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ICYMI (there were problems with the site mid-week), check out my forecasts for 2025, always one of my more popular pieces of the year.

He has invented an entirely new digital system of money with the potential to change the world as we know it. He has watched it grow to a market cap of over two trillion dollars, with as many as 100 million users worldwide, including actual nations, and the US President promising a strategic bitcoin reserve in his 2024 election campaign.

He has half the internet nosing about and trying to figure out who he is. His own coins are worth about $100 billion, making him one of the richest people on earth.

Yet he has managed to stay completely unknown and anonymous. It is almost unbelievable.

Never mind Big Foot, the Mary Rose or the Loch Ness Monster, the mystery of ‘Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?’ is perhaps the greatest mystery the world has ever known - or not known.

There have been thousands of investigative attempts, articles, blog posts and discussion groups involving probably millions of man hours dedicated to pinning down this man, with names bandied about from Elon Musk to little known computer scientists. They have all failed. Satoshi’s identity is as bulletproof as his code.

For my 2014 book, Bitcoin: the Future of Money?, from which today’s piece is taken, I ventured on the same doomed journey. I spent many months poring over the 80,000 words Satoshi wrote in the three years he was active online, looking for clues. What unusual words did he use? Does he make any spelling mistakes? Does he have any quirky grammatical habits? I analysed it in such detail I can tell you where he places brackets, how he uses hyphens, even how many spaces he uses after a full stop and how that changed – all in the hope of finding idiosyncrasies that appear in the writing of other Cypherpunks - clues which might lead me to him.

Profiling a genius – some broad brushstrokes

‘I’ve had the good fortune to know many brilliant people over the course of my life, so I recognize the signs.’ Hal Finney

Satoshi reached such high levels of expertise in so many different fields that many believe he can’t possibly be one person. He is a polymath. It is not just the breadth and depth of his knowledge, but, more importantly, its specificity that makes him unique.

In order to first conceive a new system of electronic cash, one would have to have thought extensively about the nature of money and its history. Money is a subject that has found more interest in the last few years with the emergence of bitcoin, the 2000s bull market in gold, the financial crisis and the growth of

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