Book Review: “The Mystical Mr. Nakamoto,” by Benjamin Wallace

Mystical Mr Nakamoto: Benjamin Wallace’s 15-year quest to drive out the secret genius behind Crypto

A few years ago, I met someone named Keith Labois for coffee in Miami Beach. Along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Labois is a member of the so-called Paypal Mafia. The group opened the company in 2002 and developed a series of original Silicon Valley businesses.

The topic of Bitcoin appeared as it tended to do so. Labois noted that Paypal’s original vision was similar. “I still have a T-shirt with the PayPal logo,” he said. “And they showed me a video of “New World Currency.” He showed us a video of Thiel giving a speech in 1999. “That was the company’s goal to reform finances,” Labois said. “It turns out that was really tough.”

Even in 1999, the concept of digital currency, bypassing nation-states and financial institutions, was not novel. It fermented for years in the ecosystems of online listserves, Bay Area potlucks and cryptographic circles. There, the connection between cryptographers and quirky programmers was experimented with ideas that seemed inevitable. It appeared in Neil Stevenson’s science fiction and techno libertarian controversies like William Reese Mogg and James Dale Davidson’s “Sovereign.” But creating something that actually worked was really hard.

Benjamin Wallace’s “Mystical Nakamoto” is a new attempt to ultimately reveal the identity of such a person (or figure), introducing Bitcoin in 2008 under the name Nakamoto at. Wallace, a writer for New York Magazine and Vanity Fair, is good for this task. His first article on Bitcoin appeared in Wired in 2011. That year he attended the first Bitcoin tournament in New York. There, a small group of participants tried (and failed) to use encryption to pay for dinner.

As Bitcoin prices surged over the years between them (and as their major use cases evolved from a medium of exchange to the theoretical storage of value), Sato Puzzle continues to prove attractive to journalists. It also represents a particular instance, like quicksand, like reports, which mainly leads to general embarrassment and more often vague but impossible to call. There’s nothing really proven. No one is completely ruled out. Bitcoin boosters view these investigations as something between the dull and the blasphemous asp. Faceless founders serve both the distributed vision of the protocol and the quasi-religious dimension that emerged around it.

Anyone who has followed this story for many years will feel that this account is, to a greater or lesser extent, a normal suspect investigation for funny suspects. Wallace spends a significant portion of the book in favor of computer scientist Nick Szabo, founder of Bitcoin Precursor Bitgold and the subject of long-standing speculation. (Reporter Nathaniel Popper laid out the szabo case in the New York Times a decade ago.) Another part is dedicated to Australian pretender Craig Wright.

Wallace creates plausible candidate criteria ranging from “chord quirks” to “emotional scope.” He attempts both textual and code stylometry to see if statistical analysis can escape atsoshi’s identity. Nearly 200 pages, he still turns the wheels. “I was almost moving forward with my own research and was beginning to despair.” (The readers may be allowed to feel the same way.) Later, when he wrote, he began to identify familiar forms of the hairy dog ​​story, “I always wondered whether Nakamoto’s mystery was more persuasive than its resolution.”

Most disappointing is that Wallace has probably not meaningfully delved into some of the more left field outlooks to become more visible over the years. For example, there is the “lab leak” theory of Bitcoin. Satoshi, for example, was the NSA’s crypto unit, and Bitcoin was an experiment that violated containment. In particular, these theorists point to an agency’s 1996 paper, “How to Make Mint: How to Encrypt Anonymous Electronic Cash.” It makes it as ridiculous as any other specific possibility (e.g. Nakamoto is the first candidate to investigate in the book, for example).

If Wallace doesn’t close the case, he is a charming narrator, and his book serves as a useful introduction to one of the real mysteries of the century. It is a mystery that becomes more prominent as the current administration explores the concept of strategic Bitcoin reserves, and it cites a surprising civic neo-gold bug spirit of the community at the White House crypto summit. Nevertheless, the riddle remains stubbornly surviving, at least for the time being.

Mystical Mr Nakamoto: A 15-year quest to drive out the secret genius behind Crypto | Benjamin Wallace | Crown | 342 pp. | $32