【新闻周刊 20140306】比特币身后的面孔

满仓

【中文标题】比特币身后的面孔
【原文标题】The Face Behind Bitcoin
【登载媒体】新闻周刊
【原文作者】Leah McGrath Goodman
【原文链接】http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto.html




中本聪站在烈日下车道的尽头，看起来既胆怯又恼怒。

他穿着一件皱巴巴的T恤衫、褪色的牛仔裤和一双白色运动袜，没有穿鞋，好像是匆忙中从家里跑出来。他的头发蓬乱，目光呆滞，好像是整整一个星期没有睡觉。他毫无底气地站在那里，就像一个经历了漫长的战争，即将面临失败的人。

两名加利福尼亚坦普尔市的警官站在他身旁，一脸的困惑。其中一个人问我：“你要问这个人什么事？他在担心和你谈话会不会热麻烦。”

我说：“不会有麻烦的。我就是想问问他有关比特币的事情，这个人是中本聪。”

警官吃惊地说：“什么？这个人发明了比特币？他的生活似乎不怎么体面呀。”

我来这里就是为了了解中本和他不大体面生活的详细信息。听起来似乎令人难以相信，发明了比特币——世界上最成功的数据货币，高峰期每年交易额高达5亿美元——的人，竟然会生活在洛杉矶圣加布里艾尔的山脚下，蜗居在家里，把价值4亿美元的比特币束之高阁。同样不可思议的是，听到我敲门后，中本的第一反应是报警。现在我们面对面站在一起，有两位警察作证，中本在回答我有关比特币的问题时非常谨慎，但提供了很多有用的信息。

他用沉默承认了他在比特币项目中的角色，他的眼睛看着地面，明确地拒绝回答任何问题。他说：“我不再参与这件事，我不能在讨论相关的话题，”他的左手果断地一挥，拒绝了接下来所有的问题，“这件事已经交给别人，别人在负责，已经和我没有任何关系。”

中本不再说话，警察说我们的谈话结束了。

但是，历时两个多月的针对与中本密切合作的开发人员的调查和采访，揭露了比特币这个横空出世的全球现象、最著名的虚拟货币神秘的内容。用一个词概括其内容，就是“神秘”，事实比最异想天开的科幻小说还要离奇。

《新闻周刊》调查的结果远非很多比特迷和《纽约客》所多次提到的那个故事——一名东京神童用“中本聪”作为化名，而是找到了一个64岁的日裔美国人，他的本名就是中本聪。他喜欢收集火车模型，他的职业围绕着诸多的秘密，包括曾经为大公司和美国军方完成过保密工作。

站在我面前，眼睛看着地面的这个人，似乎就是比特币之父。连他的家人也不知道他做的这些事。


中本聪在加利福尼亚兰卡斯特。

在北美地区生活着好几个中本聪，有些已经过世，包括纽约的一名拉尔夫劳伦男装设计师，和另外一位死于2008年的檀香山居民。甚至在社交网站LinkedIn上还有一个人声称自己发明了比特币，目前居住在日本。但所有这些人似乎都不能和我们已知的细节完全吻合，有些内容也不完全可信。当然，也有可能“中本聪”是一个化名，但这不禁让我们思考，为什么有人愿意起这样独特的一个化名。当我们检索移民注册资料时，发现了另一个中本聪，这个人的信息和背景提供了一些可能性。当我们从国家档案馆调集了相关资料，完成了很多的采访之后，才逐渐形成了一副完整的图画。

在前往坦普尔市与他会面的两个星期之前，我与中本聪开始了邮件往来，大部分内容都是在讨论他用电脑技术改造蒸汽火车模型的兴趣。我在中本曾经购买火车模型的一家公司找到了他的电子邮件。从十几岁开始，他就在英国和日本购买火车零件，他说：“我自己组装，在车间里手工加工、打磨零件。”

这项工作需要大量的计算工作，而这恰恰是中本——和他的家庭——所擅长的事。作为同在工程和技术领域中工作的三兄弟中的大哥，中本毕业于波莫纳加州州立理工大学，获得物理学学位。但是和他的弟弟们不同，他的职业生涯非常复杂。

当我提到比特币之后，中本就不再回复我的邮件，这是二月底的事情。在此之前，我还询问过他的职业背景，因为在公共记录中很少能找到这类信息，但我只得到了模棱两可的回复。他曾经询问我过的职业，我说如果可以电话沟通，我非常愿意详细地介绍自己。由于没有收到任何回复，我于是联系到他的长子，31岁的艾瑞克，请他帮忙问问他的父亲是否愿意谈一谈比特币。他回复说不行，尝试与其他家庭成员联系也都没有成功。

从那以后，中本不再理会我和他通电话的要求，也不接我的电话。在我亲自来到他位于南加利福尼亚简朴的家中时，他的丰田卡罗拉汽车就停在家里，但他没有给我开门。他掀开门帘看了一眼，我们的目光短暂接触，然后他关上门。这是在警察来之前我见到他的唯一一面。

中本聪最小的弟弟中本亚瑟在加利福尼亚一家射频放大器公司Wavestream任质控主管，他说：“你想结识我那令人着迷的物理学家哥哥？”

