FROM CHAUM TO NAKAMOTO

In 2024 Craig Wright walked into a London courtroom still claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. He walked out branded a forger.

The High Court ruled that he had not written Bitcoin's founding paper. It found he had lied extensively to the court and forged documents on a grand scale to support his claim. The real Satoshi has never come forward. A fortune of roughly a million coins, attributed to him, has sat almost untouched for more than fifteen years.

But the story of Bitcoin did not begin with Satoshi. It began in 1982, with a young cryptographer named David Chaum, who saw a future in which every electronic payment could be watched, recorded and used against the person who made it. He set out to invent money that would protect its users instead. He nearly succeeded, and the deals that could have put his digital cash in every computer collapsed one by one.

What followed was a forty-year relay of brilliant ideas and near misses: cypherpunks building privacy tools in defiance of the government, inventors who came within one problem of a working currency, and then, on Halloween 2008, nine pages from a programmer nobody had ever met.

Bitcoin worked. Then it tore itself apart. Rival camps fought over what Satoshi had meant, and split the network into Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. Each side was certain it was the loyal one. Into that vacuum stepped a man who said he could settle the argument, because he had written the paper.

From Chaum to Nakamoto is the true story of the forty-year struggle to create money without a bank, and of the battles that began when someone finally succeeded. Drawing on court judgments, mailing-list archives and original correspondence, NJ Carney tells it with the evidence on the page.

You don't need to own Bitcoin to be gripped by this story. You only need to wonder who you can trust with your money, and how anyone could prove it.