Review: Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? A New Book Investigates Bitcoin’s Creator

The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto, journalist Benjamin Wallace’s book about the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, gives you more details than you likely need if you just want an engaging, informative read on a story that savvy crypto watchers know is not apt to reach an 
illuminating or surprising 
conclusion.

Yep, Wallace fails (like everyone else who has tried) to unarguably reveal the true identity of “Satoshi Nakamoto”—a person (with an earth-shatteringly valuable pile of bitcoin) who has been off the public playing field for over a decade. Wallace rises above the credulous and the cranky in the Satoshi-unmasking field by not insisting he’s cracked the case.

He takes various contenders seriously, some not as benign as the Satoshi of modern legend, and helps the reader see why he wasn’t fully sold on any candidate. (Would it hurt bitcoin’s image if its creator was a raging neoreactionary, as Wallace suspects for a time?) Ultimately it seems he’s leaning strongly toward Satoshi’s apparent early collaborator, the now late Hal Finney, likely allied with others to explain certain elements of Satoshi that don’t fully fit the Finney theory.

Wallace knows he doesn’t know. Still, his dive into the libertarian-infused cypherpunk world from which the project arose reminds the reader what bitcoin was designed to be.

Yes, crypto’s media face has become more about asset values and fruitful collaborations with big banks and big government. But Satoshi wanted to give mankind a tool that held the promise to liberate money from control by the state and huge financial institutions, giving the world’s consumers freedom from profligate and dangerous manipulations from above.