“他非常聪明。我只是个普通的工程师，但他的思考极为专注，而且兼收并蓄。聪明、智慧、数学工程、计算机，无论什么他都擅长。”但他也给我一些警告。“我哥哥是个浑球。你不知道他曾经从事过保密工作，他的生活有那么一段时间完全是空白。你找不到他，他会拒绝一切，永远别想让他承认发明过比特币。”说完这些，中本的弟弟挂掉了电话。

他的话说明我调查的方向是正确的，但这还远远不够。尽管他的弟弟说中本完全有能力发明比特币，但我不确定是否的确如此。他说他们相处得不好，不经常交谈。我必须要和中本聪面谈。

比特币是一个存在于计算机代码中的货币，不需要联系银行、支付手续费就可以发往世界各地，而且可以储存在手机或者硬盘中。由于货币是以代码的形式存在，如果硬盘损坏、丢失，或者有人获取了你的密码，比特币也会丢失。

比特币首席科学家、47岁的加文•安德森说：“网络迷之所以对比特币如此狂热，是因为它的财务转移极为高效。”他承认，易用性必然导致容易丢失，最安全的方法是把它储存在一个不接入互联网的硬盘中。“如果有人想与海外转移资金，你就可以看到国际比特币转移有多么方便了，就像发一封电子邮件那样简单。”尽管如此，比特币依然面临大规模盗窃、欺骗和丑闻的风险，其价格因此会大起大落，从去年每个比特币1200美元降到2月份的130美元。

这个货币吸引了美国参议院、国土安全部、联邦储备委员会、国内税务局、财政部金融犯罪网络、证券交易委员会和联邦调查局的关注。FBI在10月份关闭了在线交易黑市Silk Road，没收了价值350万美元的比特币。安德森说：“联邦调查局现在是世界上最大的比特币持有者。”最近几个星期，Silk Road改头换面之后的网站，和比特币最大的交易平台、位于东京的MTGOX分别关闭。他们分别遭到黑客入侵，损失了数百万美元，因此提出破产申请。

从硅谷流落到马萨诸塞阿墨斯特的安德森说，他在2010年6月到2011年4月之间，与中本聪这个人或者“机构”紧密合作开发比特币。这是在今天数百万美元的比特经济现象出现之前，比特币目前的状况或许来源于联邦储备委员会主席本•伯南克一番出人意料的表态，他说虚拟货币“可能拥有长期的前途”。从那以后，比特币自动提款机开始出现在北美各地（最早是温哥华、不列颠哥伦比亚、波士顿、新墨西哥的阿尔布开克）。很多企业开始接受比特币，包括特斯拉、OkCupid、Reddit、Overstock.com、Virgin Galactic和Richard Branson航空公司，后者说他如果收集到足够多的比特币，就能把人炸到太空去。

安德森说：“编写比特币源代码其实是件可怕的工作，搞错一个地方，这个价值80亿美元的项目就毁掉了。这样的事情的确发生过，我们犯过错误。”在将近一年的时间里，安德森每周与比特币的创始人联系几次，花费大量的时间修改比特币代码。在他们沟通的过程中，安德森说中本一直是一副躲躲藏藏的模样。实际上，他从未听到过中本的声音，因为比特币的创始人不愿意用电话交流。他说，他们的互动主要通过“电子邮件和比特迷们聚会的网络论坛”。

安德森说：“他就是那么一种人，如果你犯了一个无心的错误，他就会叫你傻瓜，而且再也不和你说话。那时候，我们还不知道发明比特币是否合法。他想尽办法不透露自己的身份。”对于安德森有关他是哪里人、职业是什么、做过什么工作、是真名还是假名（很多比特币爱好者都使用化名）等问题，中本一概置之不理。安德森说：“他从不聊天，我们只是谈代码。”

安德森来自澳大利亚，他毕业于普林斯顿大学计算机科学系。当比特币在2009年1月降临世间之后，他就成为了团队中与中本的联系人，这个团队由不断增加的国际代码写手和编程人员组成，这些志愿者任务是不断完善比特币代码。安德森最早听说比特币是在2010年的一个博客上。他通过比特币一个创始人留下的电子邮件联系到中本，说愿意提供帮助。他最早发给比特币创始人的邮件中写到：“比特币是个绝妙的发明，我想提供帮助。你需要我做什么？”安德森说他不在乎为一个匿名的发明者工作，他说：“我就是一个极客，我不在乎持有这个想法的是个好人还是坏人，想法就是想法。”

他说，其他开发人员都有“中饱私囊”的想法或者自己的目的，但所有人都被这种可以绕开全球金融体制所依赖的中央银行、可以无障碍地通往世界各地的电子货币所深深吸引了。从这个意义上讲，比特币出现的时间太完美了。

2008年，在比特币正式出现之前，一个灰色难懂的9页报告出现在网络上，署名是中本聪和他的邮件地址。报告中提到“电子现金”，它可以“让网络资金不通过金融机构从一方转移到另一方”，并且可以看到转移时间标记。这种巧妙的策略可以用比特币用户取代银行的中间人角色，他们坚守系统的诚信，用计算机的方式确认比特币的转移。比特币的生产遵循极为谨慎的理念——确保其价值稳步提升、保持稀缺性、免受通货膨胀影响。它的数量每4年增加一倍，在2140年达到2100万总量时停止发行。（比特币可以被分割为最小8位小数的单位，最小的比特币单位叫做“中本”。）

