The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto, coming March 18, 2025.
A thrilling investigation into the mysterious identity of Bitcoin’s creator and a deep dive into crypto’s utopian origin story—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Billionaire’s Vinegar
In October 2008, someone going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper outlining “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” called Bitcoin to an arcane listserv populated by Cypherpunks. No one in the community had heard of Nakamoto, and just as people were starting to wonder who he was, he vanished. As the years passed, and the scope of Nakamoto’s achievement became clear, the truth of his identity grew into the greatest unsolved mystery of our time.
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto traces Benjamin Wallace’s attempt to unmask the figure behind the currency and the world it wrought. Nakamoto’s Bitcoin at first seemed destined to fulfill the dreams of fringe 1990s utopians for a currency set free from governments and big banks. Yet after he disappeared, his creation took on a strange new life in the financial markets, where rampant speculation fueled a vision of crypto as a potential windfall, inviting charlatans and scammers and opening a vast gulf between Bitcoin’s idealistic origins and its troubled reputation.
But who was Nakamoto? Whoever he was could rightly claim to have invented one of the most important technologies of the new century. And Nakamoto was a billionaire—his Bitcoin wallet held an untouched eleven-figure fortune waiting to be claimed.
With the same propulsive-narrative flair that made his New York Times bestseller The Billionaire’s Vinegar an instant success, Benjamin Wallace presents a page-turning work of investigative journalism. Tracking leads from London to Oslo to Los Angeles, from coastal Australia to the Arizona desert, he takes readers through a rogues’ gallery tour of Nakamoto suspects—from benevolent geniuses like cryptographer Hal Finney to difficult ones like a reclusive polymath known to his followers only as Jim; from the mercurial Australian Craig Wright, who claims to be Nakamoto, to a secret team at the National Security Agency. With the forensic skill of Sherlock Holmes and the storytelling verve of Arthur Conan Doyle, Wallace follows the trail of computer code and personal writings to the heart of the Nakamoto mystery while interrogating the very nature of mystery itself.
Praise:
“The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto could be the best mystery story of the past twenty years. I’m not sure whether Ben Wallace should win a Pulitzer, be institutionalized for taking on this massive project, or both.”—James Patterson
"Benjamin Wallace’s astonishingly obsessive deep dive into the financial world’s greatest modern mystery will leave you amazed, enlightened and utterly breathless.”—Robert Kolker, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
“Wallace is an elegant historian and a talented anatomist of the Satoshi affair, and The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto deserves a wide readership.”—The New Yorker
“I have long relished Ben Wallace’s storytelling talents, and in The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto, he delivers a tale that is somehow a blend of Agatha Christie and Soren Kierkegaard, unraveling a mystery while also exploring the nature of mystery itself. His search leads us into many dark corners of the nation-state of Bitcoin, a world and its people I was surprised, as a reader who willfully never gave much thought to crypto, to find absolutely mesmerizing.”—Adam Moss, New York Times bestselling author of The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing
“This is, by far, the deepest investigation into possibly the biggest mystery of the twenty-first century. I couldn’t put it down.”—Mark Manson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck