# Satoshi *A Biography of Satoshi Nakamoto* — Legendary Biographies No. 104 - **Subject:** Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym; identity unconfirmed) - **Written by:** Sterling Aldridge - **Shelf:** Technology & Money / Technology - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 210 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 210 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-101-7) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Miles Ashby (ISBN 979-8-90623-169-7) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/104-satoshi.html ## About this book On October 31, 2008, at 2:10 p.m. UTC, a nine-page paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to the Cypherpunks mailing list by an account under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The genesis block was mined on January 3, 2009 at 18:15 UTC. The final known communication from Nakamoto — an email to Gavin Andresen reading "I've moved on to other things" — was sent on April 26, 2011. The pseudonym has not appeared since. The wallet addresses attributed to Nakamoto hold an estimated 1.1 million bitcoin — at recent prices, more than $100 billion — and have not moved. Sterling Aldridge's biography is a careful reconstruction of what is knowable about Satoshi Nakamoto from the public record, written with the epistemological caution the subject demands. The book traces the cypherpunk movement of the 1990s that produced the intellectual prerequisites — Adam Back's hashcash, Wei Dai's b-money, Hal Finney's reusable proof of work — through the late-2008 release of the Bitcoin white paper, the early-2009 forum-and-mailing-list correspondence, the November 2010 P2P Foundation interview that the book parses for stylistic fingerprints, the April 2011 disappearance, the long succession of named candidates — Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Dorian Nakamoto, Craig Wright — and the April 2026 New York Times stylometric investigation, led by John Carreyrou and Times AI editor Dylan Freedman, that pointed with high statistical confidence to Adam Back. What emerges is a portrait of the most consequential pseudonymous creator in modern technology — and an honest account of what the public record can and cannot say about the person behind it. ## Contents 1. The Paper 2. The Cypherpunks 3. The Genesis Block 4. The Early Network 5. The Disappearance 6. The Text 7. Hal Finney 8. Nick Szabo 9. Craig Wright 10. Adam Back 11. The Untouched Coins 12. The Disappearance Revisited 13. The Linguistics 14. What Bitcoin Became 15. The Community 16. The Candidates Revisited 17. What Can Be Known 18. The Machine 19. The Machine — A Postscript ## Questions **Who is Satoshi about?** Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym; identity unconfirmed). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Satoshi — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,581 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,000 words, 19 chapters, 210 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Sterling Aldridge is an Atlanta-based business journalist whose work for Bloomberg Businessweek and The Wall Street Journal has focused on the founders, fraudsters, and venture capitalists of the late-stage tech industry. After years of reporting on the ground, he transitioned to writing book-length portraits of industry figureheads. His biographies, including Satoshi, On the Run, and The Monopolist, examine the human cost of rapid technological scale. Other works like The Encino Hills, The Lanai Purchase, and The Five-Day Firing focus on the high-stakes boardroom battles that define modern Silicon Valley. He has also authored The Black Turtleneck and The Glen Park Library. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he spends his free time restoring midcentury modern furniture and cycling through the city's historic neighborhoods.