Ben Wallace
Appearances
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And I thought there just wasn't much evidence that Elon was likely to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
So that happens in 2021. And that's when I really got back into the story and back on this case of... who could satoshi be and how is it possible that you know we're now bitcoin this pseudonymous person first announced bitcoin in late 2008 and first launched the software in early 2009. so now we're in 2022 13 years later And how is it possible that no one knows who the guy is still?
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And this is when Bitcoin is now really going mainstream for the first time and hitting new price heights. And there's like an NFT craze happening. There's like a DeFi craze happening. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency But by now there are thousands of cryptocurrencies because once this technology had been invented, anyone can basically release their own version of it, right?
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Exactly. And sometimes when people are writing about Nakamoto and they want to depict him, they actually use the Guy Fawkes mask.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And I thought that combination of this epic mystery that there've been all these attempts to solve combined with crypto's increasing mainstream relevance meant that there needs to be a book that normies can read to understand this important but very hard to grasp thing.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
I thought there was something that I could do with a book that I hadn't been able to do and maybe couldn't do with a magazine story. I also, by this point, having been thinking about it for quite a long time, I had some specific ideas of approaches I could take that had not been taken that at a minimum might produce new candidates and shed new light on... on this mystery.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
The main elements of his Satoshi mystery are why did this person or people use a pseudonym? Why did they disappear? And why have they not touched the fortune, right? Because you can see on the Bitcoin blockchain, these coins have never been moved from the wallets they're in.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
That's a very real possibility because that would explain why the fortune has never been touched. And in fact, that's one of the main interpretations of the fact that the fortune has not been touched is he must be dead.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
I mean, another interpretation is Satoshi is this quasi-religious figure who's so selfless that it's more important that the project have credibility than that he personally enrich himself.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Yeah. Yeah. If you lose your keys, which are basically really the equivalent of a password. And that is another theory. And it's not an unrealistic theory. I talked to a lot of very smart, experienced software people and even cryptographers who say it's just not that hard to lose your keys. That easily could have happened. And they
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Not even. I was a sort of Luddite English major, really late adopter in general. Like, I was very skeptical of the internet for much of the 90s and was like, why is everyone making such a big deal about it? So it was somewhat... random that I got this assignment.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Several of these people said, you know, it could have happened to me. I mean, there have been multiple cases of people losing their keys or accidentally throwing out a hard drive that had crazy amounts of Bitcoin on them. There's a guy in Wales famously who's been trying to get the place where he lives to let him dig in the landfill for, I think, seven or eight years now, maybe even 10 years.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Maybe I think he's suing them now just to get permission to excavate this landfill because he wants to find his lost hard drive.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
So, I mean, much like sort of meme stocks, if you remember GameStop, you know, these are things you can invest in that have a price that is not based on their intrinsic value, right? They're based on just people deciding to pile into them as an investment, either for shits and giggles or because they hope to get rich off it.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And some people do get rich off it, but most people lose money on these things. And so anyone... It's very easy now for anyone to basically create their own meme coin. You could create VanessaCoin tomorrow. You could go on Twitter and say, hey, everyone, come buy VanessaCoin. And then if enough people did and the price kept going up, you might be sitting on a pile of money.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
But it probably has to seem like to have some legitimacy or at least some buy-in by people other than the one person who created it. I mean, the most famous meme coin is Dogecoin, right? Right. Which was just this random coin that, again, the way GameStop did with stocks, somehow it got the attention of the Internet. Somehow people decided like Dogecoin, I'm going to buy Dogecoin. It's fun.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And in 2011, an editor at Wired asked me if I'd like to write about this thing called Bitcoin, which had just been making the news because of its association with Silk Road, which was this black marketplace on the dark web. It was the first thing like that of its kind. And I had never heard of Bitcoin. I'd never heard of Silk Road. What really hooked me on it, besides the fact that Bitcoin sounded
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
