A fifteen-year hunt for the most consequential anonymous figure of the 21st century — the creator of Bitcoin.
In October 2008, a mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper outlining "a peer-to-peer electronic cash system" called Bitcoin to an arcane mailing list populated by Cypherpunks. No one in the community had heard of Nakamoto. By 2011, just as the world was beginning to wonder who he really was, he vanished — leaving behind a working cryptocurrency, an eleven-figure Bitcoin fortune untouched in his wallet, and a mystery that would only deepen with every passing year.
Just who was Satoshi Nakamoto?
Tracking leads from coastal Australia through London, Oslo, and Los Angeles to the Arizona desert, journalist Benjamin Wallace takes readers on a fifteen-year quest through the rogues' gallery of Nakamoto suspects — eccentrics, geniuses, libertarians, anarchists, longevity fanatics, and self-styled prophets of a stateless future. Along the way, The Crypto Genius traces Bitcoin's utopian origins, the cryptographic ideas that made it possible, and the multi-trillion-dollar world it eventually wrought.
Previously published as The Mysterious Mr Nakamoto.
Praise
"Could be the best mystery story of the past twenty years." — James Patterson
"This is, by far, the deepest investigation into possibly the biggest mystery of the 21st century. I couldn't put it down." — Mark Manson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k
"An astonishingly obsessive deep dive into the financial world's greatest modern mystery." — Robert Kolker, #1 NYT bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road
"Highly enjoyable." — The Wall Street Journal
About the author
Benjamin Wallace is an American journalist and bestselling author. His previous book The Billionaire's Vinegar, about a $156,000 bottle of counterfeit wine, was a New York Times bestseller. He has written for New York magazine, Vanity Fair, GQ, The New Yorker, and Wired. He lives in Philadelphia.