安德森说：“让我印象深刻的是，中本做这件事的确有他的政治目的。”他和其他几位散布在从硅谷到瑞士的比特币核心开发人员都获得了比特币收入，这都来自于一个非营利的标准化货币组织——比特币基金。安德森说：“他不喜欢我们现在的系统，想要一个更加公平的系统。他不想看到一些银行和银行家因为掌握了代码而变得更加富有。”

掌握代码也让一些早先接触比特币的人变得极为富有。安德森说：“我少少地投资了一些比特币，现在的收益实际上让我可以退休了。总体来说，我当初投资的每一分钱现在的回报是800美元。这太疯狂了。”在2009年参与创建比特币的一个人是马蒂•麦尔姆，25岁，是来自赫尔辛基的程序员，曾经投资比特币。他说：“我在2011年卖出了这些比特币，买了一所不错的公寓。今天，那些比特币的价值足够买100所好房子。”

到2011年，中本与比特币的创始团队联系越来越少。他停止更新比特币代码，也不再参与论坛中的讨论。但是，让安德森没有预料到的是中本聪在2011年4月26日发来的一封邮件。中本写道：“我希望你不要再把我说成是一个神秘的影子人物，媒体已经把它变成了一个盗版的货币。或许你可以开放源代码，让你的团队享受功劳，这可以激励他们。”安德森回复说：“是的，我也对‘怪异的盗版货币’说法很生气。”

之后，他告诉中本他接受了一个邀请，到中央情报局做演示。“我希望可以直接和他们对话，更重要的是，听听他们的问题和意见。这样他们才可以对比特币持有和我同样的看法——一个更好、更有效、与政治无关的货币，而不是一个黑市上被无政府主义者用来推翻当前体制的工具。”从那以后，中本聪不再回复他的邮件，他们也不再有任何联系。


中本的房子。

中本的家人把他描述成一个极为聪明、喜怒无常、过分关注隐私的人，他的话很少，过滤自己的电话，隐藏自己的电子邮件。他一生大部分时间都被两件事情所占据，而这两件事情正是比特币的特点——金钱和隐秘。在过去40年里，中本聪没有使用自己出生时的名字。据美国洛杉矶地方法院在1973年的记载，他23岁从加利福尼亚州立理工大学毕业之后，把名字改为“Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto”。从那以后，他就不使用中本这个名字，而是用“Dorian S. Nakamoto”作为签名。

中本在1949年出生于日本别府，他的家族在历史上是武士，他的父亲是一名佛教僧侣，母亲晶子在贫穷的佛教传统中把他养大。1959年，她的母亲离婚，之后再婚，带着三个儿子来到加利福尼亚。现年93岁的她和中本一起住在坦普尔市。中本和他的继父相处不好。亚瑟说，但是他在早期就展示了数学和科学天赋，“他的脾气古怪，爱好也不同寻常。”从大学毕业之后，中本到南加利福尼亚的修斯飞机公司工作，从事防御和电子通讯方面的研究。亚瑟也曾经在修斯工作，他说：“这仅仅是一个开始，他是唯一一个我知道的在面试中说面试官是个白痴，然后又证实了他的观点的人。”

中本有6个孩子。第一个儿子艾瑞克出生在80年代，是他第一任妻子所生，他现在是费城的一名3D动画设计师。接下来的5个孩子是第二任妻子Grace Mitchell所生，她现年56岁，住在新泽西奥特朋。她说她在80年代中期新泽西樱桃山的一次教堂聚会中遇到中本，他在离开现在更名为雷神公司的修斯飞机公司之后来到东海岸，他在新泽西卡姆登美国无线电公司做一名系统工程师。公司的总裁David Micha说：“我们为军队、政府飞机和军舰制作国防电子和通讯设备，这都是保密信息，我不能详细谈论。”

Mitchell说她的丈夫“不经常谈起他的工作”，有时候在无线电公司之外还会独立接一些工作。1987年，一家人回到加利福尼亚，中本在洛杉矶地区为通讯和电信公司做系统工程师的工作，包括Quotron等金融机构。

中本在90年代曾经两次下岗，Mitchell说，他们的贷款难以为继，房子被取消抵押。中本的大女儿、26岁的Ilene Mitchell说，这样的经历影响了她父亲对银行和政府的态度。作为一个自由论者，中本鼓励他女儿要独立，开创自己的事业，“别受政府支配”。她说：“他很担心政府和税收以及那些当权的人。”她还说，她父亲是一个工作起来不知道休息的人，从家人还没有起床的清晨一直到深夜。她回忆道：“他会把自己锁在办公室里，如果有人碰了他的电脑，他会大发脾气。他经常会抨击时事，无论是新技术还是旧技术他都喜欢。他自己组装电脑，并引以为荣。”

Mitchell说，大约在2000年，中本和Grace开始分居，但他们并没有离婚。他们带着5个孩子回到新泽西，在911事件之后，中本在联邦航空管理局工作，负责安全和通讯方面的工作。她说：“这份工作保密性非常高，他在2001年离职，从那以后，他好像就没有一份稳定的工作。”

联邦航空管理局的合同结束之后，中本回到坦普尔市，接下来的十年里，他具体从事什么工作不得而知。

自从比特币引起公众关注之后，对中本聪的寻找就从未停止。他是单独行动还是为政府卖命？人们把比特币与国家安全局和国际货币基金组织联系在一起。然而，当今这个世界中，几乎所有硅谷伟大的发明都会引发针对创始人的法律诉讼。而比特币的创始人在过去5年一直保持坚定的沉默。

