Chasing the Bitcoin God: A reporter's 15-year investigation into Satoshi Nakamoto

Original title: "In Pursuit of the Bitcoin God"

Written by: Benjamin Wallace

Translated by: ChainCather, Riley

Editor's note: This article is excerpted from "The Mysterious Mr. Satoshi Nakamoto: Fifteen Years of Decoding the Encrypted World Behind the Scenes Genius" by Benjamin Wallace, one of the earliest journalists to report on Bitcoin, spent fifteen years conducting in-depth investigations, from technical analysis, stylistic identification to cross-border tracking, trying to uncover the true face of Satoshi Nakamoto. In the end, the clues pointed to a programmer in his seventies, James A. Donald. However, after meeting and talking with Donald, Wallace chose to put down his pen and gave up continuing to investigate Satoshi Nakamoto.

TL, DR:

1. I first reported on Satoshi Nakamoto in 2011. After 15 years of investigation and search, I now think I have solved the mystery.

2. Sahil Gupta emailed me and revealed that he speculated that Musk was "very likely" to be Satoshi Nakamoto. Sahil believes that the public is ready to accept that Satoshi Nakamoto and Musk are the same person. He claimed to be "99% sure" and attributed the outside world's doubts to "prejudice against Musk."

3. The author describes the details of how Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin. After Gavin Andresen told him that he would go to the CIA to explain Bitcoin but did not receive a response, Satoshi Nakamoto completely retired in 2011, leaving only a suspected forum post and never appeared again.

4. The author found that Satoshi Nakamoto's idiomatic word "hosed" only appeared four times in the early Bitcoin mailing list, two of which came from the first questioner James Donald, becoming the key language fingerprint to lock his identity.

5. The author locked James Donald through multiple clues, but when faced with questioning, the top suspect of Satoshi Nakamoto simply ended the conversation with "cannot disclose".

6. Perhaps one day, artificial intelligence can help us confirm Satoshi Nakamoto's identity. But unless the government declassifies some unforeseen secrets, we may never know his true identity beyond a reasonable doubt

If Satoshi Nakamoto—the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin—is who I suspect he is, he will never admit it. He probably won’t even talk to me. It would take me 20 hours on a plane and another eight hours on a car. But I have to try to talk to him face to face.

In the spring of 2011, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared. I first heard about him that summer, when I wrote one of the first in-depth stories about Bitcoin for a magazine. The currency is outside the government and banking system. Twelve years later, Bitcoin’s creator remains a mystery, and his multibillion-dollar fortune remains intact. Never before in the history of science has anyone created a revolutionary technology and taken no credit for it, or earned a cent from it.

Believers cannot worship a flesh and blood body, so they add the aura of legend to this pseudonym. In 2022, Kanye West stepped out of a luxury car in Beverly Hills wearing a baseball cap with "Satoshi Nakamoto" printed on it; Budapest erected the first bronze statue of Satoshi Nakamoto - a hooded ghost; a group of libertarians bought the retired cruise ship "Satoshi Nakamoto" and recruited residents to establish the first Bitcoin sovereign society; more than one technical expert called for him to be awarded the Nobel Prize.

When I first reported on Satoshi Nakamoto in 2011, I never expected that his identity would still be an unsolved mystery more than a decade later. Since then, countless attempts to "reveal the secrets" have failed, and some have even become farces. In 2014, Newsweek firmly identified California system engineer Dorian Nakamoto, triggering a media blockade of his residence for several days. Even 60 Minutes, with its top resources, was helpless and called the task "impossible." But at this moment, I was sure that I had solved the mystery.

I was a little nervous. This man went to great lengths to hide his tracks, and the truth I discovered was disturbing - he was completely different from what people imagined Satoshi Nakamoto to be. He repeatedly called himself a "dangerous person" and had guns hidden in his home.

He also owned at least four properties on two continents. I had thought he was hiding somewhere on the Big Island of Hawaii, but in the summer of 2023, clues pointed to a seaside town on the east coast of Australia.

While I was anxious about this, I had dinner with my sister. She has been a TV news producer for 20 years and witnessed the FBI raid on the home of the "University Unabomber" with the "48 Hours" program team. She suggested that I bring professional security personnel, wear bulletproof vests, and notify local police in advance. “Thanks,” I muttered.

That night she texted: “Can’t sleep, don’t know why.” It was 4:09 a.m. “Two suggestions: If the target goes out, try to block him in a public place; it’s best to arrange for someone to record the video remotely for evidence.”

Could it be Elon Musk?

On New Year’s Eve 2021, I received an email in my mailbox with the title “New Clues About Satoshi Nakamoto.”

