The Quest for Bitcoin's God: A Journalist's Fifteen-Year Investigation into Satoshi Nakamoto
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The Quest for Bitcoin's God: A Journalist's Fifteen-Year Investigation into Satoshi Nakamoto
Perhaps one day, artificial intelligence will help us confirm Satoshi Nakamoto's identity.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Benjamin Wallace
Translated by ChainCather, Riley
Editor's note: This article is excerpted from *Mr. Satoshi: A 15-Year Quest to Uncover the Genius Behind the Cryptocurrency Revolution* by Benjamin Wallace—one of the earliest journalists to report on Bitcoin. Over fifteen years, Wallace conducted an in-depth investigation involving technical analysis, linguistic forensics, and international tracking, aiming to reveal the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Ultimately, clues pointed toward a programmer over seventy years old—James A. Donald. Yet after meeting and speaking with Donald, Wallace chose to stop writing and abandoned his pursuit of uncovering Satoshi.
TL;DR
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The author first reported on Satoshi in 2011 and has since spent 15 years investigating. He now believes he has solved the mystery.
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Sahil Gupta emailed the author suggesting Elon Musk was "very likely" Satoshi. Sahil claimed the public is ready to accept that Musk and Satoshi are one. He said he was "99% certain," attributing skepticism to "bias against Musk."
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The author details how Satoshi created Bitcoin. After learning that Gavin Andresen planned to brief the CIA about Bitcoin without receiving a reply, Satoshi vanished completely in 2011—leaving only what appears to be a forum post before disappearing entirely.
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The author discovered that Satoshi’s use of the word “hosed” appeared only four times in early Bitcoin mailing lists, twice used by James A. Donald—the first person to question Bitcoin—which became a key linguistic fingerprint linking him to Satoshi.
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The author narrowed down multiple线索 to James Donald, but when confronted, this top suspect ended the conversation with “I can’t say.”
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Perhaps one day AI will help confirm Satoshi’s identity. But unless governments declassify unforeseen secrets, we may never know his true identity beyond reasonable doubt.
If Satoshi—the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin—is truly the person I suspect, he will never admit it. He probably wouldn't even want to talk to me. To meet him, I’d need to fly for 20 hours and then drive another eight. But I had to try to speak with him face to face.
In the spring of 2011, Satoshi disappeared. I first heard of him that summer when I wrote one of the first deep-dive magazine features on Bitcoin—a currency operating outside government and banking systems. Twelve years later, Bitcoin’s creator remains a mystery, and his fortune, worth tens of billions of dollars, remains untouched. In the history of science, no one has ever done something like this: invent a revolutionary technology while claiming neither credit nor profit.
Unable to worship a flesh-and-blood figure, believers have draped legendary status onto this pseudonym. In 2022, Kanye West stepped out of a luxury car in Beverly Hills wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with “Satoshi”; Budapest unveiled the first bronze statue of Satoshi—an anonymous hooded ghost; a group of libertarians bought a decommissioned cruise ship named *The Satoshi*, recruiting residents to build the first Bitcoin-based sovereign society; more than one tech expert has called for him to receive the Nobel Prize.
When I first reported on Satoshi in 2011, I never imagined his identity would remain unsolved over a decade later. Since then, countless attempts to expose him have failed, some descending into farce. In 2014, *Newsweek* confidently identified Dorian Nakamoto, a California systems engineer, triggering days of media siege at his home. Even *60 Minutes*, with its elite resources, admitted defeat, calling the task “impossible.” Yet now, I believe I’ve cracked the case.
I’m uneasy. This man went to great lengths to conceal himself, and the truth I uncovered is disturbing—he bears little resemblance to the Satoshi people imagine. He has repeatedly described himself as a “dangerous person” and keeps firearms at home.
He owns at least four properties across two continents. I once thought he was hiding somewhere on Hawaii’s Big Island, but in the summer of 2023, clues led to a coastal town on Australia’s east coast.
While anxious about this, I had dinner with my sister. She’d worked as a TV news producer for 20 years and had accompanied the *48 Hours* crew during the FBI raid on the Unabomber’s cabin. She advised me to bring professional security, wear a bulletproof vest, and notify local police in advance. “Thanks,” I mumbled.
