silence, despite the fact that
this was a project that he’d
been involved in for over a
decade. Most bizarrely, Nick
altered the dates on his 2008
postings about bit gold to
make it appear as though they
had been published after
Bitcoin was released, rather
than before.
Not long before the Tahoe
gathering, a blogger who
went by the name Skye Grey
had posted two persuasive
essays
comparing
Nick’s
online writing with that of
Satoshi, and concluded that
the similarities in style and
word choice were unlikely to
be a coincidence. Both Nick
and Satoshi, Skye Grey
wrote, made “repeated use of
‘of course’ without isolating
commas,
contrary
to
convention” and “repeated
use of ‘timestamp’ as a verb,”
among other such tics. Then
there were smaller eyebrow-
raising details, like Satoshi
Nakamoto’s initials being a
transposition
of
Nick
Szabo’s.
Nick had made a brief
statement, by e-mail, to deny
that he was Satoshi, but that
didn’t quiet the speculation.
At Morehead’s gathering,
people spoke in hushed tones
about things they’d overheard
Nick saying. Nick showed up
at
Morehead’s
private
gathering because a few
months earlier he had quietly
joined
a
cryptocurrency
startup that was operating in
stealth mode. The startup,
Vaurum, was based a few
blocks from Wences’s office
in Palo Alto and focused on
the task of matching up big
holders of Bitcoin wanting to
buy and sell. Nick, though,
had joined Vaurum to do
more sophisticated work on
so-called
smart
contracts,
which would allow people to
record their ownership of a
house
or
car
into
the
blockchain, and transfer that
ownership with the use of a
private key, something Nick
had been thinking about for
over a decade. This was the
kind of thing that Satoshi was
writing
about
at
the
beginning, but Satoshi had
believed that these more
advanced
uses
of
the
blockchain would take off
only after Bitcoin caught on
as a currency.
At Morehead’s house, it
was obvious that Nick was a
guy who lived a life of the
mind. His large frame was
covered haphazardly with old
jeans and a flannel shirt. His
beat-up black sneakers looked
as if they’d been purchased
back in the days of DigiCash.
His hair was an unkempt ring
around his scalp, not unlike a
monk’s tonsure just after a
long nap.
In Tahoe, Szabo didn’t
seek out conversation and
didn’t make much eye contact
when engaged. He had a
seemingly perpetual smirk on
his sleepy, bearded face.
Most of the other attendees
watched him from a distance,
waiting for him to open up.
During the cocktail hour
before dinner, on Friday
night, when the topic of
Satoshi came up in the small
group where he was standing,
he took the opportunity to
sound
off
on
all
the
mischaracterizations of him,
including
the
frequent
descriptions of him as a law
professor
at
George
Washington University—and
the notion that he created
Bitcoin.
“Well, I will say this, in
the hope of setting the record
straight,” he said with an acid
note in his voice. “I’m not
Satoshi, and I’m not a college
professor. In fact I never was
a college professor. How the
media got a hold of that, I
don’t know.”
“Even I thought you were
a college professor,” a New
York trader, standing next to
Nick, said with a laugh.
Nick did use a George
Washington e-mail address,
but he explained that this was
because he had gone to law
school at the university in
mid-career, “just for the
reality check of what I’d been
thinking about.” He had paid
the tuition thanks to some
stock options he had from his
earlier days as a security
programmer. He had returned
to school in part because he
had become convinced that
the singular focus on markets,
among
libertarians
and
cryptoanarchists, was naive.
Szabo believed that society
had
multiple
“protocols”
beneath markets, such as the
legal
system,
which
determined
how
markets
worked. All of this, though,
had just been a hobby for
Nick, until very recently.
“The
cryptocurrency
economy is actually big
enough that I can actually
make a living out of it,” Nick
said with a bit of a chortle.
As he walked over to the
big living room, for dinner,
Nick explained that he traced
the germ of all this back to
his childhood in Washington
State and his father, who
came to the United States
after fighting in the 1956
Hungarian revolution, which
the Soviets crushed.
“We’re fairly rebellious
sorts,” he said of his family.
“To really have the freedom
to be creative you have to
think outside the box.”
This
was
about
as
personal as Nick got in
discussing his motivations.
He was a person who liked
thinking about the world—
not himself—and this is one
of
the
most
useful
characteristics for someone
trying to create great things.
At dinner, everyone was
too polite to speculate about
Nick, but the Newsweek story
of a few weeks earlier
naturally
kicked
off
conversations at the different
tables about Bitcoin’s origins.
“Is there no doubt in any
of your minds that maybe this
was a product of the NSA?”
asked the New York trader
who had been talking with
Nick before dinner.
Erik Voorhees scoffed
and said that the government
would have been unlikely to
come up with something so
brilliant. But the trader cited
his own work experience at
the NSA, and said Erik was
underestimating the level of
intelligence the NSA attracts.
Erik, always willing to listen
and learn, said that if it was
the NSA, “it is the best thing
the government has ever
done.”
Erik’s pet theory was that
Satoshi was actually a small
circle of programmers at
some major tech firm, who
had been assigned by their
company to come up with a
new form of online money.
When the project had come
back and was deemed too
dangerous by the higher-ups
the creators decided to put it