It's cool. Or it's going to make money on it. And they did. And then somehow at some point it came to the attention of Elon Musk and he got on the bandwagon and he started promoting Dogecoin. And, you know, it's no accident that he has named the Department of Government Efficiency Doge. So, yeah, that's that's a meme coin for you.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Anyone can do it. Anyone could do it. I mean, the reason I don't even know is because I don't pay any attention to them because I never would invest in a meme coin. I never have invested in a meme coin. And there's so many of them that I wouldn't even begin to know how to sift through them to find one that might be interesting.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Well, I think you have to make distinctions. I mean, I can tell you that people who are really into Bitcoin hate meme coins. They hate it for all the reasons that you just mentioned. I mean, it gives Bitcoin a terrible name that Bitcoin does not, I would say, deserve. It actually has become, again, a sort of digital gold, a store of value.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Like it has major Wall Street people who have a lot of money in it, right? You can now, as a Fidelity customer, buy a Bitcoin ETF, buy into a Bitcoin ETF. Yeah. So Bitcoin, of all of them, and there's a handful of others, but there are a handful that really have a lot of serious, sincerely intentioned people involved with them, building things on them or with them.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And I really think you have to separate those out from the vast majority of cryptocurrencies, which are complete scams, which are just like a casino and certainly can be used for money washing. And for that matter, look, I mean, People can use the quote unquote legitimate cryptocurrencies for money washing also.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
I mean, it's not necessarily as easy as it sounds in that the blockchain is transparent. It is visible. There are blockchain forensics companies now that are pretty good at tracing the origins of a transaction. But on the other hand, there are these online kind of money laundries, coin mixers that can sort of take Bitcoin in and spit them out and try to cut the money trail.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
you know, really kind of mind-bendingly interesting in being this money unlike any other money that existed up to that point. But also there was this mystery about who had invented it. I don't know, it was just very unusual for someone to invent something that was already getting a lot of attention, but who had taken no credit for it.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Yeah. And I mean, and that's kind of baked into the ethos of it. I mean, a lot of the early adopters of Bitcoin were libertarians or privacy people who wanted there to be a money that, like cash, cannot be traced. And that's true. certainly can be abused and is abused, but I don't think in principle is a bad idea, right? I mean, we don't begrudge people using cash.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
The difference is that unlike cash, Bitcoin, you don't have to like stuff five suitcases full of dirty dollar bills to do a black market transaction. You can just instantly and almost invisibly send it around the world.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
I mean, I think certainly a big piece of crypto is part of that. Yes.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
I mean, the way I think about this in terms of Bitcoin and crypto is, you know, it's a technology and like any technology, it can be used for good or bad. I do shy away from the idea that because it is abused, as it widely is, that it is not also valuable, right? People are going to do what they do with technology.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And obviously, the internet has sort of supercharged the ability to do this, not just in this area, but in all the other gambling areas you mentioned.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Wait, I'm now supposed to weigh in on the future of the cosmos?
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
I mean, I wrote a book about the Satoshi mystery. I mean, when I read the newspaper every day, there's certainly plenty of things to worry about. I don't think that crypto is part of the apocalypse.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
I definitely don't think that. And I'll tell you one of the reasons why is because if you're going to invest in crypto, you have to be prepared to just not sleep very well because it is so volatile that you will find yourself constantly monitoring the price. And the price is often driven by things that you can't even figure out. Like, why is the price going up right now? Why is it going down?
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And so it's just a recipe for... like a very attention stealing investment in your life that I think most people don't want. And I typically don't want.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
It's a less easy question to answer than you might think. And there's a reason why I think people are somewhat intimidated by the subject. I mean, very basically, it's a digital currency, right? So it's a kind of computer money. But unlike most monies, it's not minted by a government or a central bank. Its supply is not controlled by a government or a central bank. And it exists only digitally.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And it's controlled by a crowd, by a peer-to-peer network of volunteers. I mean, anyone can join the Bitcoin network and be a part of this process.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Well, exactly. That's why I found it really mind bending because it gets you into the philosophy of like, what is money? What gives something value? And when I was working on this book, I mean, my father-in-law, said to me, you know, well, why is Bitcoin worth anything? And I said, why is gold worth anything? And he said, why does everyone answer this question with another question?
