The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto Quotes

“Satoshi Nakamoto was something that whoever was behind the pseudonym could never be. It was a name and an idea and, without a body or a history to drag it down, it would live forever.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“to associate epic outcome with an epic motive. Perhaps that is an unnecessary stretch.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“cryptocurrency industry had become. But for all the outright frauds and fake utopians and Wall Street suits parroting cypherpunk lingo, some of the most far-seeing cypherpunks—and Nakamoto candidates—were able to look beyond the crime and froth and politics and garishness of crypto. Bitcoin had done its job. It had been a necessary experiment, a proof of concept that, by knocking down conceptual and technical barriers previously seen as insurmountable, had opened up new vistas of possibility and invention. These more sanguine types were keeping their eyes on a future they still saw as inevitable.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“Even as Bitcoin had become extremely valuable and almost mainstream, you couldn’t look at it in 2024 and say it had fulfilled its creator’s vision. It still wasn’t a working cash system. It was still arguably very centralized, with four mining pools controlling more than 75 percent of the network, and just two controlling more than 53 percent. Its originally vaunted privacy had proven to be much exaggerated. It had never escaped its reliance on third-party exchanges as on-ramps from the fiat-money system, a shocking number of those exchanges had proved untrustworthy, and these chokepoints were increasingly susceptible to regulation. Bitcoin still struggled to scale.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“The legend took up space in our imaginations. The person not so much.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“Clients would come to include a pharmaceutical firm seeking to protect its intellectual property and a police department looking to document the chain of custody of its evidence. The newspaper ad was, as Scott put it, “an unassailable repository, widely witnessed.” For $ 100 a week, it created a virtually uncrackable defense. Scott would call his contact at the paper every seven days and read out the numbers. The contact would read them back to him. “We had a routine down.” Stuart and Scott had invented the world’s first blockchain.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“And Clear made the point that was becoming a refrain among Bitcoiners: Nakamoto’s identity shouldn’t matter. That was the essence of a decentralized currency. Being headless was its greatest attribute.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“In the Bitcoin realm, I explained without raising my voice, the Nakamoto mystery was seen as necessary—a feature rather than a bug. To be truly decentralized required that Bitcoin have a virgin birth. Depriving it of a human figurehead—a flawed individual with a particular identity that might be palatable to this group but not to that one—gave it the best shot at being received on its own terms and taken up en masse. And so among Bitcoiners the Nakamoto alias had come to be hallowed, and inquiries into it discouraged.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“And it was hard to make the case that crypto was a better mousetrap when it kept snapping on people’s fingers.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“Bitcoin had at least as many critics as fans. Hard-edged libertarianism was off-putting to regular people. There was something bleak and disappointed about having so little trust in people that you put your faith in a network of machines. Most people preferred to rely on banks, police, and utilities.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“Had Bitcoin become more mainstream? Had the mainstream become more Bitcoin?”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“thirteen years after its launch, a single bitcoin was worth more than $ 65,000, and Bitcoin was just part of a much larger industry. Crypto, which had long been shorthand for cryptography, stood, to the chagrin of cryptographers, for cryptocurrency. There were, almost unbelievably, more than sixteen thousand different cryptocurrencies in existence—riffs of one sort or another on the first and only one that had existed in 2011. Collectively, they had recently passed $ 3 trillion in value. Eighty-six percent of Americans had heard of crypto. Sixteen percent had used, traded, or invested in it. That didn’t mean they understood it. I wasn’t sure I did, and I’d been trying for eleven years.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“Nakamoto’s software included a cap on how many bitcoins would ever be minted, 21 million, which the system was projected to hit around the year 2140. Instead of being at risk of inflation or hyperinflation, Bitcoin was deflationary: if the technology spread, you were holding an asset that would appreciate.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“a centerless money was something the world had never seen. Its invention was an intellectual tour de force.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“Nakamoto cleverly engineered the system so that the first computer to solve each puzzle received a multibitcoin reward. In a stroke, he’d found a way to both attract sincere participants and dissuade insincere ones, while also creating a predictable mechanism for releasing new bitcoins into the money supply. Though the main purpose of the puzzle-solving race was to ensure the integrity of the system, it came to be called “mining” because of the multibitcoin reward. (The enormous energy used by hundreds of thousands of computers constantly working to solve these puzzles is also what gives Bitcoin its bad reputation among environmentalists.)”