anything like Nakamoto’s.

5. Nick Sazbo

A brilliant programmer, but no one can make a convincing case for him.

6. Craig Wright

A shady Australian businessman and information-technology expert who seems to have manipulated Gizmodo and Wired into writing an article about him being the creator of Bitcoin at roughly the same time, in December 2015—in what appears to have been a very elaborate hoax. A 2024 lawsuit against Wright ended with a 400-page judgment which stated all the pieces of evidence that Wright had provided were merely forgeries as elaborate as they were sloppy. As the law firm investigating Wright noted in a gleefully schadenfreude-ridden article it posted:

Hard copy documents had been artificially aged with splashed coffee stains, their staples rusted up in record time.

Notepads had been covered from top to bottom in handwritten notes and backdated to 2007–8: but the notepads themselves were more modern, and would not be created until well after 2010 (facts established through shoe-leather investigation over the course of months).

From the start, Tigran Gambaryan and Mark Karpelès both asserted that Craig’s claims were bogus and that he was a buffoon. He might be the only Craig to ever make Craigslist look like a pillar of honesty and transparency. At least on Craigslist, when someone says they’re selling you a slightly used bike, you know it’s only probably a scam.

As recently as 2024, Tigran told me, “I have a good idea of who Satoshi Nakamoto really is and I would never say, but what I will say is that it isn’t Craig Wright or the individual HBO identified in their bombastic docudrama, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery.”

We won’t name that individual here either, because he asserts that being labelled Satoshi Nakamoto puts his life at risk, and he’s probably right.

Here’s The Sword in The Stone test for anyone claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto. They have to spend some of the coins that we know belong to Nakamoto because of their digital serial numbers—those coins buried at the bottom of the blockchain.

Everyone would like to know who the real Satoshi Nakamoto is. Some would like to get their hands on the billions of dollars’ worth of bitcoins he owns. The Central Intelligence Agency fears that Nakamoto might be able to disrupt the world economy with his 1 million BTC. “It’s highly possible that Satoshi Nakamoto is a state agent, backed by a hostile entity or possibly a libertarian terrorist,” one former spook told me over cocktails in one of the last bars in Washington DC where you can still smoke a cigarette. He didn’t have anything else to tell me of much value.

A former National Security Agency analyst said he was sure that Bitcoin could be hacked, but after spending weeks looking at the code, realized it would be nearly impossible. “It was made by the most paranoid cyber geek in the world. It had to be somebody at least familiar with the basic tenets of cyberwarfare. Every possible attack has been anticipated and countered in advance.”

I don’t know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, but when he was active, he was a prolific writer. And yet you can pore through all his messages, his emails, and his papers, and rarely will you ever get a glimpse of the man behind them. Correspondents with Satoshi would try to glean some sign of humanity from him.

“Merry Christmas, wherever you are (if you celebrate Christmas),” wrote one.

There was no response from Satoshi, except a discussion of the latest quirks in the code.

It’s a reasonable assumption to believe he’s English or spent a great deal of time in England. His writings are peppered with British spellings. The newspaper he quotes in the genesis block, The Times of London, is a British paper. (It’s also a paper I’ve served as a correspondent for. That fact is not relevant, but it does make me feel connected to him.)

Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and Bitcoin believer, graphed out the timestamps of more than 500 of Nakamoto’s online posts. There was an almost complete absence of posts between midnight and 6.00 am Greenwich Time, which could also indicate that Satoshi lived in England, and that he almost always went to bed before midnight.

A Bitcoin developer, Laszlo Hanyecz, who is famous for making the first real-world purchase with bitcoins (10,000 of them for a pair of pizzas) sent hundreds of emails back and forth between himself and Satoshi. He noticed that the answers would only come near the end of the US working week. This seemed to suggest that Satoshi had a daytime job and only had free time on the weekends.

There is a constant strain of paranoia in his emails—fear of government interference, fear of the code failing, fear of Bitcoin being hacked—that gives some of his correspondence a soft-spoken intensity.

Years after I wrote the first article about Satoshi Nakamoto, I asked Mark Karpelès about their exchanges over a cup of coffee laced with whisky in a smoky jazz bar. Mark was eating cinnamon toast. I wanted to know what he thought of Satoshi Nakamoto. After all, there was a time when the Japanese police actually asked Mark if he was Nakamoto.

“You know the Japanese name for Satoshi Nakamoto?” he asked me.

“Of course, I do. Nobody knows if those Japanese characters are really correct.”

“Well,” he said with a Cheshire Cat-like grin, “I made them up—when I was translating his article for the Bitcoin organization in Japan. I just picked the characters that seemed to best capture the essence of the man in Japanese: ‘The center of reality and the wisdom of history’. Rather nice, don’t you think?”

I agreed. And then I realized that one of the last clues we thought we had to Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity was no longer even a clue.

That is the Zen of Satoshi Nakamoto.

The more you think you know about him, the less you actually know.