That night she texted at 4:09 a.m.: “Can’t sleep, not sure why. Two suggestions: if your target goes out, intercept him in public; ideally, have someone record from a distance for evidence.”
Could It Be Elon Musk?
On New Year’s Eve 2021, an email landed in my inbox titled “New Clue About Satoshi.”
Since writing about Bitcoin’s early days, such emails have occasionally arrived.
The sender, Sahil Gupta, had published a blog four years earlier speculating Musk was “very likely” Satoshi. This time, he offered new “evidence”: a vague conversation with Musk’s chief of staff, Sam Teller. I didn’t respond.
Two days later, the same address sent a detailed argument from Gupta. The reasoning ranged from speculative to technical. I decided to reply. Sahil told me that in 2015, as an undergrad at Yale, he interned at SpaceX’s rocket factory. Musk visited the office three days a week, and they often crossed paths in the hallway. Sahil majored in computer science; his senior thesis proposed a central bank digital currency called “Federalcoin,” in which he thanked “Satoshi, a true legend.”
While researching, he deeply studied cryptocurrency literature, including Satoshi’s nine-page white paper. He noticed striking similarities between Satoshi’s and Musk’s writing styles: both loved phrases like “order of magnitude” and “bloody.” Satoshi spoke abstractly about money, just as Musk did during his PayPal days. Both were fluent in C++ and cryptography. Sahil began to wonder: could the father of Bitcoin have been hiding in plain sight all along?
After graduation, Sahil tried to work for Musk. After several cold emails, he secured a phone interview with Chief of Staff Teller.
At the end, he mustered the courage: “Is Elon Satoshi?”
Sahil recalled: “Teller was silent for 15 seconds, then said, ‘What can I say?’” He took this as a crucial clue. That year, he published an article titled *Elon Musk May Have Invented Bitcoin*, arguing the Bitcoin community needed its founder back. Despite Musk tweeting denial (“False. A friend gave me some BTC years ago, but I lost it”), Sahil remained convinced.
He added more “evidence”: PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek once said their goal was to create a currency free from banks; both Satoshi and Musk habitually left two spaces after periods; Musk frequently flew through Van Nuys Airport, and an IP address accidentally exposed in an early Bitcoin email was located north of Los Angeles; early developers described Satoshi as “autocratic”—a trait also attributed to Musk.
By late 2021, Musk had just been named TIME’s Person of the Year, SpaceX had successfully docked with the International Space Station, and he jokingly promoted Dogecoin on Twitter (causing wild price swings). Sahil believed the public was finally ready to accept that Satoshi and Musk were one.
He claimed to be “99% certain,” blaming criticism on “anti-Musk bias.”
“But Musk isn’t humble—why deny it?”
Sahil’s explanation: “Companies need marketing, but Bitcoin doesn’t. The mystery of an anonymous founder made Bitcoin stronger and faster-growing—that’s Musk’s genius.”
I couldn’t say whether Sahil was right, but I understood his obsession. At the time, Bitcoin had surged to nearly $70,000, with a market cap exceeding $1 trillion. El Salvador adopted it as legal tender. In 2011, Satoshi’s identity seemed irrelevant—but now, it remained unresolved.
Six months later, I quit my job to fully dedicate myself to this puzzle that had haunted me for over a decade.
The Disappearing Founder
In this paper, Satoshi described a new kind of currency—running on a network of volunteer computers, relying on a transparent public ledger maintained collectively rather than on bank or government loan records. He attached a link to a more detailed technical document—later known as the *Bitcoin White Paper*.
A few members of the mailing list offered feedback on the software Satoshi had written, which he accepted gladly. “Thanks for the questions,” he wrote in one email. “My approach is actually backwards: I had to write all the code first to make sure it works, then go back and write the paper.” In early January 2009, Satoshi released the initial version of Bitcoin on the open-source platform SourceForge. Early participants recall only 127 downloads on the first day.
Many early users were programmers who felt “money needed an upgrade.” Paper bills fade, wrinkle, tear, and carry germs; they’re fixed in value, easy to counterfeit, and hard to transfer in large amounts. Bitcoin, being durable, unforgeable, infinitely divisible, promised ideal internet micropayments—any amount instantly transferable worldwide.