Ilene Mitchell在俄勒冈比佛顿的学生成绩合作组织工作，她说：“我知道爸爸在做一些了不起的工作，而且并没有接受其带来的成就。但我也知道他没有说出实情，任何正常人都会被这些事情冲昏头脑，但他毕竟算不上是正常人。”中本的二弟中本东吉住在加利福尼亚杜阿特，离他的哥哥和母亲不远。他赞同这种说法：“他对自己所做的事情极为严谨，但从来不愿意与媒体接触，所以你要原谅他。”

比特币的发明者中本聪的性格特点与计算机工程师Dorian S. Nakamoto的相同之处颇为不少，那些与比特币创始人密切合作的人发现了几个问题：他的年轻似乎不小了，他喜欢单独工作。中本的芬兰学徒马蒂•麦尔姆说：“他不像一个年轻人，似乎受硅谷很大的影响。”安德森也说：“中本的代码风格属于老式的，比如说他会用反向波兰表示法。”而且，中本的代码也谈不上简洁，似乎没有人帮助他修改、调整这些代码。安德森说：“每个阅读他代码的人应该都会认为他是个单打独斗的人。在项目开始之后，我们大约改写了70％的代码。原来的代码界面不友好，就像一个大毛球。它的底层代码很好、很完整，但是周围累计的程序一塌糊涂。”

中本聪在2008年网上发表的报告也暗示了他的年龄，因为他提到了“磁盘空间”，这个概念早在上个世纪就已经不是一个问题了。他似乎把当代的研究工作推回到1957年。比特币代码基于几十年前架设的网络协议，其英明之处并不完全是代码，而是让它有机会进入任何中终端的设计。报告的标点符号使用习惯也和Dorian S. Nakamoto的写作方式一致，比如句号之后有两个空格，以及其他一些怪异的格式。

目前存在着两种不同的声音，一方认为日本裔的中本可以写出“完美的英文”，另一方认为他的英文水平不行。实际上，在这两个名字下的书写方面有巨大的差异，包括大小写、全拼和缩写、正式用语和俗语。很多人都注意到，中本聪在他的沟通和写作中会交替使用英语和美语拼写，在面对不同的受众时，他会分别使用缩写和相对正式、经过锤炼的语言。Grace Mitchell说她的丈夫就是这样。她说，Dorian S. Nakamoto的英文或许和他一生挚爱的火车模型有关系，他在十几岁学习英文时从英国买了很多模型。Mitchell猜测，中本最初发明一种可以在世界各地使用的电子货币的原因，或许是他当初在英国购买火车模型时，海外付款的银行收费和汇率让他不胜其烦。她说：“我觉得他的英文说不上完美，他随意挑选一些词汇，拼写也不规范。”中本与其前妻所生的大儿子艾瑞克说，他依然不确定他的父亲是否是比特币的发明者，因为报告的后半部分似乎更“简洁”、“比我父亲的语言更加精炼”。

或许两个中本之间最具相似性的地方是他们的专业技能和职业时间。安德森说中本聪曾经告诉他花了多长时间比特币，这段时间正好落在2001年Dorian S. Nakamoto的工作间歇期。安德森说：“中本曾经说他在推出比特币之前，花了多年时间做开发工作。我知道最初的代码编写花了至少两年时间，而且他已经解决了一些从来没被攻克过的难题。”中本聪沉默的三年里，正好与Dorian S. Nakamoto健康出现问题的时间相吻合。他的妻子说：“那是一段困难的时期，因为他在几个月之前中风，在此之前他还患有前列腺癌。”她是新泽西的急症护士，“他有好几年没见过孩子们了。”她没有办法让中本亲口确认自己是否是就是比特币的创始人。中本艾瑞克说他的父亲否认这件事，中本东吉和中本亚瑟都认为他们的哥哥永远不会透露事实真相。东吉说：“Dorian有很严重的妄想症，我无法和他接触，我不相信他会诚实地回答家人的这些问题。”

当然，所有这一切都不能回答一个终极问题，或许只有中本聪本人才能回家，那就是他为什么没有消费他在几年前启动项目时留存下来的、价值数百万美元的比特币？无论是他还是他的家人，都没有任何障碍使用这笔钱。安德森说，这个问题的答案并不复杂，中本极为关心他身份的保密性，他根本不想参与疯狂的比特币现象。“如果你是一个公开的比特币领导人物，那你就必须公开露面、召开会议、与媒体接触，这和中本的性格格格不入。他就是不想再参与了，他不能容忍任何的不称职现象，而且他坚信这个项目已经不需要他了。”

当然也有另外一种可能，中本丢失了安全密钥，无法兑现比特币。但是安德森说他觉得不大可能。“他是一个极为自律的人。”如果中本出售他的比特币，他很有可能选择一个合法的比特币银行或者交易中心，这不但会透露他的身份，还会引起国税局和联邦调查局的注意。尽管比特币可以用匿名的身份交易，但是所有交易过程在网络上都是透明的。每个人都在关注中本手中的比特币动向。安德森说他尊重中本的选择。“当程序员们聚在一起时，我们不经常讨论中本聪是谁，我们主要谈如何投资更多的比特币。我们的确有些好奇，但实话说，我们也不大在乎他究竟是谁。”

Ilene Mitchell对于父亲有可能是比特币之父的问题不怎么吃惊，她觉得父亲愿意保持低调很正常，尤其是他现在的健康状况令人堪忧。“他不喜欢政府的干预行为。在我小时候，父亲和我玩游戏时会说：‘政府探员来抓你啦！’我就会藏在壁橱里。”





原文：

Satoshi Nakamoto stands at the end of his sunbaked driveway looking timorous. And annoyed.

