Satoshi

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.