As a digital currency maintained by ordinary individuals, Bitcoin operates independently of central authority. Gold can be seized, bank accounts frozen, fiat currencies devalued by central banks or restricted under authoritarian capital controls—but Bitcoin bypasses these traditional systems.
Satoshi’s core innovation was blockchain—a continuously growing system of transaction records (buying, selling, etc.). Roughly every ten minutes, recent transactions are bundled into a “block” and cryptographically linked to the previous block via sophisticated math, making tampering nearly impossible. In traditional finance, such ledgers are maintained by banks or governments; in Bitcoin, they’re stored and updated by volunteers’ computers worldwide, each running Bitcoin software.
Though Bitcoin is an open-source project (a “many-hands” collaboration), someone still needed to coordinate. For the first 20 months, Satoshi filled that role—releasing code, accepting modifications from other developers, and integrating approved changes.
Gavin Andresen, a software developer who joined four months in, earned Satoshi’s trust through dedication and technical skill. Satoshi first granted him direct access to the source code, then around September 2010 informed Gavin he’d be busy with other projects and would transfer control of the SourceForge repository and the project’s “alert key”—a cryptographic key allowing emergency broadcasts to all Bitcoin-running devices. In open-source terms, these were near-equivalent to “the leader’s scepter.” From then on, Gavin became Bitcoin’s lead developer, leading a team of five volunteer coders.
In the following months, Satoshi occasionally participated in technical discussions, but Gavin’s high-profile outreach clashed with Satoshi’s reclusive nature. When PayPal and Visa froze WikiLeaks’ accounts, some Bitcoin supporters urged using cryptocurrency to support the controversial organization. Someone shouted on the BitcoinTalk forum: “Let them come!” Satoshi snapped back: “No! Don’t let them come. The project needs time to grow so the software can mature. I beg WikiLeaks not to use Bitcoin… the attention will destroy us.”
For journalists covering Bitcoin, Gavin became the go-to interviewee. Calm, rational, and willing to use his real name, he filled the role of “Bitcoin ambassador” that Satoshi never played. But this seemed to unsettle Satoshi. In late April 2011, he emailed Gavin: “Hope you stop describing me as a mysterious shadow—media will just label Bitcoin as ‘black market money.’”
This was the last email Gavin received. When I first contacted Gavin in July that year, he said he hadn’t communicated with Satoshi “in months.” On April 26, Gavin had emailed Satoshi informing him he’d be briefing intelligence officers at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia—but got no reply. That same day, Satoshi sent emails to at least one other collaborating programmer.
After that, silence. Except for a single suspected forum post years later (its authenticity debated), Satoshi never resurfaced.
Early Bitcoin developers reached several consensus points about Satoshi’s identity. The second channel Satoshi used to publish his white paper was the P2P Foundation website—a utopian nonprofit promoting peer-to-peer networks. His profile listed Japan as residence, but no one believed he was Japanese. His English was flawless, with British touches: in Bitcoin’s source code and BitcoinTalk posts, he favored British spellings like “colour” and “optimise.”
Satoshi guarded his identity fiercely. When registering bitcoin.org, he used anonymousspeech.com to hide his information—a service itself registered through a Tokyo short-term rental agency. It provided him with a vistomail.com email (which could fake send times) and he also used gmx.com. In correspondence, he practiced disciplined vagueness: answering only technical questions, avoiding personal topics entirely.
His coding style was slightly outdated, suggesting he might be older. For example, he used “Hungarian notation”—a variable naming convention popular among Windows programmers in the 1990s.
Gavin believed Bitcoin’s code might have been written by a small team or even a single person. When programmers collaborate, they usually add comments explaining code functions, but Bitcoin’s software had almost none. Others countered that Bitcoin ran too smoothly at launch for solo development. Also, the white paper frequently used “we,” suggesting “Satoshi” might represent a team or institution.
