The Story of Crypto’s Rise: Tangled, Confusing and Frustrating

THE MYSTERIOUS MR. NAKAMOTO: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto, by Benjamin Wallace

A few years ago, I met up for coffee in Miami Beach with a person named Keith Rabois. Along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Rabois is a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia — the group that took that company public in 2002 and went on to develop a series of seminal Silicon Valley businesses.

The topic of Bitcoin came up, as it tended to do then. Rabois pointed out that PayPal’s original vision had been similar. “I still have T-shirts with the PayPal logo,” he said, “and on the back: ‘The New World Currency.’” He showed me a video of Thiel speaking in 1999, proposing a world of private currencies exchanged on cellphones, where governments would be forced to cede their monetary sovereignty. “That was the goal of the company, to reinvent finance,” Rabois said wistfully. “Turns out it was really hard.”

Even in 1999, the notion of a digital currency that bypassed nation-states and financial institutions was not a novel one. It had been fermenting for years in an ecosystem of online listservs, Bay Area potlucks and cryptography circles, where a nexus of crypto-anarchists and eccentric programmers experimented with an idea that seemed to them inevitable. It had appeared in the science fiction of Neal Stephenson and in techno-libertarian polemics like William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson’s “The Sovereign Individual.” But creating one that actually worked was, indeed, really hard.

Benjamin Wallace’s “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” is a new attempt to unmask the identity of the figure (or figures) who eventually did so, introducing Bitcoin in 2008 under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Wallace, a writer for New York magazine and Vanity Fair, is well suited to the task. His first article on Bitcoin appeared in Wired in 2011, only a few years into its existence. That year, he attended the first Bitcoin convention, in New York, where a small group of participants tried (and failed) to use crypto to pay for dinner.

As the price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed in the intervening years (and as its primary use case has evolved from being a medium of exchange to a theoretical store of value), the Satoshi puzzle has continued to prove irresistible to journalists. It also represents a particular instance of something like reportorial quicksand, leading mostly to public embarrassment or, more often, a kind of hazy but impassable indeterminacy. Nothing is ever really proved; nobody is ever entirely ruled out. For their part, Bitcoin boosters largely view these investigations as something between dull and blasphemous, a faceless founder being more useful both to the decentralized vision of the protocol and to the quasi-religious dimension that has emerged around it.