He's wearing a rumpled T-shirt, old blue jeans and white gym socks, without shoes, like he has left the house in a hurry. His hair is unkempt, and he has the thousand-mile stare of someone who has gone weeks without sleep.

He stands not with defiance, but with the slackness of a person who has waged battle for a long time and now faces a grave loss.

Two police officers from the Temple City, Calif., sheriff's department flank him, looking puzzled. "So, what is it you want to ask this man about?" one of them asks me. "He thinks if he talks to you he's going to get into trouble."

"I don't think he's in any trouble," I say. "I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto."

"What?" The police officer balks. "This is the guy who created Bitcoin? It looks like he's living a pretty humble life."

I'd come here to try to find out more about Nakamoto and his humble life. It seemed ludicrous that the man credited with inventing Bitcoin - the world's most wildly successful digital currency, with transactions of nearly $500 million a day at its peak - would retreat to Los Angeles's San Gabriel foothills, hole up in the family home and leave his estimated $400 million of Bitcoin riches untouched. It seemed similarly implausible that Nakamoto's first response to my knocking at his door would be to call the cops. Now face to face, with two police officers as witnesses, Nakamoto's responses to my questions about Bitcoin were careful but revealing.

Tacitly acknowledging his role in the Bitcoin project, he looks down, staring at the pavement and categorically refuses to answer questions.

"I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," he says, dismissing all further queries with a swat of his left hand. "It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."

Nakamoto refused to say any more, and the police made it clear our conversation was over.

But a two-month investigation and interviews with those closest to Nakamoto and the developers who worked most frequently with him on the out-of-nowhere global phenomenon that is Bitcoin reveal the myths surrounding the world's most famous crypto-currency are largely just that - myths - and the facts are much stranger than the well-established fiction.

Far from leading to a Tokyo-based whiz kid using the name "Satoshi Nakamoto" as a cipher or pseudonym (a story repeated by everyone from Bitcoin's rabid fans to The New Yorker), the trail followed by Newsweek led to a 64-year-old Japanese-American man whose name really is Satoshi Nakamoto. He is someone with a penchant for collecting model trains and a career shrouded in secrecy, having done classified work for major corporations and the U.S. military.

Standing before me, eyes downcast, appeared to be the father of Bitcoin.

Not even his family knew.

Satoshi Nakamoto in Lancaster, Calif.

There are several Satoshi Nakamotos living in North America and beyond - both dead and alive - including a Ralph Lauren menswear designer in New York and another who died in Honolulu in 2008, according to the Social Security Index's Death Master File. There's even one on LinkedIn who claims to have started Bitcoin and is based in Japan. But none of these profiles seem to fit other known details and few of the leads proved credible. Of course, there is also the chance "Satoshi Nakamoto" is a pseudonym, but that raises the question why someone who wishes to remain anonymous would choose such a distinctive name. It was only while scouring a database that contained the registration cards of naturalized U.S. citizens that a Satoshi Nakamoto turned up whose profile and background offered a potential match. But it was not until after ordering his records from the National Archives and conducting many more interviews that a cohesive picture began to take shape.

Two weeks before our meeting in Temple City, I struck up an email correspondence with Satoshi Nakamoto, mostly discussing his interest in upgrading and modifying model steam trains with computer-aided design technologies. I obtained Nakamoto's email through a company he buys model trains from.

He has been buying train parts from Japan and England since he was a teenager, saying, "I do machining myself, manual lathe, mill, surface grinders."

The process also requires a good amount of math, something at which Nakamoto - and his entire family - excels. The eldest of three brothers who all work in engineering and technical fields, Nakamoto graduated from California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, Calif., with a degree in physics. But unlike his brothers, his circuitous career path is very hard to trace.

Nakamoto ceased responding to emails I'd sent him immediately after I began asking about Bitcoin. This was in late February. Before that, I'd also asked about his professional background, for which there is very little to be found in the public record. I only received evasive answers. When he asked about my background, I told him I'd be happy to elaborate over the phone and called him to introduce myself. When there was no response, I asked his oldest son, Eric Nakamoto, 31, to reach out and see whether his father would talk about Bitcoin. The message came back he would not. Attempts through other family members also failed.

After that, Nakamoto disregarded my requests to speak by phone and did not return calls. The day I arrived at his modest, single-family home in southern California, his silver Toyota Corolla CE was parked in the driveway but he didn't answer the door.

At one point he did peer out, cracking open the door screen and making eye contact briefly. Then he shut it. That was the only time I saw him without police officers in attendance.

"You want to know about my amazing physicist brother?" says Arthur Nakamoto, Satoshi Nakamoto's youngest sibling, who works as director of quality assurance at Wavestream Corp., a maker of radio frequency amplifiers in San Dimas, Calif.

"He's a brilliant man. I'm just a humble engineer. He's very focused and eclectic in his way of thinking. Smart, intelligent, mathematics, engineering, computers. You name it, he can do it."
But he also had a warning.

"My brother is an asshole. What you don't know about him is that he's worked on classified stuff. His life was a complete blank for a while. You're not going to be able to get to him. He'll deny everything. He'll never admit to starting Bitcoin."