Even before vanishing, Satoshi was being mythologized. On April 16, 2011, BitcoinTalk user Wobber noted the paradox of someone with such vast knowledge creating such a disruptive technology yet seeking neither credit nor profit, then quietly stepping away. Some compared him to Zorro, or David—the masked figure using a slingshot against Goliath (the giant Philistine warrior symbolizing overwhelming power) of banks and governments.
Did the name hold clues? “Satoshi Nakamoto” literally translates to “central intelligence,” possibly hinting at spy agency involvement in Bitcoin’s creation. For instance, the NSA might have orchestrated a long game: building an unregulated financial network for global agent funding while creating a “honey pot”—luring adversaries into supposedly secure transactions that the NSA could monitor.
This isn’t entirely absurd. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory developed TOR (The Onion Router), enabling the dark web; the FBI secretly launched encrypted phones and ANOM messaging, mistakenly used by criminal groups, leading to over 800 arrests; in summer 1996, the NSA’s cryptography division even published an internal paper titled *How to Make Anonymous Electronic Cash* (later declassified), detailing cryptocurrency principles.
Another interpretation breaks “Satoshi Nakamoto” into tech giants: SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, MOTOrola—suggesting a corporate conspiracy. Reddit users creatively rearranged the letters into absurd phrases like “Ma, I took NSA’s oath” or “So a man took a shit.”
Dan Kaminsky, a programmer famous for discovering a flaw that could have broken the internet in 2008, believed Satoshi might be an internal bank team. “I suspect he’s a small squad within a financial institution,” Dan told me. “Just a gut feeling.”
But he added: “Satoshi’s identity doesn’t matter to Bitcoin’s essence. Bitcoin has already transcended Satoshi.” This echoes a mainstream view: Satoshi’s deliberate anonymity and disappearance embody Bitcoin’s decentralized spirit—his exit turned the technology into a global experiment without leaders.
“We don’t know who Satoshi is.”
At the 2022 Miami Bitcoin Conference, Satoshi wasn’t present but was everywhere. The main stage was named “Satoshi Hall,” with screens flanking it cycling through fragments of his writings—like passages from Scientology’s *Dianetics*: mundane to outsiders, sacred to believers.
“Imagine gold turning into lead after theft.”
“In twenty years, Bitcoin transaction volume will either be huge or zero.”
“The network’s robustness lies in its simple decentralization.”
Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist, emerged from stage right, tossing a stack of hundred-dollar bills to the front row: “This thing still works? Crazy.” He declared Bitcoin the ultimate warning against fiat systems and named its enemies—Warren Buffett, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. Thiel called them “extensions of state power,” and emphasized: “Bitcoin has no board—we don’t even know who Satoshi is.” He stressed the last line deliberately.
“We don’t know who Satoshi is.” In 2011, he was an obscure anonymous coder in geek circles; a decade later, he became the “mythmaker” behind a trillion-dollar project. Bitcoin ranked as the ninth-largest asset globally, behind Tesla but ahead of Meta. Whoever he is, he holds immense wealth. Computer scientist Sergio Demian Lerner estimated, based on early blockchain analysis, that Satoshi held bitcoins worth about $40 billion at the time (now higher)—solidly placing him as Bitcoin’s wealthiest holder.
In spring 2021, Coinbase’s SEC filing listed “exposure of Satoshi’s identity” as a risk factor. The potential crisis is clear: if Satoshi were revealed as a foreign agent, extremist, or financial criminal, Bitcoin’s legitimacy could collapse. Yet the Bitcoin community increasingly sees this mystery as intentional design—a “pure birth” essential for decentralization. Without a concrete persona, there’s less risk of schism due to founder controversies, maximizing universal acceptance.
Thus, the pseudonym “Satoshi” has been sanctified. While some believe he hides to avoid taxes or danger, the dominant narrative casts him as a “selfless martyr.” The most fervent believers see probing his identity as sacrilege—akin to asking Scientologists about Xenu.
But What If the Father of Bitcoin Is a Monster?
In summer 2022, I pinned an Excel sheet to my office wall listing over a hundred people proposed as Satoshi. Most major candidates came from the cypherpunk world—names repeatedly suggested over the years. Others were obscure figures from adjacent fields like mathematics, cryptography, and economics. Some were early contributors to Bitcoin’s software. Others created alternative cryptocurrencies. Many were just famously smart: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Musk.