Since writing the early reports on Bitcoin, such emails have appeared from time to time.

The sender, Sahil Gupta, published a blog four years ago speculating that Musk “probably” was Satoshi Nakamoto. This time he provided new “evidence”: a conversation with Musk’s chief of staff, Sam Taylor. The content was vague, and I did not respond.

Two days later, Gupta's detailed arguments were sent to the same email. The arguments ranged from vague to technical. I decided to reply. Sahil told me that when he was an undergraduate at Yale in 2015, he had interned at the SpaceX rocket factory. Musk came to the office three days a week, and the two often met in the corridor. Sahil majored in computer science, and his graduation thesis proposed a central bank digital currency called "Federal Coin", in which he thanked "Satoshi Nakamoto, a true legend."

While researching the thesis, he read in-depth cryptocurrency literature, including Satoshi Nakamoto's nine-page white paper. He noticed that Satoshi Nakamoto's wording style was surprisingly similar to Musk's: both of them liked to use expressions such as "order of magnitude" and "bloody". Satoshi Nakamoto talked about currency in an abstract way, just as Musk did when he was at PayPal. In addition, both of them are proficient in C++ language and cryptography. Sahil began to wonder: Has the father of Bitcoin been hiding in the spotlight?

After graduation, Sahil tried to work for Musk. After multiple emails, he got a phone interview with Chief of Staff Taylor.

At the end of the interview, he plucked up the courage to ask, "Is Elon Satoshi Nakamoto?"

Sahil recalled: "Taylor was silent for 15 seconds, then said, "What can I say?" This was regarded by him as a key clue. In the same year, he wrote an article "Elon Musk May Have Invented Bitcoin", arguing that the Bitcoin community needs the return of the founder. Although Musk tweeted to deny ("False news. A few years ago, a friend gave me some Bitcoin, but I don't know where it was lost"), Sahil still believed in his theory.

He cited more "evidence": PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek once said that the company's original intention was to create a currency that was independent of banks; Satoshi Nakamoto and Musk were both accustomed to leaving two spaces after the period; Musk often went in and out of Van Nuys Airport, and the IP address accidentally exposed in an early Bitcoin email was located in northern Los Angeles; early developers commented that Satoshi Nakamoto was "tyrannical", and so was Musk.

At the end of 2021, Musk had just been elected Time's Person of the Year, SpaceX successfully docked with the International Space Station, and he even joked about Dogecoin on Twitter (the coin subsequently soared and plummeted). Sahil believes that the public is ready to accept that Satoshi Nakamoto and Musk are the same person.

He claimed to be "99% sure" and attributed the outside world's doubts to "prejudice against Musk."

"But Musk is not humble, why deny it?"

Sahil's explanation for this is: "Businesses need marketing, but Bitcoin is different. The mystery of the early anonymous founders makes it stronger and faster-this is where Musk is smart."

I dare not assert whether Sahil is right, but I can understand his obsession. At that time, the price of Bitcoin soared to nearly $70,000, and the total market value exceeded $1 trillion. El Salvador made it a legal currency. In 2011, the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto's identity seemed insignificant, but now it is still an unsolved mystery.

Six months later, I quit my job and devoted myself to this mystery that had entangled me for more than ten years.

The Vanished Founder

In the paper, Nakamoto described a new type of currency that would run on a network of volunteer computers and rely on a transparent public ledger maintained by the entire network, rather than a bank or government system of record-keeping for loans and borrowings. Nakamoto included a link to a more detailed formal description, which later became known as the Bitcoin white paper.

Several members of the mailing list offered feedback on the software Nakamoto had written, and he readily accepted it. "Thanks for your questions," he wrote in one email. "My approach is actually a bit reversed: I have to write all the code first, make sure I have solved all the problems, and then go back to write the paper." In early January 2009, Nakamoto released the initial version of Bitcoin on the open source platform SourceForge. According to early participants, there were only 127 downloads on the first day.

Many of the first users were programmers who thought that "the currency urgently needs an upgrade." Paper money can fade, wrinkle, tear, and get infected with germs; it has a fixed face value, is easy to forge, and is difficult to transfer large amounts. Bitcoin is durable, unforgeable, and almost infinitely divisible, and is expected to realize the ideal of small payments on the Internet - any amount can be instantly transferred to the global account.

As a digital currency maintained by ordinary individuals, Bitcoin is not subject to central power intervention. Gold can be confiscated, bank accounts can be frozen, and legal tender can be devalued due to central bank decisions or capital controls imposed by dictators, but Bitcoin does not need to rely on these traditional systems.

The core of Satoshi Nakamoto's creation is the blockchain - a constantly expanding system of transaction records (buys and sells, etc.). About every ten minutes, the latest transaction record is packaged into a "block" and linked to the previous block through sophisticated mathematical algorithms, making it almost impossible to tamper with the content. In traditional finance, such ledgers are maintained by banks or government agencies; in the Bitcoin network, the ledgers are stored and updated by computers of volunteers around the world, and each device runs Bitcoin software.

Although Bitcoin is an open source project (a "many hands on" collaboration), someone still needs to coordinate. For the first 20 months, Satoshi Nakamoto assumed this role. He released the code, other developers proposed changes, and he integrated the parts that he approved.

Four months after software developer Gavin Andresen joined the Bitcoin project, his commitment and computer science attainments won Satoshi's trust. Nakamoto first gave him direct access to the source code, and then around September 2010, Satoshi told Gavin that he would be busy with other projects and would hand over control of the SourceForge code base and the project's "alert key" in the next few months-this key can broadcast emergency messages to all devices running Bitcoin software. For open source projects, these two are almost "leader's scepter"; at this point, Gavin officially became the chief developer of Bitcoin, leading a team of five volunteer programmers.

In the months that followed, Satoshi continued to occasionally participate in technical discussions, but Gavin's high-profile interactions with the outside world gradually rubbed against his reclusive style. When PayPal and Visa froze WikiLeaks' accounts, some Bitcoin supporters advocated using cryptocurrency to support the controversial organization. Someone shouted on the BitcoinTalk forum: "Let them come!" Satoshi objected sharply: "No! Don't let them come. The project needs to grow gradually so that the software can be improved synchronously. I implore WikiLeaks not to use Bitcoin... The attention at this moment will destroy us."

For reporters covering Bitcoin, Gavin became the first choice for interviews. He was gentle and rational, willing to show his real name, filling the role of "Bitcoin ambassador" that Satoshi never played. But this seemed to make Satoshi uneasy. In late April 2011, he emailed Gavin to remind him, “I hope you won’t describe me as a mysterious shadow anymore—the media will only hype Bitcoin as a label for ‘black market currency.’”

This became the last email Gavin received. When I first contacted Gavin in July of the same year, he said that he had “not communicated with Satoshi for several months.” On April 26, Gavin emailed Satoshi to inform him that he would go to the CIA headquarters (in Langley, Virginia) to explain Bitcoin to intelligence personnel, but received no response. On the same day, Satoshi emailed at least one programmer who collaborated on the project.

After that, he was completely silent. Except for a forum post by a suspected account many years later (it was difficult to tell whether it was true or false), Satoshi never appeared again.

Gavin and other early Bitcoin developers reached a few consensuses on the identity of Satoshi. The second channel through which Nakamoto released his white paper was the website of the P2P Foundation, an idealistic nonprofit dedicated to promoting peer-to-peer networks of all kinds. His profile on the site listed his residence as Japan, but no one believed he was actually Japanese. His English was impeccable, with a British accent: in the Bitcoin source code and in BitcoinTalk forum posts, he favored British spellings such as “colour” and “optimise”.

Nakamoto kept his identity a closely guarded secret. When registering the domain bitcoin.org, he hid his information through the anonymous service anonymousspeech.com, which itself was registered by a Tokyo short-term apartment agency. The service provided him with an email address at vistomail.com (which could fake the time of sending emails), and he also used a free email address at gmx.com. In his correspondence, he displayed a carefully practiced ambiguity: he only answered technical questions and avoided personal topics.

His programming style was slightly old-fashioned, suggesting that he might be older. For example, he adopted the "Hungarian notation" - a variable naming convention popular among Windows programmers in the 1990s.

Gavin believes that the Bitcoin code may be completed by a small team or even a single person. When programmers collaborate, they usually add comments to the code to explain the function of the instructions, but there are very few such comments in the Bitcoin software. However, some people question: Bitcoin ran too smoothly in the early days of its launch, and it did not seem to be completed independently by an individual. In addition, the word "we" is used many times in the white paper, suggesting that "Satoshi Nakamoto" may be a synonym for a team or organization.

Satoshi Nakamoto began to be deified before he retired. On April 16, 2011, BitcoinTalk user Wobber pointed out the complexity of his knowledge system and the abnormality of his behavior - he created such a disruptive technology but did not take credit or seek profit, and quietly withdrew. Some have compared him to Zorro, or the masked David who aimed his slingshot at the banks and government Goliaths.

