If you were the inventor of Bitcoin, you’d simply disappear. In 2008, he invented the world’s first digital cryptocurrency, publishing his seminal paper under the fake name “Satoshi Nakamoto.” For the next two years, he built an open source team to develop the Bitcoin software. Since then, bitcoin has grown in value exponentially as people worldwide have realized that its fundamental design is reliable and resistant to government control.
Most of Satoshi’s coins, now worth billions of dollars, are still there, sitting in his digital wallet, and haven’t been spent. But why? Who was behind the mysterious Satoshi pseudonym? Why did he launch this digital money revolution? And where has he gone?
Chip is an IT worker with a cloud services company in Boston. His job is tedious and boring. On the rare occasions when he is allowed to show initiative or excellence, his manager drags him back down to Earth. One day, Chip makes a chance discovery that will change his life. He finds a hard drive containing the key to the bitcoin genesis block — the key to Satoshi’s fortune, and possibly his true identity.
But bitcoin is not completely anonymous; there are ways to track each transaction. And now, Chip has caught the attention of many powerful people — some curious, and some sinister.
That’s the synopsis of my first novel, Satoshi No No, available in paperback and ebook. But what is it really about?
I’ve always loved stories about mistaken identity. Alfred Hitchcock mined this device to great effect in his films. Mistaken identity subverts the psychological bias we all have to think we are all special; it forces the misidentified character to reclaim their agency in the face of clear evidence that they are not special.
A related theme in Satoshi No No is the inability of powerful organizations to understand and grapple with new technology, even when they know instinctively that the new technology is valuable and, potentially, indispensable. The best real-world example I can think of is the way the US government instinctively tried to control (and sometimes poison) the export and development of encryption technology in the 1990s and 2000s. Never mind that encryption is a foundational piece of modern e-commerce and business communication; never mind that encryption is, fundamentally, a mathematical concept that can’t be contained within national borders — they still felt compelled to enact futile measures to restrict it.
Finally, of course, my novel is about Bitcoin itself, and the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto. I had the germ of this story bouncing around my head for a long time, and I found myself increasingly shocked that not only had Satoshi himself never come forward, but no one else had made a book about the possibility of his apparent return. Those are bigger topics than one blog post can do justice to, but I promise to flesh them out soon.