And with that, Nakamoto's brother hung up.

His remarks suggested I was on the right track, but that was not enough. While his brother suggested Nakamoto would be capable of starting Bitcoin, I was not at all sure whether he knew for certain one way or the other. He said they didn't get along and didn't speak often.

I plainly needed to talk to Satoshi Nakamoto face to face.

Bitcoin is a currency that lives in the world of computer code and can be sent anywhere in the world without racking up bank or exchange fees, and is then stored on a cellphone or hard drive until used again. Because the currency resides in code, it can also be lost when a hard drive crashes, or stolen if someone else accesses the keys to the code.

"The whole reason geeks get excited about Bitcoin is that it is the most efficient way to do financial transactions," says Bitcoin's chief scientist, Gavin Andresen, 47. He acknowledges that Bitcoin's ease of use can also lead to easy theft and that it is safest when stored in a safe-deposit box or on a hard drive that's not connected to the Internet. "For anyone who's tried to wire money overseas, you can see how much easier an international Bitcoin transaction is. It's just as easy as sending an email."

Even so, Bitcoin is vulnerable to massive theft, fraud and scandal, which has seen the price of Bitcoins whipsaw from more than $1,200 each last year to as little as $130 in late February.

The currency has attracted the attention of the U.S. Senate, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Reserve, the Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which in October shuttered the online black market Silk Road and seized its $3.5 million cache of Bitcoin. "The FBI is now one of the largest holders of Bitcoin in the world," Andresen says.

In recent weeks, a revived version of Silk Road as well as one of Bitcoin's biggest exchanges, Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, shut down and filed for bankruptcy after attacks by hackers drained each of millions of dollars.

Andresen, a Silicon Valley refugee in Amherst, Mass., says he worked closely with the person "or entity" known as Satoshi Nakamoto on the development of Bitcoin from June 2010 to April 2011. This was before the rise of today's multibillion-dollar Bitcoin economy, boosted last year by the unexpected, if cautious, endorsement of outgoing Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, who said virtual currencies "may hold long-term promise."

Since then, Bitcoin ATMs have been cropping up across North America (with some of the first in Vancouver, British Columbia; Boston; and Albuquerque, N.M.) while the acceptance of Bitcoin has spread to businesses as diverse as Tesla, OkCupid, Reddit, Overstock.com and Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's aviation company, which has said it will blast people into space if they cough up enough Bitcoin.

"Working on Bitcoin's core code is really scary, actually, because if you wreck something, you can break this huge $8 billion project," says Andresen. "And that's happened. We have broken it in the past."

For nearly a year, Andresen corresponded with the founder of Bitcoin a few times a week, often putting in 40-hour weeks refining the Bitcoin code. Throughout their correspondence, Nakamoto's evasiveness was his hallmark, Andresen says.

In fact, he never even heard Nakamoto's voice, because the founder of Bitcoin would not communicate by phone. Their interactions, he says, always took place by "email or private message on the Bitcointalk forum," where enthusiasts meet online.

"He was the kind of person who, if you made an honest mistake, he might call you an idiot and never speak to you again," Andresen says. "Back then, it was not clear that creating Bitcoin might be a legal thing to do. He went to great lengths to protect his anonymity."

Nakamoto also ignored all of Andresen's questions about where he was from, his professional background, what other projects he'd worked on and whether his name was real or a pseudonym (many of Bitcoin's devotees use pseudonyms). "He was never chatty," Andresen says. "All we talked about was code."

Andresen, an Australian who graduated from Princeton with a Bachelor's in computer science, eventually became Nakamoto's point person on a growing team of international coders and programmers who worked on a volunteer basis to perfect the Bitcoin code after its inauspicious launch in January 2009.

Andresen originally heard about Bitcoin the following year through a blog he followed. He reached out to Nakamoto through one of the Bitcoin founder's untraceable email addresses and offered his assistance. His initial message to Bitcoin's inventor read: "Bitcoin is a brilliant idea, and I want to help. What do you need?"

Andresen says he didn't give much thought to working for an anonymous inventor. "I am a geek," he says simply. "I don't care if the idea came from a good person or an evil person. Ideas stand on their own."

Other developers were driven by "enlightened self-interest," profit or personal politics, he says. But nearly all were intrigued by the promise of a digital currency accessible to anyone in the world that could bypass central banks at a time when the global financial system was on life support. In this respect, the launch of Bitcoin could not have been better timed.

In 2008, just before Bitcoin's official kickoff, a somewhat stiffly written, nine-page proposal found its way onto the Internet bearing the name and email address of Satoshi Nakamoto.

The paper proposed "electronic cash" that "would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution," with transactions time-stamped and viewable to all.

The masterstroke was replacing the role of banks as the trusted middlemen with Bitcoin users, who would act as sentinels for the integrity of the system, verifying transactions using their computing power in exchange for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin production is designed to move at a carefully calibrated pace to boost value and scarcity and remain inflation proof, halving its quantity every four years, and is designed to stop proliferating when Bitcoins reach a total of 21 million in 2140. (Bitcoins can be divided by up to eight decimal places, with the smallest units called "satoshis.")

"I got the impression that Satoshi was really doing it for political reasons," says Andresen, who gets paid in Bitcoins - along with a half-dozen other Bitcoin core developers working everywhere from Silicon Valley to Switzerland - by the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit working to standardize the currency.

He doesn't like the system we have today and wanted a different one that would be more equal. He did not like the notion of banks and bankers getting wealthy just because they hold the keys," says Andresen.

Holding the keys has also made early comers to Bitcoin wealthy beyond measure. "I made a small investment in Bitcoin and it is actually enough that I could now retire if I wanted to," Andresen says. "Overall, I've made about $800 per penny I've invested. It's insane."

One of the first people to start working with Bitcoin's founder in 2009 was Martti Malmi, 25, a Helsinki programmer who invested in Bitcoins. "I sold them in 2011 and bought a nice apartment," he says. "Today, I could have bought 100 nice apartments."

Communication with Bitcoin's founder was becoming less frequent by early 2011. Nakamoto stopped posting changes to the Bitcoin code and ignored conversations on the Bitcoin forum.

Andresen was unprepared, however, for Satoshi Nakamoto's reaction to an email exchange between them on April 26, 2011.

"I wish you wouldn't keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure," Nakamoto wrote to Andresen. "The press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them."

Andresen responded: "Yeah, I'm not happy with the 'wacky pirate money' tone, either."

Then he told Nakamoto he'd accepted an invitation to speak at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters. "I hope that by talking directly to them and, more importantly, listening to their questions/concerns, they will think of Bitcoin the way I do - as a just-plain-better, more efficient, less-subject-to-political-whims money," he said. "Not as an all-powerful black-market tool that will be used by anarchists to overthrow the System."

From that moment, Satoshi Nakamoto stopped responding to emails and dropped off the map.

Nakamoto's house

Nakamoto's family describe him as extremely intelligent, moody and obsessively private, a man of few words who screens his phone calls, anonymizes his emails and, for most of his life, has been preoccupied with the two things for which Bitcoin has now become known: money and secrecy.

For the past 40 years, Satoshi Nakamoto has not used his birth name in his daily life. At the age of 23, after graduating from California State Polytechnic University, he changed his name to "Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto," according to records filed with the U.S. District Court of Los Angeles in 1973. Since then, he has not used the name Satoshi but instead signs his name "Dorian S. Nakamoto."

Descended from Samurai and the son of a Buddhist priest, Nakamoto was born in July 1949 in the city of Beppu, Japan, where he was brought up poor in the Buddhist tradition by his mother, Akiko. In 1959, after a divorce and remarriage, she immigrated to California, taking her three sons with her. Now age 93, she lives with Nakamoto in Temple City.

Nakamoto did not get along with his stepfather, but his aptitude for math and science was evident from an early age, says Arthur, who also notes, "He is fickle and has very weird hobbies."

Just after graduating college, Nakamoto went to work on defense and electronics communications for Hughes Aircraft in southern California. "That was just the beginning," says Arthur, who also worked at Hughes. "He is the only person I have ever known to show up for a job interview and tell the interviewer he's an idiot - and then prove it."

Nakamoto has six children. The first, a son from his first marriage in the 1980's, is Eric Nakamoto, an animation and 3-D graphics designer in Philadelphia. His next five children were with his second wife, Grace Mitchell, 56, who lives in Audubon, N.J., and says she met Nakamoto at a Unitarian church mixer in Cherry Hill, N.J., in the mid-1980s. She recalls he came to the East Coast after leaving Hughes Aircraft, now part of Raytheon, in his 20s and next worked for Radio Corporation of America in Camden, N.J., as a systems engineer.

"We were doing defensive electronics and communications for the military, government aircraft and warships, but it was classified and I can't really talk about it," confirms David Micha, president of the company now called L-3 Communications.

Mitchell says her husband "did not talk much about his work" and sometimes took on military projects independent of RCA. In 1987, the couple moved back to California, where Nakamoto worked as a computer engineer for communications and technologies companies in the Los Angeles area, including financial information service Quotron Systems Inc., sold in 1994 to Reuters, and Nortel Networks.

Nakamoto, who was laid off twice in the 1990s, according to Mitchell, fell behind on mortgage payments and taxes and their home was foreclosed. That experience, says Nakamoto's oldest daughter, Ilene Mitchell, 26, may have informed her father's attitude toward banks and the government.

A libertarian, Nakamoto encouraged his daughter to be independent, start her own business and "not be under the government's thumb," she says. "He was very wary of the government, taxes and people in charge."

She also describes her father as a man who worked all hours, from before the family rose in the morning to late into the night. "He would keep his office locked and we would get into trouble if we touched his computer," she recalls. "He was always expounding on politics and current events. He loved new and old technology. He built his own computers and was very proud of them."

Around 2000, Nakamoto and Grace separated, though they have never divorced. They moved back to New Jersey with their five children and Nakamoto worked as a software engineer for the Federal Aviation Administration in New Jersey in the wake of the September 11 attacks, doing security and communications work, says Mitchell.

"It was very secret," she says. "He left that job sometime in 2001 and I don't think he's had a steady job since."

When the FAA contract ended, Nakamoto moved back to Temple City, where for the rest of that decade things get hazy about what kind of work he undertook.

Ever since Bitcoin rose to prominence there has been a hunt for the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Did he act alone or was he working for the government? Bitcoin has been linked to everything from the National Security Agency to the International Monetary Fund.

Yet, in a world where almost every big Silicon Valley innovation seems to erupt in lawsuits over who thought of it first, in the case of Bitcoin the founder has remained conspicuously silent for the past five years.