For years, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, and Hal Finney were widely considered top contenders. Szabo, a programmer who advocated decentralized money years before Bitcoin, conceived “bit gold” in the 1990s—a Bitcoin precursor. He had the technical skills, and his writing style superficially resembled Satoshi’s. But he consistently denied being Satoshi, with no solid evidence linking him to Bitcoin’s early development. The white paper mentions Adam Back as creator of Hashcash, another crypto predecessor, and Back’s email was one of the first Satoshi contacted. Back also denies being Satoshi, and his writing style matches less closely than Szabo’s. Hal Finney, a legendary coder and cryptographer, received the first-ever Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi. But Finney denied being Satoshi, and was diagnosed with ALS in 2009, rapidly losing his ability to work. If Satoshi were exposed, Finney would be the ideal candidate for Bitcoin enthusiasts—his tragic hero image, gentle reputation, and death in 2014 mean he couldn’t generate scandalous behavior or associations.
All along, there’s been opposition within the Bitcoin community to investigating Satoshi’s identity. Last fall, when an HBO documentary suggested libertarian Canadian programmer and crypto enthusiast Peter Todd was the most likely candidate, the reaction wasn’t just strong skepticism—it included outrage at doing such a project. He contributed greatly, so his wish for anonymity should be respected. What matters isn’t the person, but the idea and the code.
But Satoshi placed his invention in the public square, so I believe it’s fair to ask who put it there—and why.
I meticulously analyzed the 60,000 words Satoshi left behind. His writing was plain, rarely revealing personal views or personality. Whenever I spotted a hint of distinctive style, I added it to a “Satoshi Style Lexicon”—eventually compiling over 200 unique words and phrases: “wet blanket,” “sweet,” “clobbering.”
I built a program called “Satoshitizer” that scans archived writings of suspected Satoshis, searches for his linguistic fingerprints, and generates statistical reports. I could instantly rank archives using over a dozen criteria, including frequency of Satoshi-like terms, e-cash terminology, and discussion of software tools Satoshi used.
One day in late April 2023, I found myself thinking about a word I’d seen in Satoshi’s writings: hosed.
Given Satoshi’s writing style avoids personal flair or era-specific references, “hosed” stood out. I hadn’t heard it recently; it means screwed or broken, vaguely recalling 1990s surfer or fraternity slang.
I re-examined my archive, carefully tagging every instance. On the Metzdowd mailing list, in the three years before October 31, 2008 (when Satoshi first posted the Bitcoin white paper), “hosed” was used exactly four times. Two of those uses came from the same person: James A. Donald.
Though Donald wasn’t active in Bitcoin’s public discussions, he made a fleeting appearance in its early history—as the first person to respond to Satoshi on the mailing list. He raised technical concerns about scalability, exchanged a few messages, then exited. He was just one of many cypherpunks interested in digital currency.
At the time, on my suspect spreadsheet, Donald ranked 42nd—not only far behind the top three candidates, but included mainly because he was a C++-savvy cypherpunk and libertarian. But intrigued by the “hosed” coincidence, I revisited the rare-word list generated by my “Satoshi Fingerprint Analyzer” to check if Donald used other unusual Satoshi-like expressions.
Indeed. Across my two-decade corpus, Donald was the only one who used the word “fencible” (meaning “salvageable through fencing”)—a term Satoshi used once in the form “non-fencible.” More shockingly, Donald used it as early as October 1998 on the cypherpunk mailing list. My mind started ringing alarms. While “fence” as a verb for selling stolen goods is common slang, the adjective “fencible” is extremely rare. Google yielded almost no results, and even searching the *New York Times* archive (over 13 million articles dating to 1857), the word never appeared in relevant contexts.
Unlike standard terms like “trusted third party” or “zero-knowledge proof,” “fencible” and “hosed” aren’t technical jargon—they’re linguistic fingerprints reflecting personal style.
I dug deeper into Donald. His online trail was elusive: websites claimed he was Canadian, declared him dead, and said “James A. Donald” wasn’t his real name. Though he rarely shared personal details, fragments remained. He was Australian but lived long in Silicon Valley, and like Satoshi, his writing mixed American and Commonwealth spellings.
