Benjamin Wallace > Quotes

“In an increasingly digital world, when there wouldn’t be paper and ink to analyze, this kind of thing was only going to get worse and more common. It was easy to alter digital content and hard to detect the alteration. Online, there was no precise equivalent of a seal that would betray any attempt to tamper with it.”
― 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

“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

“You have all these armchair people who are looking for candidates to be Satoshi,” Jeremy said, “and they’re looking where the lights are—people who published papers on the internet, or were on a message board. But there are a lot more people in the bushes.”
― 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

“the parable of the policeman who finds a drunk looking for his keys under a streetlamp. After the man acknowledges that he lost the keys in some nearby bushes, the cop asks why he’s looking under the lamp. “This is where the light is,” the drunk says.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Signaling theory says if you have a good way of proving something and a noisy way of proving something, and you choose the noisy way, then that means chances are that’s because you couldn’t do the good way in the first place.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“In hindsight, it was unsurprising that some of the people yearning to build a utopia with math and cheat death with science should, defeated by the earthbound constraints of the human condition, wind up deeply alienated.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“Rationale, and the foresight and skill, to create a bulletproof pseudonym (Who would bother wiping a crime scene clean before it was a crime scene?”
― 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

“In the realms of science and invention, patents, fortunes, and reputations hinged on proving that you had an idea first. For centuries, scientists established priority with the help of cryptography. After Robert Hooke, a rival of Isaac Newton’s, discovered his law of elasticity in 1660, he waited nearly twenty years to publish anything about it and did so as an anagram. This had the advantage of allowing him to conceal the discovery while he took advantage of it—the insight led to Hooke’s creation of the hairspring, which was used in the first pocket watches—and also letting him assert credit for it later by revealing what the anagram stood for, a Latin phrase summing up the law.”
― Benjamin Wallace, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

“If Donald was Nakamoto, his current fascist politics bore little resemblance to the antiauthoritarian cypherpunk values esteemed by Bitcoiners. He had hidden not because Bitcoin could be a risk to him but because he could be a risk to Bitcoin.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Their idea was to create the digital equivalent of a notary public, a way to stamp a document with proof of when it had been created and of its authenticity, and to do so without a trusted central authority. How could a user of the system be certain that the notary public wasn’t susceptible to corruption or manipulation?”
― 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

“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

“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

“Libertarians and crypto-anarchists seemed unable to grasp that most people were never going to be libertarians and crypto-anarchists. There was no scenario where Bitcoin would be adopted without being co-opted.”
― 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

“The modern history of science supplied no precedent for someone who conceived a revolutionary technology and brought it into the world without taking credit.”
― 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

“Jeremy wanted to talk about Bayesian probability, a statistical approach revered by Silicon Valley’s influential Rationalists, the contemporary community that came closest to and shared many members with the extropians. “If I give you no evidence, am I Satoshi?” Jeremy said. “The probability is one in seven billion. So things like ‘He’s from the UK,’ or ‘He uses Canadian spelling,’ or ‘He uses two spaces,’ or ‘He knows about cryptography’: These do limit the number of people, but you can’t get over the probability” that any single suspect is extremely unlikely to be Nakamoto. To surmount an outright denial by a candidate, “the evidence you’d need would have to be overwhelming. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
― 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