It’s Him.
If Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, was who I believed him to be, he was not going to acknowledge it. He probably wouldn’t talk to me. And seeing him was going to mean sitting on a plane for 20 hours and driving another eight. But I needed to try to have a conversation with him, and it had to be face to face.
Nakamoto had disappeared in the spring of 2011. I learned about him that summer, when I wrote Wired’s first feature article about Bitcoin, the internet-based currency that operated beyond the control of a government or bank. Twelve years later, Bitcoin’s creator remained unknown and his enormous fortune untouched. His anonymity and restraint were a confounding rebuttal to the acclaim and riches that would be his were he only to step out of the shadows. The modern history of science supplied no precedent for someone who conceived a revolutionary technology and brought it into the world without taking credit.
Acolytes of Bitcoin, denied a flesh-and-blood human to venerate, had conferred on the pseudonym the halo of legend. In 2022, you could see Kanye West, as he stepped from an Escalade in Beverly Hills, wearing a Satoshi Nakamoto baseball hat. In Budapest, adherents had unveiled the first statue of Nakamoto, a depiction in bronze of a hooded, spectral figure. In the Vanuatu archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean, real estate developers sold shares in a utopian paradise named Satoshi Island. A trio of libertarians bought a decommissioned cruise ship, christened it the MS Satoshi, and recruited settlers for the world’s first sovereign Bitcoin-powered society. More than one fellow technologist lobbied for Satoshi Nakamoto to receive a Nobel Prize.
But the riddle of Nakamoto’s identity stubbornly defied solution. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, among others, speculated about it. Obsessed Nakamoto hunters strove to unearth new clues or remix existing ones in a more convincing way. By this point, more than 100 different suspects had been fingered.
The ghost behind the world’s first cryptocurrency, and the drive to decipher him, would bring lawsuits, a car chase, a bounty, a $75 billion fortune, extortion attempts, death threats, a SWAT team, a suicide, a fugitive arms dealer, a serial forger…
The intrigue transcended technology. In a world where the internet shone a pervasive light into every corner, there were vanishingly few unanswered questions of this kind. We’d learned who Bob Woodward’s secret source was. We finally knew the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. We’d been informed that Thomas Pynchon likely copped his bagels at Zabar’s.
When I first set out to write about Nakamoto, I couldn’t have foreseen that more than a decade later his identity would be the last big mystery. It would have been still more ludicrous to imagine that the ghost behind the world’s first cryptocurrency, and the drive to decipher him, would bring with them lawsuits, a car chase, a bounty, a $75 billion fortune, extortion attempts, death threats, a SWAT team, a suicide, a fugitive arms dealer, a serial forger, a hidden society of paranoiacs known only by pseudonyms, a big-hearted genius trapped by disease in his own body, a nuclear bunker in Europe, frozen corpses in the Arizona desert, and a British spy in a locked duffel bag.
Prior attempts to unmask Nakamoto had failed, sometimes spectacularly. Even 60 Minutes, with untold resources and a deep bench of seasoned investigative journalists, had thrown up its hands and declared the challenge “mission impossible.” Yet now, against all odds, I believed I had cracked it.
I was nervous about what this might mean. The Bitcoin world was hostile toward projects like mine. But that wasn’t my main concern. When I’d locked in on Nakamoto’s real identity, I’d been surprised that he wasn’t a usual suspect. This was someone who’d gone to great lengths to be unfindable. And what I learned about him was disturbing. He was nothing like how people had imagined Satoshi Nakamoto. He’d repeatedly described himself as dangerous. He had guns.
The modern history of science supplied no precedent for someone who conceived a revolutionary technology and brought it into the world without taking credit.
Before I flew around the world to meet him, I needed to be certain that I knew where he was. He owned at least four properties on two continents. I’d initially thought he was hiding out in a remote part of Hawaii’s Big Island. More recently, I’d come to believe that he lived on the east coast of Australia, in a small beach community north of Brisbane. It was dawning on me that I’d have to hire private investigators to surveil the property and confirm his presence.
I was in the midst of fretting about all this when I met my sister for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Manhattan and told her what I’d learned.
“It’s him,” she said, with a certainty I didn’t feel.
She coolly sipped her margarita while I made doubtful noises.
“It’s him,” she repeated.
I told her my anxieties, but she had more experience with this sort of thing. She’d been a TV news producer for 20 years. During a period when she worked at 48 Hours, she’d been onsite in Montana after the FBI raided the Unabomber’s property and arrested him.
She suggested I take professional security people with me. And that I wear a bulletproof vest. And give local police a heads-up.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
I felt a little better. This was a plan. TV news people did this all the time. She wasn’t worried. I needn’t worry.
Later that night, she texted me.
“Couldn’t sleep not sure why.”
It was 4:09 a.m.
“Two thoughts. Maybe doorstep him in a public place if he ever leaves the house. Also might be worth having someone video the encounter (from a safe distance) for evidence.”
A Straight-Up Legend
Eighteen months earlier, on New Year’s Eve 2021, an email had arrived in my inbox.
“Subject: New information re Satoshi.”
Ever since writing the Wired article, I’d periodically received emails like this. Bitcoin, and the broader cryptocurrency industry it begat, was still young enough that if you’d bought some as recently as 2017, you were an “OG”; journalists who’d covered the story in its earliest years were graybeards, and natural targets for anyone with a Satoshi theory to sell. Someone was always shopping a new Satoshi theory.
Usually, I paid little heed to these emails. Nakamoto news would rekindle a fleeting hope of learning something fresh and inevitably prove unconvincing. I was inured to the likelihood that the mystery would persist. This particular email hardly inspired confidence, being unsigned. I clicked it open anyway. There was no text, but a link led to a blog post titled “I’m the SpaceX Intern Who Speculated Satoshi Is Elon Musk. There Is More to the Story.” The author, Sahil Gupta, had briefly produced a ripple on the internet four years earlier with another post making the case that Musk was “probably” Nakamoto. Now he presented further evidence: an account of an interaction he’d had with Musk’s chief of staff, Sam Teller. It seemed slight and ambiguous, and I didn’t respond.
The intrigue transcended technology. In a world where the internet shone a pervasive light into every corner, there were vanishingly few unanswered questions of this kind.
Two days later, I received another unsigned email from the same address. This one contained a link to a page on GitHub, a website where software programmers share their work, featuring a detailed breakdown of Gupta’s case for Musk as Nakamoto. Maybe because Musk was by then a fixture in the news, over the next few weeks I found myself mulling over Gupta’s theory. I didn’t know what to make of his arguments, which ranged from vague to highly technical. Finally, I wrote back to Gupta, who’d clearly sent the emails. He had, after all, in looking for someone to amplify his theory, singled me out.
“Thanks for taking the call,” Sahil began. “I’ve emailed hundreds of reporters.”
He was at home near San Jose, and we were on a video call. He wore a magenta T-shirt and silver can headphones and the shadow of a beard.
“It’s remarkable how negative a caricature of Musk they have,” Sahil continued, with an antsy energy. “They think he built a rocket and a car company by a fluke.”
Sahil then described how he’d come to discover Nakamoto’s real identity.
Excerpted from The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto by Benjamin Wallace Copyright © 2025 by Benjamin Wallace. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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