Ideologically, Donald fused extreme libertarianism (bordering on anarcho-capitalism) with fervent belief in cryptography’s transformative power. In 1996, he wrote: “Folks, here’s our plan—we’ll use advanced mathematics to destroy the state. We’ll replace corporate structures with cryptographic mechanisms, giving more people ways to evade and resist taxation.”
He showed special interest in digital currency. In 1995, he predicted “people will eventually bypass banks to transfer funds directly.” Between 2006 and 2009, Donald used Satoshi-style e-cash terminology on the Metzdowd list more than any other participant.
Examining his programming style: in the late 1990s, Donald promoted “Crypto Kong,” an encrypted communication tool written in the same C++ language as Bitcoin. Archived source code shows multiple overlaps: both supported Windows; both used Hungarian notation favored by Satoshi; both used bold slash separators in code sections; both employed elliptic curve cryptography for public-private key generation.
Further personal research: born in 1952, Donald is now in his seventies—consistent with early developers’ observation that Satoshi’s coding style suggests age. He doesn’t use his real name on mainstream social platforms. His $2.8M Palo Alto and $400K Austin homes appear blurred on Google Street View (a feature requiring formal application or internal Google access, perhaps via a son who works there). Photos of him are scarce; like Satoshi, he uses Swiss privacy email Proton Mail and runs an anonymous blog, “Jim’s Journal,” where he describes having “lived off-grid for long periods.” The pieces clicked into place.
Reconsidering his role as first responder, I imagined Satoshi in 2008: launching a revolutionary idea into silence, then staging a technical critique to spark discussion and mislead.
His blog revealed more clues: just before October 31, 2008, Donald was deeply focused on the financial crisis. His October 11 post, “Roots of the Crisis,” opened with: “The bailout will fail.” Bitcoin’s genesis block embedded a *Times* headline: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
More leads surfaced: Donald owned multiple properties in Hawaii. Months before Satoshi announced his invention, on June 19, 2008, the *Honolulu Star-Bulletin* published an obituary for WWII veteran “Satoshi Nakamoto,” aged 84. Was this identity theft to find a pseudonym?
Though “James” rarely reveals personal info, his intellectual journey is clear in his blog: radical leftist in youth, joined the Trotskyist Spartacist League at 15, left due to “disillusionment with participatory democracy and distaste for representative democracy.” At 17, joined anarchist socialist and Maoist groups “because they were most hated by Trotskyists.” Eventually concluded property rights equal freedom, evolving into an anarcho-capitalist.
To verify academic background, I contacted insiders at Sydney University’s physics department. Professor Bob Hewitt, who interviewed the Melbourne applicant, recalled he had a “bohemian vibe”—when asked about housing, Donald said he planned to “sleep under a bridge.” Though seen as “friendly but eccentric,” his PhD thesis, *Assumptions of the Singularity Theorems and the Rejuvenation of Universes*, was rejected as “incomprehensible,” and he dropped out.
His career path: wrote software for Apple, moved to the U.S. to develop games for Epyx, then shifted to databases. His blog shows deep insight into Bitcoin’s nature: “It’s just a prototype system, prematurely treated as final.” He always viewed Bitcoin historically—as a stepping stone toward an ideal future.
I never bought into the Bitcoin community’s assumption that Satoshi must be a benevolent figure. I always felt those who deify Satoshi as half-man, half-god are engaging in wishful projection—imagining him selfless, humble, a prophet from the future sent to save humanity. Hal Finney was such an attractive candidate precisely because he perfectly fit this idealized image.
Donald is different. On his blog, he promotes a dark ideology called “Neo-Reactionaryism”—a movement that once captivated parts of Silicon Valley. Neo-reactionaries believe society is hijacked by what they call the “Cathedral”—an alliance of academic, media, and bureaucratic elites. They scorn social justice efforts, arguing that abandoning democracy and restoring monarchy is humanity’s best path forward. Donald’s version adds raw Christian fundamentalism and excessive paranoia: he blames the Jesuits for the pandemic.
