“I’ll ask you one last time.” The Director pulled the bag off the head of Suspect No.1. “Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?”
Suspect No.1 frantically looked around, squinting from the sudden onslaught of light. There was one federal agent in a black suit before him and two more Feds by the door. He was sitting on a wire-framed cot inside a windowless interrogation room. Where? No idea. He’d been knocked unconscious at home then woke up with a black bag over his head.
“I told you,” Suspect No.1 said, “I don’t know—”
“Bullshit!” The Director punched him in the gut.
Suspect No.1 groaned in pain then took a deep breath to recover. “Please,” he whispered. “I’m telling you the truth.”
“We’ve been following you for years,” the Director said. “Listened to your phone calls, read your emails—”
“That’s illegal.” Suspect No.1 was appalled by the intrusion of privacy.
“Like you didn’t know we were monitoring you.” The Director winked with scorn. “You’ve been quite careful though, which is to be expected from a cryptography nerd with a libertarian’s fear of the government.”
Suspect No.1 had assumed as much, ever since Snowden blew the whistle, but felt no vindication in hearing it confirmed.
“Your friends have been careful, too,” the Director said. “So all we’ve got to go on are Nakamoto’s public writings and correspondences: the original white paper, the forum posts, and the emails. Compiling all the evidence and data, there are only three possible people with the combined knowledge of cryptography, mathematics, computer science, coding, law, politics, economics, history, philosophy, and psychology to have created Bitcoin: Hal Finney, [Suspect No.2], and you.”
“No Elon Musk?” said Suspect No.1.
The Director laughed. “If Musk was Nakamoto, he’d already be on Mars.”
“Hasn’t Craig Wright openly admitted to being Satoshi Nakamoto?”
“Only for the publicity.”
“What about Dorian Nakamoto?”
The Director rolled his eyes. “There’s a better chance of Dora the Explorer being Satoshi Nakamoto than Dorian Nakamoto. You probably chose that surname to set him up as a fall guy.”
“No, it wasn’t me,” Suspect No.1 said. “You’re looking on the wrong continent. Satoshi used British English in all his writing.”
“Any bloody American can pretend to be a Brit,” the Director said in a cockney accent.
“Maybe you’re looking in the wrong century,” Suspect No.1 said. “Some people think Satoshi is a time traveler from the future communicating back through a quantum computer.”
“Time travel is nothing but a pipe dream of science fiction,” the Director said dismissively.
“Others believe Bitcoin was an immaculate conception—that Satoshi is literally God.”
“No chance in Hell.”
“Think about it,” Suspect No.1 said. “The Genesis Block took six days to mine the first bitcoins, then on the seventh day Satoshi ‘rested.’”
“Give me a break.”
“Maybe He was tired of seeing ‘In God we trust’ libelously printed on fiat and decided to gift humanity a true money to trust in.”
“You seriously believe that?” The Director skeptically raised his brow.
“I don’t believe anything,” Suspect No.1 said. “I verify.”
“Next you’ll be claiming Bitcoin was created by aliens.”
“It’s not impossible.”
“If aliens were here, believe me, we would know about it.” The Director straightened the ID card on his suit’s front pocket.
“Maybe it was created by another three-letter agency,” Suspect No.1 said. “Don’t you guys talk to each other?”
“No civil servant has the creative vision to invent something like Bitcoin,” the Director said—and Suspect No.1 could not argue with him there. “It had to be one of you cypherpunks.” He picked up a file from the table. “Hal Finney died in 2014, and we have [Suspect No.2] currently locked up in another facility. Satoshi Nakamoto is either one of you or a combination of all three.”