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“At the heart of Nakamoto’s creation was something called the blockchain, an ever-lengthening record of all transactions (buy, sell, etc.) that had occurred in the system. Approximately every ten minutes, the latest batch of transaction records were bundled into a “block,” and the block was “chained” onto the block that had preceded it using some clever math that made it impractical for anyone to go back and tamper with the block’s contents. This record, or ledger, which in traditional finance would be maintained by an institution such as a government or bank, was in Bitcoin maintained by a network of volunteers’ computers, each of which ran the Bitcoin software, communicated with the other computers in the network, and stored more or less identical, constantly updating copies of the ledger. The price of entry to this network, for a computer, was to try to solve a math puzzle generated by the system every ten minutes.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“A lot of the first participants were programmers who thought money was overdue for a product update. Paper bills and coins faded, wrinkled, tore, wore down, got dirty, spread germs. They were available only in fixed denominations, could be counterfeited, and were hard to move in any significant quantity. Bitcoin was money 2.0: durable, unforgeable, almost infinitely divisible.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“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.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“What about Hal Finney? “In some ways, he’s my favorite. He has the useful distinction of being dead. But Satoshi had been silent for some time before he died. But Hal’s health was declining. I mean, none of them seem plausible, especially Hal, because he was very ill. A lot of money would have been helpful.” Unless he lost the keys.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“Oh, yeah. I mean, I don’t have any insights at all. I think it’s really interesting that they effectively disappeared, given how much money they had. And I can only come up with two explanations for that. One is that they’re dead. And the other is that they lost their private keys and they’re just too fucking embarrassed to admit it.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“It’s like horror movies. Twenty, thirty years ago, when effects weren’t nearly as good, you didn’t show the monster until the last scene, but it was terrifying in your mind, because the story was good. And then you see the monster, and he’s a rubber puppet, but it didn’t matter, because you already scared yourself through the whole film. You’d fill in those blanks yourself.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“but I never expected the Satoshi story to be clean. He’s an anonymous internet character from the dark web. Satoshi’s a fundamentally dishonest character. He’s an unreliable narrator. That’s who Satoshi Nakamoto is. That’s the point, right?”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“Why had I thought I needed something as pedestrian as a name? What could we possibly learn from Nakamoto’s biography? That he was some 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.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“Every theory worth considering, in other words, had a critical flaw. My brain rang with buzzwords and clichés. Confirmation bias. Occam’s razor. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“And to conceive of Satoshi Nakamoto as a group, you had to imagine that a cabal in possession not only of the biggest secret in technology but also of the keys to a monstrously huge fortune, had defied incomprehensible odds and agreed: Mum’s the word.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“Hal Finney, in order to be Nakamoto, required that you fantasize an elaborate pantomime in which he created sock-puppet accounts to send emails to himself; in which, despite having access to hundreds of millions of dollars, he didn’t spend any of it on life-extending healthcare or leave it to the family who would live on without him, or to the cause, ALS research, to which his wife Fran would soon devote herself;”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“With Wei or Adam Back, you needed to swallow the inconvenient fact of Nakamoto, an all-time OPSEC champ, naming his own work among just eight citations in the Bitcoin white paper.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“He also wanted to make a statement. Bitcoin was just an advertisement for something with much broader application: the blockchain. “What’s the line in Lord of the Rings? ‘The ring has a power of its own.’ It will work its way into all the world’s record-keepings and dealings. And right along with it will be money + +. But we’re still very much in the opening innings of the game.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“One was technical, a cryptographic method of irreversibly linking documents together, making it impossible to tamper with one without changing every document that came after it in the chain. The other was social: have the document chain witnessed broadly, in order to create a shared collective reality immune to manipulation by individual parties. There was also a set of incentives. Everyone in the system would want to ensure its integrity because the integrity of their own documents depended on it.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“The reason trust couldn’t be removed from the system, he and Stuart had realized, was that to do so would require the collusion of everyone in the world. Unless everyone in the world maintained a copy of a particular record, how could anyone without it know that it hadn’t been changed? And that’s how it hit him, in line at the Friendly’s in Morristown: Yes! Exactly! Make everyone in the world collude! And so the attempt to prove that it couldn’t be done had led to a way that it could be done. “It felt like turning a bag inside out,” Scott said later.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto