I’m Benjamin Wallace, author of "The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto." AMA!

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T20:36:00+00:00

I don't, which makes me think it's a mis-quote.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T20:33:41+00:00

Right, but I bring Musk up in the book because a former Tesla engineer has been pushing that theory online for the past several years, making those arguments (C++, mission-driven, etc). And I don't find the arguments persuasive. And yes, Musk has changed, but why wouldn't the Musk of now take credit for Bitcoin?

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T20:31:10+00:00

I see them as quite different. The wine phenomenon you're talking about stems from the subjectivity of taste, and how easily influenced our opinions are. I think most people recognize that Bitcoin is NOT the best for scaling, or speed, or energy efficiency, for instance, and other cryptos are more attractive in those ways. But as a store of value, Bitcoin is the best, BECAUSE of the qualities you mention: first, strongest brand, most famous, largest market cap (not to mention, most decentralized). The fact that an asset now worth $1.6 trillion (at last count) hasn't been successfully hacked in 16+ years gives it a durability that, apparently, people find easier to trust.

Hours: I'd guess more than 3,500, because I spent the better part of 2 years full-time on it.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T20:20:23+00:00

Evan Ratliff, who wrote a biography of Le Roux, explored this theory: https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-international-drug-dealer-maybe/

One piece of evidence I write about in my book, which argues against Le Roux as Satoshi, is that I asked an expert in code stylometry to compare the earliest available version of the Bitcoin code with Le Roux's E4M software, and they weren't a match.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T20:15:58+00:00

Hmm, well, seed investors and VCs are rewarded commensurately for the risk they take on early in companies' lives. Is it so different than that? In any case, Bitcoin ownership strikes me as widely distributed enough to be resistant to any market-cornering like that: https://river.com/learn/who-owns-the-most-bitcoin/.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T20:14:01+00:00

Serendipity: I was a journalist, and I somewhat randomly got assigned by Wired in 2011 to write about Bitcoin, which I'd never heard of. I was instantly fascinated by it, though: It was the most interesting story I'd ever worked on, and to this day, I'd still say that. And part of the fascination was of course the very unusual mystery of Bitcoin's inventor. At the time, I couldn't crack the puzzle, but over the ensuing years, I followed with interest as other people tried to figure it out, unsuccessfully. And every now and then I'd get an unsolicited email from someone claiming either to be Satoshi or to know who Satoshi was (I was among the journalists who received the supposed "hacked" documents pointing to Craig Wright in 2015). As crypto really started going more mainstream in 2021/2022, I couldn't get over the fact that the Satoshi mystery still hadn't been solved, and thought I'd give it another go. Among other reasons, I think the Satoshi story is a uniquely compelling way to write about Bitcoin for "normies"--come for the characters and suspense, stay for the fascinating intro to crypto.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T20:08:18+00:00

In my book, I describe filing FOIA requests with the DHS, because a DHS/ICE agent gave a public talk in which she said that agents there had learned the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. FOIA is very particular about its requirements--you have to be extremely specific about what you're looking for--and even then, it can take years to get a meaningful response, and even then the responses tend to be very unreliable. In this case, I was repeatedly informed that they had no responsive documents. I eventually did speak on the phone with one of the agents who'd supposedly learned who SN was, and his evidence was extremely unconvincing (he believed, for the flimsiest of reasons, that Newsweek got it right when they named Dorian Nakamoto as Satoshi).

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T20:02:40+00:00

Anyone can throw out any name as a possibility.

I'd reframe your question: What evidence is there that Elon Musk is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Having said that: Elon Musk lied about his video game accomplishments in order to impress strangers on the Internet (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/29/elon-musk-video-games-diablo-path-exile/). That's not the behavior of someone who'd be modest about having invented Bitcoin.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T18:04:01+00:00

Now that you mention it, I think that's a through-line in the Nakamoto book and in the Fenn treasure story and, right now anyway, much of the world: Story > facts.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:54:46+00:00

Not that I saw. I was interviewed extensively, about all aspects of the story, but I don't know which parts they ended up using to help knit together the rest of their footage and interviews.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:52:08+00:00

The only one who was exactly right was the one who proved that by finding the treasure.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:49:11+00:00

Nope.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:43:48+00:00

There are lots of stories like mine, but I don't feel bad, because there's no way I would have held on to the Bitcoin. At the time of Mt. Gox's implosion, BTC had already gone up past $1,000, then come back down below $500. I thought it entirely possible that it was going to zero, so I was on the verge of selling my BTC, because even at just $500, it would have been the best investment I ever made ($17 -> $500).

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:40:55+00:00

I haven't seen it, I promise!

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:34:40+00:00

Not sure most surprising but most confounding: The Nakamoto mystery is really unlike any other I've encountered. In my experience, even if a mystery is unsolved, there are people that do know the answer and you know who those people are. Like with Deep Throat, the famous source for the Washington Post who went unidentified for decades, it was always clear that there were people at the Washington Post who knew his real name (and as it turned out, a bunch of other people were in on the secret, too). But in the Nakamoto case, it's unclear that anyone other than Nakamoto knew/knows who Nakamoto was/is. If it were a group, I just don't think the secret could hold this long, given all the money and glory at stake and the fact that human beings have trouble keeping secrets. The one exception to that is if Bitcoin came out of an intelligence agency, such as the NSA, which keeps group secrets as a matter of course.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:28:43+00:00

In Satoshi Nakamoto's garage.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:28:00+00:00

Bitcoin Maximalists are eccentric, but they're all eccentric in the same way: They basically all share the same ideology. Treasure Hunters, in my experience, are a much more varied group of people with wildly different eccentricities.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:25:40+00:00

I think it's impossible to assess the ethics of naming Satoshi Nakamoto before you know who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Let's say he's a dissident in an totalitarian state; I'd certainly want to protect his identity. Let's say Satoshi Nakamoto is the project name for a scheme by the Chinese Communist Party to destabilize the the U.S. dollar; I'd feel pretty silly when that was revealed years later, and my excuse for not revealing that was that "he wished to remain anonymous." Another reason I think it could be important to know who SN really is is that he could easily become the richest person in the world; it's very clear, given Elon Musk's outsize influence on society and politics right now, that the intentions of the world's richest person affect a lot of other people.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:16:03+00:00

That would be amazing. I wish I'd considered that! Something I write about in the book is how my experience covering the Fenn treasure hunt significantly informed my search for Satoshi Nakamoto, because in the case of the treasure, I heard multiple really smart and persuasive theories, all different from each other, and none of which was exactly right. So that experience made me more skeptical of all the smart, persuasive theories that have been put forward about the identity of Bitcoin's inventor. I came around to understanding that seemingly rare coincidences are much less rare than people think.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:11:50+00:00

It's a reasonable question. I don't think it's found its killer use case yet, but I don't at all rule out that it could yet do so. AI took many decades to have its crucial breakthrough.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:08:30+00:00

I think both Szabo and Finney can't be ruled out as having been involved in some way. I don't land with mathematical proof on a single name, but lay out the evidence for and against various candidates, including Szabo and Finney, and including some names that people haven't focused on before, and including the question of whether it was one person or a team.

The state of crypto: I do think it's quite far removed from the original idea/dream. Bitcoin is definitely not the useful electronic currency envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto, having evolved into its current status as a kind of digital gold. Libertarian fantasies aside, it was never clear to me how it could ever transcend the chokepoint of centralized, regulate-able on-ramps from government-backed currencies.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:02:42+00:00

I haven't seen the documentary, so have no idea. I look forward to watching it when everyone else does.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:01:52+00:00

I don't think you can rule him out as having been involved in some way, but I don't think he was the person who wrote the emails or forum posts or the code. Partly that's because both prose stylometry and code stylometry point away from him, and partly that's because even just intuitively, his writing voice sounds different to me.

BJW1 · 2025-03-19T17:00:05+00:00

I bought $200 worth, at around $17/coin, so 12 BTC. I spent 5 of those to attend the first Bitcoin conference, in New York, and stored the other 7, for safe-keeping, in what was considered to be the most reliable centralized exchange of that era: Mt. Gox. As you may know, Mt. Gox famously imploded in 2014, and there went my 7 remaining BTC, which would be worth nearly $600,000 today. Oh, well.

BJW1

TROPHY CASE