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Who Is Satoshi? Benjamin Wallace Goes Down the Rabbit Hole in New Book

Published

6 месяцев ago

17 марта, 2025

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Who created Bitcoin?

More than 16 years ago, on Halloween Day of 2008, an entity by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto sent out the whitepaper for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system to a cypherpunk email list. Bitcoin launched shortly thereafter; it quickly spawned a global cultural movement and a multi-trillion dollar industry.

Benjamin Wallace wrote a piece on the phenomenon for WIRED in November 2011, making him one of the very first mainstream journalists to ever cover the crypto space. Back then, nobody seemed to know Nakamoto’s identity, and despite robust efforts, Wallace couldn’t figure it out either.

Amusingly, the author of “The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine” (2009) was sucked back into the enigma in 2022 after receiving persistent emails from an ex-Tesla employee who was absolutely convinced that Elon Musk was Nakamoto all along. Wallace stays clear of that particular theory, but he lays out his own findings in “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto,” a 342-page investigation set for release on March 18.

Read more: Marc Hochstein — Satoshi Nakamoto: The Mystery That (Probably) Will Never Be Solved

The conclusion? Well, by the end of it, Wallace is forced to admit that he failed to solve the Nakamoto riddle once again. But his obsession yielded a thoughtful survey of Bitcoin’s history with a special emphasis on the cypherpunks whose ideas contributed to the cryptocurrency’s birth. “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” is a perfect work for crypto veterans and beginners alike who are curious to know more about Bitcoin’s origins; in that respect, it’s comparable to Laura Shin’s “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” (2022), which focuses on Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum’s early days.

Wallace shuffles through a long list of suspects throughout the book. His favourites include Hal Finney, the recipient of the first-ever bitcoin transaction; Nick Szabo, who designed a digital currency in the 1990s called “bit gold”; Len Sassaman, one of the main developers and operators of the Mixmaster remailer; the relatively obscure cypherpunk James A. Donald; and longtime Bitcoin critic Ben Laurie.

One of the things that makes “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” a fun read is that you can watch Wallace slowly go insane as he bounces back and forth between these names. Each time he narrows it down to one person, a new piece of information rolls in and detonates his theory. Wallace deserves credit for his multi-faceted approach to the affair. He makes abundant use of stylometry for Nakamoto’s emails and code, deeply investigates circumstantial evidence, interviews almost all of the potential candidates, and even learns to code to get a better grasp of what the cypherpunks are talking about.

Looming over the investigation, of course, is the debate over whether Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity even matters in the first place. There has been renewed interest in the question lately, between HBO’s “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” documentary (which came out last fall) and VanEck’s head of digital assets Matthew Sigel stating in February that he believed Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey created Bitcoin.

As Wallace notes, Nakamoto’s identity is one of the great secrets of the 21st century. With Wall Street and the White House beginning to fully embrace the crypto sector, there is perhaps a feeling that putting a face on Bitcoin’s inventor is necessary to make the digital asset a little cleaner and safer to integrate into the global financial system.

Nakamoto’s identity is crucial because its discovery would impact the way people see Bitcoin, Wallace argues. Crypto folks, he says, prefer to think of Satoshi as a kind of promethean figure that unleashed Bitcoin as a gift to mankind before disappearing for the greater good. But what if Nakamoto was an outright criminal like former cartel boss Paul Le Roux who simply cannot access his private keys because he’s behind bars? Would BlackRock and Fidelity still race to recommend exposure to the cryptocurrency to their clients?

Wallace eventually sort of settles on the idea that Hal Finney probably took part in Bitcoin’s creation, but that he likely wasn’t working alone, and that in any case any theory is almost impossible to verify without Nakamoto providing irrevocable proof. But “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” is crafted intelligently and the lack of resolution does not feel anti-climactic. At the end of the day, it’s all about the chase.

“What could we possibly learn from Nakomoto’s biography?” Wallace muses at some point, after a friend of his suggests the story would be better without an answer. “That he was a random professor who’d had a lucky brainstorm? No, what was most interesting about Nakamoto was his absence. He was defined by what we didn’t know about him.”

Business

Crypto Trading Firm Keyrock Buys Luxembourg’s Turing Capital in Asset Management Push

Published

1 час ago

16 сентября, 2025

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Crypto trading firm Keyrock said it’s expanding into asset and wealth management by acquiring Turing Capital, a Luxembourg-registered alternative investment fund manager.

The deal, announced on Tuesday, marks the launch of Keyrock’s Asset and Wealth Management division, a new business unit dedicated to institutional clients and private investors.

Keyrock, founded in Brussels, Belgium and best known for its work in market making, options and OTC trading, said it will fold Turing Capital’s investment strategies and Luxembourg fund management structure into its wider platform. The division will be led by Turing Capital co-founder Jorge Schnura, who joins Keyrock’s executive committee as president of the unit.

The company said the expansion will allow it to provide services across the full lifecycle of digital assets, from liquidity provision to long-term investment strategies. «In the near future, all assets will live onchain,» Schnura said, noting that the merger positions the group to capture opportunities as traditional financial products migrate to blockchain rails.

Keyrock has also applied for regulatory approval under the EU’s crypto framework MiCA through a filing with Liechtenstein’s financial regulator. If approved, the firm plans to offer portfolio management and advisory services, aiming to compete directly with traditional asset managers as well as crypto-native players.

«Today’s launch sets the stage for our longer-term ambition: bringing asset management on-chain in a way that truly meets institutional standards,» Keyrock CSO Juan David Mendieta said in a statement.

Business

Crypto Trading Firm Keyrock Buys Luxembourg’s Turing Capital in Asset Management Push

Published

1 час ago

16 сентября, 2025

admin

Crypto trading firm Keyrock said it’s expanding into asset and wealth management by acquiring Turing Capital, a Luxembourg-registered alternative investment fund manager.

The deal, announced on Tuesday, marks the launch of Keyrock’s Asset and Wealth Management division, a new business unit dedicated to institutional clients and private investors.

Business

Gemini Shares Slide 6%, Extending Post-IPO Slump to 24%

Published

1 час ago

16 сентября, 2025

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Gemini Space Station (GEMI), the crypto exchange founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, has seen its shares tumble by more than 20% since listing on the Nasdaq last Friday.

The stock is down around 6% on Tuesday, trading at $30.42, and has dropped nearly 24% over the past week. The sharp decline follows an initial surge after the company raised $425 million in its IPO, pricing shares at $28 and valuing the firm at $3.3 billion before trading began.

On its first day, GEMI spiked to $45.89 before closing at $32 — a 14% premium to its offer price. But since hitting that high, shares have plunged more than 34%, erasing most of the early enthusiasm from public market investors.

The broader crypto equity market has remained more stable. Coinbase (COIN), the largest U.S. crypto exchange, is flat over the past week. Robinhood (HOOD), which derives part of its revenue from crypto, is down 3%. Token issuer Circle (CRCL), on the other hand, is up 13% over the same period.

Part of the pressure on Gemini’s stock may stem from its financials. The company posted a $283 million net loss in the first half of 2025, following a $159 million loss in all of 2024. Despite raising fresh capital, the numbers suggest the business is still far from turning a profit.

Compass Point analyst Ed Engel noted that GEMI is currently trading at 26 times its annualized first-half revenue. That multiple — often used to gauge whether a stock is expensive — means investors are paying 26 dollars for every dollar the company is expected to generate in sales this year. For a loss-making company in a volatile sector, that’s a steep price, and could be fueling investor skepticism.