Beyond complex political manifestos, Donald persistently spews racism, homophobia, misogyny, and offensive rhetoric. His harshness got him banned from *Slate Star Codex* in 2014—a heavyweight Silicon Valley blog known for tolerating taboo topics like IQ science. But on a Laos-based domain relatively free from censorship, he openly advocates “whipping women on buttocks or upper back to make them compliant” and claims “most rape accusations are false.” Donald has a large following among “woke” critics and alt-right bloggers.
If Donald is Satoshi, his motive for releasing Bitcoin under a pseudonym becomes obvious: he wanted the world to embrace this brilliant invention purely on its merits, not reject it due to prejudice against his identity. He didn’t hide because Bitcoin endangered him, but because his existence endangered Bitcoin’s future.
I wonder if anyone in the circle already knows or suspects Donald is Satoshi. If Satoshi were a harmless citizen like “Dorian Nakamoto,” “respecting Satoshi’s privacy” would be defensible; if he were a dissident under a dictatorship, I’d protect the secret. But if Satoshi is truly Donald? That would shatter the narrative of the “crypto messiah”—the sacred image of someone who sacrificed fame and fortune for a noble cause. Among those shouting “respect Satoshi’s privacy,” how many already suspect that if Bitcoin’s creator were revealed as a far-right extremist, it would trigger a PR disaster—and what they really seek to protect is the reputation of this belief system and the value of their investment portfolios? In June 2020, Adam Back, creator of Hashcash (long suspected as Satoshi himself), tweeted: “Maybe we should prepare psychologically to disown Satoshi. For safety, better erase this pseudonym entirely.”
“Satoshi’s identity doesn’t matter,” wrote Ray Dillinger, who once reviewed Bitcoin code with Hal Finney. “The protocol itself is the reality. Whether the creator was a Third World dictator, a homeless man under a Belize bridge, a Bedouin working on a phone while crossing the Bir Tawil desert on a camel, or a Nairobi street vendor, the protocol is no different from one made by NSA cryptanalysts, GRU-funded ‘trolls,’ renowned security researchers, or cypherpunks. ‘Satoshi’ doesn’t exist outside the protocol. He’s just a hat someone wore during development. Who wore the hat—simply doesn’t matter.”
“I Know Who Satoshi Is”
I emailed James A. Donald requesting an interview. Days later, surprisingly, he replied. “Email is easier,” Donald wrote, though he might consider a phone or video call. He needed a few days to confirm.
Two months passed, and Donald never agreed to real-time conversation. Should I travel to Australia to confront him? What gave me pause about the Donald-as-Satoshi theory was that Satoshi, in past communications, displayed a rich emotional range. He expressed gratitude (“many thanks”), pity (“poor guy”), humility (“apologies”), and self-deprecation (“better at coding than writing”). As I combed through Donald’s decades of writing, hunting for empathy, gratitude, or warmth—even a single exclamation mark, apology, moment of compassion or camaraderie—I found only an emotional desert.
Yet among all cypherpunks obsessed with digital currency, only one ever claimed to know Satoshi’s true identity. “I know who Satoshi is,” James A. Donald once wrote in a blog comment, “and I understand his political and social goals.” If true, he’d be the only credible living witness. I was determined to meet this man.
Though Donald spent much of his career in California, he clearly owns or once owned property in Australia. Checking U.S. property assessment records, I found that in the early 2000s, his Austin property was registered to an address on a street along Australia’s northeast coast. Recent assessments still list his U.S. properties under that same Australian town, though now using a PO box. Knowing his wife died in 2016, I found her memorial plaque photo via a “find-a-grave” site in a cemetery there. Five years later, he posted a blog photo resembling a balcony view: foreground shows a glass and clay jar of homemade liquor, distant horizon dotted with islands over turquoise sea. Comparing with other local seaside photos, the geography matched perfectly.
I contacted private investigator Daniel Quinn, who lives within driving distance of the suspected coastal town. I gave him the address and a 20-year-old photo—from his son’s abandoned college blog—the most recent image of Donald available.
Days later, Daniel sent surveillance photos. “Yard overgrown, bushes wild—he’s clearly no gardener.” Attached images showed a raised bungalow on a hillside, beside a lone palm tree, sharing a driveway with two other homes. Through tangled vegetation, a wooden deck faced the Coral Sea.
