http://http://wiki.keithl.com/MysteriousNakamoto
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto
Benjamin Wallace 2024 Bvt. Lib.332.4048 WAL
Note to "Satoshi Nakamoto": Thank you for your work. Please don't waste your valuable time reading this book.
To other potential purchasers: instead, donate the price of this book to the Internet Archive. Use the time you saved to read to children, or create something beautiful, or pick up litter.
spoiler: This book is a waste of time. Nakamoto is still mysterious - the author makes many guesses, but does not understand blockchain technology, money, nor inventors and coders. A quick read - not much to slow down for.
spoiler SPOILER: while the copyright date on the book is 2025, much of the material (especially about Craig Wright) was discredited in 2023. This book is padded with too much discredited nonsense, and rather than rewrite it or retract it, Wallace and Crown Books went ahead and printed the nonsense.
No index, so here are the first pages that a concept appears on:
p4 Elon Musk as Satoshi "intern Sahil Gupta - Yale"
p6 Fedcoin
p7 Luke Nosek b1975 1998 Paypal original goal bank-less currency | cryonicist, also Peter Thiel b1967
p8 Musk?? Dogecoin? no, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer who called Musk "self-absorbed grifter"
p10 Wired editor Jason Tanz not OSU alum, Lake Oswego financier Jason Tanz
- p11 The Economist "Bits and bob" 2011 June 18 paywalls
p13 Dustin Trammell
p14 Every 10 minutes batches of transactions bundled into a block then chained to prior block
p15 Maximum 21 million coins in 2140 19,846,746.875, 450 per day, 3.125 per 10 minute cycle on 2025/04/04
- 2024-8 3.125 BTC/cycle, 19.5/hour, 468/day, ~170937/year, 683748 2024-2028 ... about 1M more to mine.
more like 16M bitcoin actively circulating
- p16 author's conflation of "cost" with price and value
p16 Nash Equilibria
p17 Mt. Gox
p19 Gavin Andresen Bitcoin Faucet 5 free bitcoins (0.5 cents) per captcha
p19 Laszlo Hanyecz 10,000 bitcoins for 2 large pizzas, first buyer of good
Pizza index - 10K bitcoins $41 2010 May 22, or $600M 2021 Nov, $827M 2025 April
p27 satoshin@gmx.com p28 stylistically erratic C++, "windows guy"
p28 David Chaum DigiCash
p30 Eric Hughes Tim May inspired by Ayn Rand and Vernor Vinge (died 2024 Mar 20 age 79)
p32 Phil Zimmermann PGP John Gilmore Electronic Frontier Foundation
p33 John Draper Captain Crunch, 1972 1y prison Bram Cohen BitTorrent John Perry Barlow cyberlibertarian
p33 Moxie Marlinspike Signal messaging app Julian Assange . Jim McCoy cpherpunk
p34 Clipper chip 1993 Big Brother Inside Gene Hoffman Doug Barnes "meatspace" neologism
p35 Jim Bell | John Callas PGP
p37 James Donald: "crypto transcendence not coming soon"
p40 Nick Szabo at Sequent April 1993, electronic privacy pamplet at Steve Buckstein's Cascade Policy meetings
- p41 Julius Szabo 1956 revolt in Hungary, fled to become plant scientist, Apple II from Nick's mother Mary
- p41 Nick Szabo . UW CS, internship at JPL
p42-48 Romana Machado Airbnb River House
- p80 Ralph Merkle: " ... do you really expect Satoshi is going to say, 'Yes, I'm Satoshi'?"
- Interviewer: "If you were Satoshi, would you tell me you were Satoshi?" R.M. "Good heavens, no."
- p82 Nick didn't owe anyone clarity, but suspicion followed him precisely because he scarcely acknowledged the many reasons to think he might be Nakamoto. This encouraged people to think that ..."
which people? Busybody snoops?
p83 ... Bitcoin was the first working decentralized digital-money system. Nick had always anchored his dreams with a hardheaded rigor, dismissing "Hello Kitty people" ... space projects should be market-driven -- First we start meeting people's needs ((mangled reference to 1989 sci.space posting, unsearchable with crippled google)
p116 Ethereum, currency, smart contracts, platform for decentralized applications
p120 Craig Wright ... Julian Assange responds "Do we really need your amateur political views?"
p125 Wired 2015/11: "Either Wright invented Bitcoin, or he's a brilliant hoaxer ..." or B. Wallace did not read the updated Wired article.
p133 Gavin Andresen retracted quote: "I believe Craig Steven Wright is the person who invented bitcoin."
- p162 Chapter Title "Anything is a Legitimate Area of Investigation"
But not a legitimate use of paper, shelf space, and library budgets The closer I look at this P.O.S., the more resentful I am of the wasted time and opportunity.
p215 Ben Laurie, former principal engineer at Google, home in Wales
p216 "I don't think I even saw RPOW
RPOW not referenced or defined, probably Reusable Proofs of Work
- p254 Facebook post by someone named Will Price about Hal Finney
p261 apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. This book is a prime example.