Is there a clue in the name?  “Satoshi Nakamoto” literally translates to “Central Intelligence,” perhaps hinting at the involvement of spy agencies in the creation of Bitcoin. For example, the National Security Agency (NSA) may have a long game: creating an unregulated financial network that is used for global agent funding and serves as a “honeypot” - allowing opponents to reveal their whereabouts in transactions they think are safe and allow the NSA to monitor them.

This is not entirely absurd. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory once developed the anonymous software "Onion Router" (TOR), which gave birth to the dark web; the FBI secretly launched the encrypted mobile phone and communication service ANOM, which was misused by criminal groups and eventually led to the arrest of more than 800 people; in the summer of 1996, the NSA cryptography department even internally released a paper "How to Forge Anonymous Electronic Cash" (later made public), detailing the principles of cryptocurrency.

Another interpretation breaks down "Satoshi Nakamoto" into a combination of the names of technology giants - SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, MOTOrola - suggesting that corporate conspiracy groups manipulate everything. Reddit users have a wild imagination and reorganized its letters into absurd sentences such as "Ma, I took NSA's oath" or "So a man took a shit." Dan Kaminsky, a programmer who rose to prominence in 2008 for discovering a technical vulnerability that could destroy the internet, believes that Nakamoto may be an internal team of banks. “I suspect he was a small team of financial institutions,” Dan told me. “That’s my instinct.” But he added that Nakamoto’s identity “is not important to the nature of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has long since surpassed Satoshi.” This echoes a mainstream view: Nakamoto’s design as an anonymous entity quietly exiting the stage is the foundation of Bitcoin’s decentralized spirit—his disappearance makes this technology truly a global experiment without the need for a leader. “We don’t know who Satoshi is” At the 2022 Miami Bitcoin Conference, Nakamoto was absent but omnipresent. The main stage was named "Satoshi Hall", and screens on both sides played his text fragments in rotation, just like Scientology's "Dianetics" - outsiders read it plainly, but believers take it as a motto.

"Imagine gold being stolen and turned into lead."

"Twenty years from now, Bitcoin trading volume will be either extremely large or zero."

"The robustness of the network lies in its simple decentralization."

PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel appeared from the right side of the stage and threw a stack of $100 bills to the front row: "This thing still works, isn't it crazy?" He declared that Bitcoin is the ultimate warning to the legal currency system, and named "enemies of the crypto revolution" - Warren Buffett, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, and BlackRock Group CEO Larry Fink. Thiel called these people "extensions of state power," and Bitcoin "has no board of directors, and we don't even know who Satoshi Nakamoto is" - the last sentence was deliberately emphasized by him.

"We don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is." In 2011, he was an anonymous programmer followed by a fringe geek circle; ten years later, he became the "myth maker" of a trillion-dollar project, and Bitcoin became the ninth largest asset in the world, second only to Tesla in market value and surpassing Meta. Whoever he is, he has a huge fortune. Computer scientist Sergio Demian Lerner speculated through analysis of early blockchains that the bitcoins held by Satoshi Nakamoto at the time were worth about $40 billion (now more), firmly ranking as the richest person in Bitcoin.

In the spring of 2021, when the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase went public, its prospectus submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission listed "Satoshi Nakamoto's identity exposure" as a risk factor. It is not difficult to imagine the potential crisis: if Satoshi Nakamoto is proven to be a spy, extremist or financial criminal of a certain country, the legitimacy of Bitcoin may collapse. But the Bitcoin community gradually regards this mystery as a necessary design-decentralization requires a "pure birth". Without a specific personality, it is possible to avoid division due to disputes over the identity of the founder, thereby maximizing universal acceptance.

Thus, the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto" was sanctified. Although some people believe that he hides to avoid taxes or protect himself, the mainstream view portrays him as a "selfless martyr." The most fanatical believers regard exploring his identity as blasphemy, like asking Scientologists about the existence of Xenu.

But what if the father of Bitcoin is a villain?

In the summer of 2022, I posted a spreadsheet on the wall of my office, listing more than a hundred candidates who had been proposed as Satoshi Nakamoto. Most of the leading candidates belong to the cypherpunk community, whose names have been proposed as candidates for Satoshi many times over the years. There are also some obscure names from adjacent fields such as mathematics, cryptography and economics. Some are programmers who participated in the Bitcoin software project in the early days. Still others are creators of new cryptocurrencies. Many are just famous smart people: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Musk.

For many years, Nick Szabo, Adam Back and Hal Finney were widely considered to be the recognized leading candidates. Szabo was a programmer who advocated for decentralized currency years before Bitcoin and conceived a Bitcoin predecessor called "Bit Gold" in the late 1990s. He had the necessary technical skills, and his writing style also had superficial similarities to Satoshi. But he has always denied being Satoshi, and there is no solid evidence that he was involved with Satoshi or the early development of Bitcoin. Separately, Adam Back, the creator of another cryptocurrency precursor, Hashcash, is mentioned in the Bitcoin white paper, and his email address was one of the first people Satoshi contacted. He also denies being Satoshi, and his writing style doesn't match up as well as Szabo's. Hal Finney, a legendary programmer and cryptographer, received the first-ever Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi. But Finney, who also denies being Satoshi, was diagnosed with ALS in 2009, and his condition rapidly worsened, eventually leaving him unable to work. If Satoshi is unmasked, Finney is the candidate Bitcoin enthusiasts would most like to see because of his tragic hero story and his aura of kindness and benevolence -- and because he's dead (he died in 2014), he can't create dishonorable news with dishonorable behavior or connections.

There has always been opposition to Satoshi Nakamoto's identity investigation in the Bitcoin community. Last fall, when an HBO documentary identified libertarian, Canadian computer programmer and crypto enthusiast Peter Todd as the most likely candidate, the Bitcoin community reacted with not only strong skepticism about the documentary’s conclusions but also anger at the idea of ​​taking on such a project. He made valuable contributions, so his wish for anonymity should be respected. It’s not the people that matter, it’s the ideas and the code.

But Satoshi had already put his invention in the public square, so I thought it was reasonable to explore who put it there and why.

I combed through the 60,000 words that Satoshi left behind. His writing is plain and simple, with few personal opinions or personality. Whenever I caught a hint of his unique style, I added it to the “Satoshi Speech Library”—a list that eventually accumulated more than 200 distinctive words and phrases. “Wet blanket,” “sweet,” “clobbering.”

I wrote a computer program called “Satoshitizer” that goes through the archived writings of various suspected “Satoshis,” scans them for Satoshi terms, and generates statistical tables. I can instantly rank the archives using a dozen criteria, including users of Satoshi terms, users of electronic cash terms, and discussers of software tools used by Satoshi.

One ​​day in late April 2023, I found myself thinking about a word I had seen in Satoshi’s writing: hosed.

Given Satoshi’s writing style’s tendency to dispense with personality or connection to any particular context, the word “hosed” stood out. I hadn’t heard of the word recently, and it means to screw or destroy, and I vaguely associate it with 1990s surf or fraternity jargon.

I combed through my archived data, carefully annotating each instance where the word was used. In the Metzdowd mailing list, the word "hosed" was used a total of four times in the three years before October 31, 2008, when Satoshi first published the Bitcoin white paper. Two of those times were by the same person: James A. Donald.

Although Donald was not active in public discussions about Bitcoin, he made a brief appearance in Bitcoin's early history as the first person on the mailing list to respond to Satoshi. He raised technical questions about Bitcoin's scalability and withdrew from the discussion after a few exchanges with Satoshi. He was just another cypherpunk interested in digital currency.

At the time, Donald was only No. 42 in my suspect spreadsheet, far behind the three most popular candidates, and his reason for being shortlisted was limited to his identity as a cypherpunk and libertarian who is proficient in C++ programming. But I was attracted by the coincidence of the word "hosed", and I re-checked the rare word list generated by the "Nakamoto Fingerprint Analyzer" to try to verify whether Donald had used other rare Nakamoto-style expressions.

Sure enough. In my collection of corpus spanning two decades, Donald was the only one who used the word "fencible" (meaning "sellable stolen goods") - a word that Nakamoto had once appeared in his writings as "non-fencible" (non-sellable stolen goods). Even more shocking, Donald's record of using the word can be traced back to his speech on the cypherpunk mailing list in October 1998. My brain began to ring alarm bells. While “fence” as a verb to sell stolen goods is common slang, “fencible” as an adjective is rare. Google results turned up few results, and even when I searched The New York Times’ historical database of 13 million articles dating back to 1857, the word appeared zero times in the relevant sense.

Unlike conventional terms in the digital currency or cryptography fields, such as “trusted third party” or “zero-knowledge proof,” “fencible” and “hosed” are not technical terms in computer science or cryptography. They are more like fingerprints of a person’s language style.

I began to dig deeper into Donald. His online presence was erratic: various websites claimed that he was Canadian, said he was dead, and pointed out that “James A. Donald” was not his real name. Although he rarely revealed personal information in his posts, details were still scattered among them. He is from Australia but has lived in Silicon Valley for a long time. Like Satoshi Nakamoto, he sometimes uses American spelling and sometimes uses Commonwealth spelling.

On the ideological level, Donald combines extreme libertarianism (essentially anarcho-capitalism) with a fanatical belief in the transformative power of cryptography. In 1996, he wrote: "Here is our plan - we will use advanced mathematics to destroy the state machine. The method is to replace the current corporate system structure with cryptographic mechanisms, so that more people have the opportunity to evade and resist taxes."

He has shown a special interest in digital currency. In 1995, he predicted that "people will eventually bypass banks and transfer funds directly." Between 2006 and 2009, Donald used more Satoshi-style electronic cash terms on the Metzdowd mailing list than other participants.

When examining his programming style, it was found that Donald promoted communication encryption software called "Crypto Kong" in the late 1990s. The software is written in the same C++ language as Bitcoin. Source code obtained from the Internet Archive shows that Crypto Kong and Bitcoin have many similarities: both support Windows systems; both use the Hungarian naming method preferred by Satoshi Nakamoto; code partitions use eye-catching slash separators; and both use elliptic curve cryptography to generate public and private key pairs.

Dig deeper into personal information and find that Donald was born in 1952 and is now over 70 years old, which is consistent with the characteristics pointed out by early Bitcoin developers that "Satoshi Nakamoto's code style suggests his age." He is not active on mainstream social platforms under his real name. His $2.8 million Palo Alto home and $400,000 Austin property are blurred in Google Street View (this feature requires formal application to Google, or internal permissions like one of Donald's sons who works at Google). It is difficult to find his photos in public channels. Similar to Satoshi Nakamoto, he uses the Swiss privacy mailbox Proton Mail, operates the anonymous blog "Jim's Log", and describes himself as "living alone for a long time." Clues click like gears.

At this moment, re-examining the significance of Donald as the first responder, I think of Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008: he threw a stunning work to the world but no one was interested, so he directed and acted out technical doubts, which not only promoted discussion but also created misleading information.

And his blog revealed more clues: On the eve of October 31, 2008, Donald was paying close attention to the financial crisis. His October 11 blog post "The Root of the Crisis" began with an assertion that "the rescue will fail", and the headline of the Times sealed in the Bitcoin Genesis Block was "The Chancellor is about to implement a second round of rescue plan."

More clues surfaced: Donald owns multiple properties in Hawaii. On June 19, 2008 (a few months before Satoshi Nakamoto announced his invention to the world), the Honolulu Star published an obituary for a World War II veteran named "Satoshi Nakamoto" who died at the age of 84. Was this identity theft in search of an alias?

Although "James" rarely reveals his identity, his ideological trajectory is clearly discernible in his blog posts: he was a radical leftist in his early years, and joined the Trotskyist organization Spartacus League at the age of 15, but later left because he was "disillusioned with participatory democracy and had no good feelings about representative democracy." At the age of 17, he joined anarcho-socialist and Maoist organizations, "just because these two factions were the most hated by Trotskyists." He eventually determined that property rights were freedom and transformed into an anarcho-capitalist.

To verify his academic background, I contacted an insider at the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. Professor Bob Hewitt, who participated in the interview, recalled that the applicant from Melbourne was "quite bohemian" - when asked about accommodation arrangements, Donald declared that he was "prepared to sleep under the bridge." Although he gave people the impression of being "friendly but weird", his doctoral thesis "Assumptions of the Singularity Theorems and the Rejuvenation of Universes" was rejected because "no one could understand it", and he eventually dropped out of school.

Career trajectory shows that Donald first wrote software for Apple Computer, then went to the United States to develop video games for Epyx, and then switched to the database field. His blog reveals a deep insight into the nature of Bitcoin: "This is just a prototype system, but it was used as the final solution too early." He always looks at Bitcoin from a historical perspective and sees it as a stepping stone to an ideal future.

I have never agreed with the assumption that is prevalent in the Bitcoin community - Satoshi Nakamoto must be a benevolent incarnation. I always feel that those Bitcoin believers who deify Satoshi Nakamoto as a demigod are just wishful projection: imagining that he is selfless, humble and low-key, and is a prophet who traveled from the future to save mankind. Hal Finney is an attractive candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto precisely because he perfectly fits this idealized image. Donald is completely different. In his blog, he promotes a dark ideology called "neo-reactionism" - a trend that has fascinated some people in Silicon Valley. Neo-reactionaries believe that society has been hijacked by what they call the "Temple" (a group composed of academic, media and bureaucratic elites). They disdain efforts to pursue social justice and advocate abandoning democracy and restoring monarchy as the best path for mankind to move forward. Donald's variant of neo-reactionism is even more mixed with naked Christian fundamentalism and an excessive amount of paranoia: he blames the new crown epidemic on a Jesuit conspiracy.

In addition to his elaborate political statements, Donald continues to output racist, homophobic, misogynistic and other offensive language. His sharp words were banned from Slate Star Code in 2014 - a heavyweight Silicon Valley blog known for its tolerance of discussing taboo topics such as IQ science. But under a relatively uncensored domain in Laos, he openly advocates "whipping women into submission by whipping their buttocks or upper backs" and claims that "most rape allegations are not true." Donald has a large number of fans in the "woke" and alt-right blogosphere.

If Donald is Satoshi Nakamoto, isn't his motivation for choosing to release Bitcoin under a pseudonym obvious? He hopes that the world will accept this genius invention based purely on its own value, rather than stifle it because of prejudice against his identity. He is anonymous not because Bitcoin may endanger himself, but because he is afraid that his existence will endanger the future of Bitcoin.

I doubt if anyone in the community knows or suspects that Donald is Satoshi. If Satoshi is a harmless citizen like "Dorian Nakamoto", "respecting Satoshi's privacy" is at least a tenable position; if he is a dissident living under an authoritarian regime, I am willing to protect this secret. But what if Satoshi is really Donald? This will completely undermine the narrative of Bitcoin's inventor as a "crypto messiah" - the sacred image of giving up fame and fortune for a lofty ideal. Among those who shouted "respect Nakamoto's privacy", did some of them already know that if the creator of Bitcoin was proven to be a far-right lunatic, it would cause a public relations disaster, and what they really want to protect is actually the reputation of this belief system and the value of their own investment portfolio? In June 2020, Adam Back, the founder of Hashcash (long suspected to be Satoshi Nakamoto), hinted on Twitter: "Perhaps we should be prepared to cut ties with Satoshi Nakamoto. To be on the safe side, it is best to erase this pseudonym completely." "The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is irrelevant," wrote Ray Dillinger, who once reviewed Bitcoin code with Hal Finney. "The protocol itself exists. Whether the creator is a third world dictator, a homeless person under a bridge in Belize, a Bedouin working on his mobile phone while riding a camel across the Bir Tawil Desert, or a pushcart vendor in Nairobi, this protocol is no different from the one created by an NSA cryptanalyst, a GRU-funded "troll army", a well-known security researcher or a cypherpunk. "Satoshi Nakamoto" does not exist outside the protocol. He is just a hat worn by someone during the development process. As for who wears the hat - it doesn't matter at all." I wrote to James Donald to ask for an interview. A few days later, I got a reply. "Email is more convenient," Donald wrote, but he also said he might be willing to talk on the phone or via video. He needs a few days to confirm the arrangement. Two months later, Donald still hasn't agreed to a real-time conversation. Should I go to Australia to meet him in person? What makes me doubt the hypothesis that Donald is Satoshi Nakamoto is that Satoshi Nakamoto has shown a rich spectrum of emotions in his past correspondence. He would express gratitude ("thank you very much"), show sympathy ("poor guy"), show humility ("I'm very sorry") and be modest ("I'm better at programming than writing"). As I searched through Donald’s archive of writings over the years, searching for a hint of empathy, gratitude, or enthusiasm—even an exclamation point, an apology, a moment of sympathy or companionship—I saw only a desert of emotion.

But among all the crypto-obsessed cypherpunks, only one claimed to know the real Satoshi Nakamoto. “I know who Satoshi is,” James Donald once wrote in the comments section of a post on his blog, “and his political and social aspirations.” If that were true, he would be the only credible person left. I was determined to meet this person.

Although Donald spent much of his career in California, he apparently owned or had owned property in Australia. By looking through the real estate assessment records for his various properties in the United States, I discovered that at some point in the early 2000s, one of his properties in Austin was registered to a street on Australia’s northeast coast. In recent years, his American property was still registered in the same Australian town, but the address was changed to a post office box. It is known that his wife died in 2016. Through the "grave search website", I found a photo of a plaque commemorating her in the town's cemetery. Five years later, he posted a photo on his blog that seemed to be from the terrace: in the foreground were glasses and pottery jars filled with homemade moonshine, and in the distance, the horizon of the sparkling blue sea was dotted with several small islands. Comparing this scene with other seascape photos in the same town, the geographical features are exactly the same.

I contacted private investigator Daniel Quinn, who lives in an area within driving distance of the seaside town suspected to be Donald. I provided Quinn with the house address and an old photo from 20 years ago - this photo taken on Donald's son's abandoned university blog was the most recent image of Donald that could be found.

A few days later, Daniel sent a surveillance report. "The yard is overgrown with weeds and shrubs. This person is definitely not a flower lover." The photo of the house attached to the letter showed that in front of the house that shared the driveway with two other houses, there was a lone palm tree and a bungalow standing on the hillside. Through the overgrown vegetation, you can see the wooden terrace facing the Coral Sea.

Although I didn't see James in person that day, I received good news in the morning a few weeks later: Daniel successfully captured the man standing in front of the house. Compared with the photo taken 20 years ago, although his hair and beard were completely white, his thick beard, metal-framed glasses and plump nose bridge were perfectly matched. Three days later, I was on a flight to Australia.

"I have a problem, that is, I talk too much"

There was no doorbell on the screen door, so I knocked on the door frame of James's house. The tension made my throat dry. While I’m not sure James himself is Satoshi, I suspect he may be part of the collective identity of “Satoshi.” Regardless, he’s the only person I know of who has publicly claimed to know the true identity of Satoshi.

I’m worried about how he’ll receive me. James has clearly gone to great lengths to make himself hard to find.

As I walk through the porch toward the front door, I see Donald sitting in front of his computer in the living room with headphones on. His latest blog post, which had been published just a few hours earlier, was a tirade about how “Georgians (the country Georgia) don’t want their churches to be destroyed or turned into shrines of Gaia worship and homosexuality, and don’t want to see ancient, beautiful buildings bulldozed and replaced by demonic, postmodern monsters.”

Western NGOs are trying to “homosexualize Georgia and put it into the meat grinder against Russia.”

When my knocks on the doorframe failed to respond, I knocked on the front door. A moment later, James emerged, wearing a red camouflage long-sleeved shirt and black thermal underwear.

I immediately began to explain. I had emailed him—“Oh, I rarely check my email,” James said. I reminded him of our correspondence over the past year, and of the book I was writing. And I told him that I would be remiss if I had not made every effort to engage him in conversation.

“In short, I can’t tell you anything I can’t reveal,” James said, his tone mild and with a bemused sense of humor.

I pointed out that he had publicly insisted that he knew Satoshi’s identity and his sociopolitical goals. Could you elaborate? "No, sorry."

"Well... do you really know? Or do you just have a strong suspicion?"

"I have a good idea who it might be, but I'm not really sure."

"Do you think it could be Hal Finney?"

"That's a question I can't answer."

"Is it because I want to respect his privacy?"

"I'm forbidden from revealing anything to anyone, including what's already been said."

"I offer to buy him a beer. James declines. "How about lunch?" I suggest. James laughs. "Listen," he says. "I have a problem with talking too much, and after a few drinks, I get even more outspoken, so let's forget it."

"I try to continue the conversation—handing over my contact information and my previous book—but his responses are curt and perfunctory. "It's really nice to live here," I say, pointing to the magnificent ocean view. “Yeah,” James said, bowing his head. I thanked him and turned to walk down the hill.

There’s no DNA test for Bitcoin

I’ve spent 15 years chasing Satoshi Nakamoto. I’ve learned to code, hired machine learning experts, literary analysts, and private investigators, and traveled 37 hours for a three-minute meeting. I’m convinced no one is as obsessed with solving this mystery as I am. I’m beginning to understand why Sahil Gupta is convinced that Elon Musk is Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s time to stop.

Maybe one day artificial intelligence will help us confirm Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity. But at this point, I’m convinced that unless the government declassifies some unforeseen secrets, we will probably never know his true identity beyond a reasonable doubt. Memories fade. Witnesses die. There is no paternity test for Bitcoin; proving who is Satoshi Nakamoto requires showing up and showing the relevant private keys, or at least providing unforged contemporary documents. As the years go by, the trail, if there was once, becomes increasingly blurred.

I am relieved to accept this fact. I am still dazzled by what Satoshi created—but almost as dazzled by how perfectly he disappeared. As a utopian idea, Bitcoin has no chance of success; but as a new asset class, it has shown tenacious vitality. The price has risen and fallen, reaching new highs, exceeding $109,000 in January (it has fallen back to $85,000 at the time of writing). Fidelity Investments now recommends that retail investors have a small allocation of cryptocurrencies in their portfolios. The popularity of blockchain technology is unstoppable.

Satoshi Nakamoto has become something that the person behind him will never be able to achieve—an idea that is immortal without the burden of flesh and history.

(Excerpt from "The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: Fifteen Years of Uncovering the Genius Behind the Encryption World" by Benjamin Wallace, Crown Publishing, available on March 18)