Though I didn’t see James that day, weeks later came good news: Daniel successfully photographed a man standing at the front door. Compared to the 20-year-old photo, despite white hair and beard, the thick sideburns, metal-framed glasses, and prominent nose matched perfectly. Three days later, I was boarding a flight to Australia.
“I have a problem—I talk too much.”
There was no doorbell on the screen door, so I tapped the frame. My throat was dry with nerves. While I wasn’t sure James himself was Satoshi, I suspected he might be part of the collective identity “Satoshi.” Either way, he was the only person I knew who publicly claimed to know Satoshi’s true identity.
I worried how he’d receive me. Clearly, James had gone to great lengths to stay hidden.
Walking up the porch toward the front door, I saw Donald sitting at a computer in the living room, wearing headphones. Just hours earlier, he’d published a new blog post—a lengthy rant about “Georgians refusing to let churches be destroyed or turned into Gaia-worshipping, homosexual sanctuaries, watching ancient beautiful buildings bulldozed and replaced by demonic postmodern monsters.”
Western NGOs, he claimed, were trying to “homosexualize Georgia, then throw it into the meat grinder against Russia.”
Seeing no response to my knock on the frame, I knocked firmly on the door. Moments later, James opened it, wearing a red camouflage long-sleeve shirt and black thermal underwear.
I immediately began explaining. I’d emailed him—“Oh, I rarely check email,” James said. I reminded him of our correspondence last year and my book project. I told him it would be a failure on my part not to try everything to speak with him.
James said, “In short, I can’t tell you anything I’m not allowed to disclose.” His tone was mild, tinged with bemused confusion.
I pointed out he’d publicly insisted he knew Satoshi’s identity and goals. Could he elaborate? “No, sorry.”
“Well… do you actually know? Or do you just have a strong suspicion?” “I have a good guess about who it might be, but actually—uh—I can’t be sure.”
“Do you think it could be Hal Finney?” “That’s a question I can’t answer.”
“Because you respect his privacy?” “I’m prohibited from telling anyone anything—including what I’ve already said.”
I offered to buy him a beer. James declined. “Could we have lunch?” I pressed. James laughed. “Look,” he said, “I have a problem—I talk too much. After a few drinks, I get completely unfiltered, so better not.”
I tried to keep talking—offering my contact info and a copy of my earlier book—but his replies grew short and dismissive. “Living here is truly desirable,” I said, gesturing at the stunning ocean view. “Yeah,” James murmured, looking down. Thanking him, I turned and walked down the hill.
Bitcoin Has No DNA Test
I spent fifteen years chasing Satoshi’s identity. I learned to code, hired machine learning experts, stylistic analysts, and private investigators, enduring a 37-hour journey for a three-minute meeting. I believe no one else has pursued this mystery as relentlessly. I began to understand why Sahil Gupta is so convinced Elon Musk is Satoshi. It’s time to stop.
Perhaps one day, artificial intelligence will help confirm Satoshi’s identity. But now I’m certain: unless governments declassify unforeseen secrets, we will likely never know his true identity beyond reasonable doubt. Memories fade, witnesses die. Bitcoin has no paternity test—proving who Satoshi is requires either his现身with the private keys, or at minimum, contemporaneous documents that can’t be forged. As time passes, even existing clues grow fainter.
Accepting this brought relief. I remain awestruck by Satoshi’s creation—but almost equally amazed by how perfectly he vanished. As a utopian idea, Bitcoin had no chance of success; yet as a new asset class, it has shown remarkable resilience. Prices rise and fall, hit new highs—this January surpassing $109,000 (down to $85,000 at publication). Fidelity now advises retail investors to include small allocations of cryptocurrency. Blockchain adoption is unstoppable.
Satoshi has become something his real-world creator could never achieve—a concept that needs no body or historical burden, destined to live forever.
(Excerpt from *Mr. Satoshi: A 15-Year Quest to Uncover the Genius Behind the Cryptocurrency Revolution* by Benjamin Wallace, Crown Publishing, on sale March 18)
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