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
But I actually think the gold comparison is relevant, both because Bitcoin now kind of is more of a digital gold than a money people use for practical purposes, but also because like gold, it's valuable because people have decided that it's valuable.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
This is my sad Bitcoin story. So when I started writing about it in 2011, I thought, you know, just to get my head around it, I needed to buy some Bitcoin. So I bought $200 of it, which just even buying it at the time was an extremely laborious process. Coinbase didn't exist, I don't think. And I had to wire money from a bank to some really obscure like money transmitter, etc.,
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And so it took me over a week to get this Bitcoin. I then spent, at the time, Bitcoin, I think, was $17 a coin. So I got like 12 coins for my $200. I spent five of them on going to a conference about Bitcoin, the world's first Bitcoin conference in Manhattan in 2011. And then the rest of it, I socked away.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And what I was told at the time was the one really solid, reputable exchange, and it was called Mt. Gox. Three years later, Mt. Gox implodes in a fireball of hacks and bankruptcy and scandal. And there go my seven Bitcoins, which today would be worth close to $700,000.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
No. I mean, there actually was a bankruptcy process, but I kind of just didn't pay attention to it. And by the various deadlines, I didn't sign up to be a proper creditor. But also, the other thing is, it's based on what the coins were worth at the time of the implosion. So it's not like I would have gotten $700,000. I would have gotten whatever it was, like a couple thousand dollars.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
That's a controversial question. I mean, certainly if you ask a lot of people in the Bitcoin world, they would say no. They would say... The whole point of Bitcoin is that it doesn't have a leader, and so it's irrelevant who founded it. And additionally, whoever created it doesn't control it. So they're not necessarily relevant.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
The argument on the other side is, number one, Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to have mined at least 1.1 million coins. which would be worth like $110 billion today, which makes him in the top 20 richest people in the world. And if Bitcoin does continue to go up, he could very easily become the richest person in the world. So number one, that's newsworthy. Who is the richest person in the world?
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
We've certainly recently seen how much influence the richest person in the world can have in society. I think it's of historic interest. If I had a chance to find out who invented the wheel, I think that would be newsworthy. And I also think until it's known who Satoshi Nakamoto was and what their motivations were, I think we need to know that.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Because let's say, for instance, it turned out that Bitcoin was invented by the Chinese Communist Party to destabilize the U.S. dollar. We should know that.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
I mean, the first steps which I took and failed to find him back in 2011 was just calling around. The shape and dimensions of the mystery were not yet apparent. I thought, how hard is this going to be, right? I'm just going to use a typical reporting process. If I interview enough people,
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
You know, someone knows, someone knows, someone knows, someone who knows, eventually the truth will bubble up. And it turned out to not be the case. It was very different from most mysteries. Like nobody seemed to actually know who it was. So, you know, after my initial failure in 2011, other people tried to solve this mystery, right?
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
So the New Yorker had a candidate they named, the New York Times had a candidate they named, Wired in a different article. And this thing kept going on and on. And these new candidates kept being proposed. But every time there was some reason they got debunked. I mean, Newsweek famously had a candidate they thought might be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And there was like a press swarm that mobbed this poor guy's house. And in Temple City, California. The guy was like living with his mother. He had had to turn off the internet because he was so broke, which doesn't sound like somebody who owns 1.1 million Bitcoin. But he happened to have been born with the name Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto. And so this Newsweek reporter,
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Thinks like, oh, everyone else is looking for, thinks it's a pseudonym. Like I think that's his real name. And so Newsweek publishes a giant cover story. There's a press mob descends on this guy. There's like a low speed white Bronco style chase on the freeways of Los Angeles.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Yeah, just kind of like a late middle-aged kind of schlumpy unemployed engineer who lived with his mom.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
The guy, so the press, you know, they're on his lawn. I mean, there's like international press, like TV cameras, everything. It's like a stakeout. And this one reporter, Ryan Nakashima from the AP, shows up and Dorian Nakamoto emerges from his house and says something like, I'm just here for the free lunch or something, or who's going to get me lunch?
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And for some reason, no one says anything except Ryan. And Ryan's like, I'll get you lunch. So Dorian Nakamoto says, I'm going with this guy. So they get into Ryan's powder blue Prius and start making their way to a sushi place because Dorian said he wanted sushi. And
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
all the other reporters start following him in their cars and they're like live tweeting like hashtag Bitcoin Chase, hashtag Satoshi. And Ryan and this guy Dorian get to a sushi place in Arcadia. They end up having to leave. They go to the AP offices where Ryan debriefs him.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And both in the car before they got to the AP offices and in the AP office, it became very clear that Dorian Nakamoto was not Satoshi and really barely knew what Bitcoin was.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
Well, no, I mean, everyone was like Newsweek's bad because Newsweek Newsweek continued to maintain that, like, you know, this was Satoshi. And like, obviously, other reporters are jealous and, you know, like historic scoops like this are typically debated at first and things like that. And it was it was just ludicrous. And just it was really a debacle for Newsweek.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
It became like a white whale for tech journalists, certainly, and maybe journalists more broadly. And I mean, just as an aside, I mean, Bitcoin is so volatile that at the time I was writing that, I said it was a $75 billion fortune, but now it's $110 billion because Bitcoin has gone up so much just since I wrote that. Satoshi disappeared in 2011. I mean, that was the last time he
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
communicated under that pseudonym or she or they, as you say. I use he for convenience, but the reality is we have no idea whether it's a he or she or they. So he disappears in 2011. And from then on, like almost every year or even more frequently, someone has a new person they think is Satoshi Nakamoto. And some of those become more prominent than others.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
I mean, one of the most prominent was the Newsweek fiasco. But the next really big one came in 2015. when a bunch of journalists received an email just unsolicited, basically leaking that the true identity of Satoshi was an Australian computer scientist named Craig Wright. I received the same email. But at the time, I looked at the email and there were a bunch of attachments.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And I didn't even open them because first of all, the subject header said not virus scan. So it just seemed like it might be malware. But I also was a little kind of turned off of the scene at that moment, partly because of my loss. My lost bitcoins. And partly because of just all these false candidates, one after another. So I just thought, oh, this is the latest one.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
But some other journalists really dug into this particular candidate and Wired and Gizmodo almost simultaneously published scoops that Satoshi Nakamoto has been found as this guy, Craig Wright. And then within 24 hours, these scoops begin to fall apart as the internet punches holes in the evidence. Yeah.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
This pattern continues of like one Satoshi after another. And then in 2021, at the end of, it was around Christmas, I got another one of these emails. I would get emails every few years from someone either claiming to be Satoshi or claiming they knew who Satoshi was just because of the fact that I'd been one of the early reporters covering it.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
And I'm sure a bunch of other reporters like that also received these emails. And in 2021, I get one from a guy who said, had worked at Tesla and he was insistent that Elon Musk must be Satoshi.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
The case that this guy, whose name is Sahil Gupta, made was, first of all, Elon Musk obviously was this incredibly brilliant polymath. And he'd already successfully done a number of different and remarkable things, whether it's SpaceX, whether it's essentially creating an e-car industry. In his spare time, he'd invented like a high-speed transportation system called the Hyperloop.
Infamous
A Bitcoin Mystery and the Crypto Bros
So I mean, it's not out of the question that the guy had the chops, right? And he had previously worked at PayPal. I mean, his company had been bought by PayPal. So he was interested in digital payments from going way back. And then there were more sort of minute similarities between the writing and coding styles of Elon Musk and Satoshi Nakamoto. But I thought it was a pretty weak case.