A nine-page message
On 31 October 2008, six weeks after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, a cryptography mailing list received a message from a stranger. “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” wrote Satoshi Nakamoto, attaching a link to a nine-page paper. The subscribers had seen dozens of such projects and replied politely and wearily (chapter “The Idle God”).
There was almost nothing new in those pages. Proof of work came from Adam Back’s Hashcash, the idea of money kept by the whole network from Wei Dai’s b-money, and Satoshi honestly cited both. What was new was the way the parts were put together, so that strangers who don’t trust one another could agree among themselves which version of the shared record was correct (same chapter).
The problem he solved
For more than twenty years cryptographers had tried to work out how to keep a shared record of money with no bank in the middle, and every time they hit the same snag: someone would spend the same coin twice (prologue). That story is told in the answer on the double-spending problem, and its prehistory, from David Chaum’s DigiCash to the cypherpunks, in the chapter “The Spectre of Crypto Anarchy”.
Satoshi’s solution works like a lottery where tickets are bought with electricity. Payments are gathered into a block, and to attach it to the shared book you have to solve a computational puzzle; across the whole network a solution turns up about once every ten minutes. To rewrite history, a crook would have to recompute every block after his payment faster than the rest of the network, which means having more computing power than all the honest participants combined. The rules allow no more than 21 million coins, and the block reward started at 50 and halved every four years (same chapter). You can watch an attacker lose the race of chains in the experiment “A double spend against the longest chain”.
Why he disappeared
On 3 January 2009 Satoshi launched the network and wrote into the first block the headline from that day’s London Times: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” In December 2010, after Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Bank of America stopped taking donations for WikiLeaks, people on the forum wanted to invite WikiLeaks to use bitcoin. Satoshi asked them not to: the project was in its infancy, and the attention would likely destroy it at that stage. A few days later he left his last forum post, and in spring 2011 he told one of the developers he had moved on to other things (same chapter).
The coins the researcher Sergio Lerner attributes to him from peculiarities of the first blocks, about a million bitcoins, have not moved since. At the peak in autumn 2025 they were worth more than 120 billion dollars.
Who has been called Satoshi
In March 2014 Newsweek named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, an engineer from California, as the creator of bitcoin. He denied it, bewildered, and no evidence to the contrary ever appeared. The Australian Craig Wright called himself Satoshi from 2016 and sued developers until, in March 2024, the High Court in England ruled that he had not written the white paper or created bitcoin; Justice Mellor wrote that Wright had forged the documents meant to prove his authorship on a grand scale. In October 2024 an HBO documentary named the Canadian developer Peter Todd. Todd called it nonsense, and the film had less evidence than Newsweek (same chapter).
I call Satoshi an idle god, the term historians of religion use for a creator who made the world, set its laws and withdrew. Priests, prophets and impostors have spoken for him ever since, while he left behind one nine-page document and a hoard of coins nobody touches.
