HERO/VILLAIN

The shadowy man behind the Bitcoin curtain is unveiled—maybe.

Eglinton, known mostly for tracking down the fugitive programmer John McAfee and getting Metallica singer James Hetfield to talk, doesn’t do a lot to demystify the architecture underlying cryptocurrency and its most famous exemplar. He does hit it right, though, when he comments that “Bitcoin, and the players in it, operate in the murky margins where truth and virtue are hard to identify at all.” Like all economies, Bitcoin is driven by scarcity. Unlike most economies, a single inventor lies behind Bitcoin, a figure known as Satoshi. The name conjures up a superhero or supervillain, to play along with Eglinton’s title. However, he notes, it’s not a V for Vendetta thing; instead, the Australian techno-wizard who took up the name explains that “it was meant to be a funny reference to Pokémon.” The name, legendary within the secretive Bitcoin community, reflects the putative inventor’s interest and training in electrical engineering, computer science, cryptography, and all things Japanese. While the technology behind Bitcoin differs in key respects from earlier systems, writes Eglinton, the inventor drew on such things as “the distributed electronic cash system B-Money” and peer-to-peer communications protocols. Operating from the Australian outback, the inventor slowly built a network that bypassed traditional internet channels, its adherents busily “mining” new coins and, with luck, “winning what amounts to a giant lottery” in the race to capture a market that, with scarcity built into the system, is theoretically limited to 21 million Bitcoins. Whether Eglinton’s subject is the real Satoshi or not, he revolutionized at least a corner of the financial world—no easy task.

Fans of cryptocurrency, and perhaps forensic accountants, will want to give this a read.