"I could see my dad doing something brilliant and not accepting the greater effect of it," says Ilene Mitchell, who works for Partnerships for Student Achievement in Beaverton, Ore. "But I honestly don't see him being straight about it. Any normal person would be all over it. But he's not totally a normal person."

Nakamoto's middle brother, Tokuo Nakamoto, who lives near his brother and mother, in Duarte, Calif., agrees. "He is very meticulous in what he does, but he is very afraid to take himself out into the media, so you will have to excuse him," he says.

Characteristics of Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin founder, that dovetail with Dorian S. Nakamoto, the computer engineer, are numerous. Those working most closely with Bitcoin's founder noticed several things: he seemed to be older than the other Bitcoin developers. And he worked alone.

"He didn't seem like a young person and he seemed to be influenced by a lot of people in Silicon Valley," says Nakamoto's Finnish protégé, Martti Malmi. Andresen concurs: "Satoshi's style of writing code was old-school. He used things like reverse Polish notation."

In addition, the code was not always terribly neat, another sign that Nakamoto was not working with a team that would have cleaned up the code and streamlined it.

"Everyone who looked at his code has pretty much concluded it was a single person," says Andresen. "We have rewritten roughly 70 percent of the code since inception. It wasn't written with nice interfaces. It was like one big hairball. It was incredibly tight and well-written at the lower level but where functions came together it could be pretty messy."

Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 online proposal also hints at his age, with the odd reference to "disk space" - something that hasn't been an issue since the last millennium - and older research citations of contemporaries' work going back to 1957.

The Bitcoin code is based on a network protocol that's been established for decades. Its brilliance is not so much in the code itself, says Andresen, but in the design, which unites functions to reach multiple ends. The punctuation in the proposal is also consistent with how Dorian S. Nakamoto writes, with double spaces after periods and other format quirks.

In the debate between those who claim Nakamoto writes curiously "flawless English" for a Japanese man and those who contend otherwise, writing under both names can swerve wildly between uppercase and lowercase, full spellings and abbreviations, proper English and slang.

In his correspondences and writings, it has widely been noted that Satoshi Nakamoto alternates between British and American spellings - and, depending on his audience, veers between highly abbreviated verbiage and a more formal, polished style. Grace Mitchell says her husband does the same.

Dorian S. Nakamoto's use of English, she says, was likely influenced by his lifelong interest in collecting model trains, many of which he imported from England as a teenager while he was still learning English.

Mitchell suspects Nakamoto's initial interest in creating a digital currency that could be used anywhere in the world may have stemmed from his frustration with bank fees and high exchange rates when he was sending international wires to England to buy model trains. "He would always complain about that," she says. "I would not say he writes flawless English. He will pick up words and mix the spellings."

Eric, Nakamoto's oldest son from his first marriage, says he remains torn over whether his father is the founder of Bitcoin, noting that messages from the latter appear more "concise" and "refined than that of my father's."

Perhaps the most compelling parallel between the two Nakamotos are their professional skill sets and career timeframes. Andresen says Satoshi Nakamoto told him about how long it took him to develop Bitcoin - a span that falls squarely into Dorian S. Nakamoto's job lapse starting in 2001. "Satoshi said he'd been working on Bitcoin for years before he launched it," Andresen says. "I could see the original code taking at least two years to write. He had a revelation that he had solved something no one had solved before."

Satoshi Nakamoto's three-year silence also dovetails with health issues suffered by Dorian S. Nakamoto in the past few years, his family says. "It has been hard, because he suffered a stroke several months ago and before that he was dealing with prostate cancer," says his wife, who works as a critical-care nurse in New Jersey. "He hasn't seen his kids for the past few years."

She has been unable to get Nakamoto to speak with her about whether he was the founder of Bitcoin. Eric Nakamoto says his father has denied it. Tokuo and Arthur Nakamoto believe their brother will leave the truth unconfirmed.

"Dorian can just be paranoid," says Tokuo. "I cannot get through to him. I don't think he will answer any of these questions to his family truthfully."

Of course, none of this puts to rest the biggest question of all - the one that only Satoshi Nakamoto himself can answer: What has kept him from spending his hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin, which he reaped when he launched the currency years ago? According to his family both he - and they - could really use the money.

Andresen says if Nakamoto is as concerned about maintaining his anonymity as he remembers the answer might be simple: He does not want to participate in the Bitcoin madness. "If you come out as the leader of Bitcoin, now you have to make appearances and presentations and comments to the press and that didn't really fit with Satoshi's personality," he says. "He didn't really want to lead it anymore. He was pretty intolerant to incompetence. And he also realized the project would go on without him."

On the other hand, it is possible Nakamoto simply lost the private security keys to unlock his Bitcoin and cash in on his riches. Andresen, however, says he doubts it. "He was too disciplined," he says.

If Nakamoto ever sells his Bitcoin fortune, he would likely have to do so at a legitimate Bitcoin bank or exchange, which would not only give away his identity but alert everyone from the IRS to the FBI of his movements. While Bitcoin lets its users conduct transactions anonymously, all transactions can be viewed transparently online - and everyone is watching Nakamoto's Bitcoin to see if he spends it, says Andresen.

For his part, Andresen says he is inclined to respect Nakamoto's anonymity. "When programmers get together, we don't talk about who Satoshi Nakamoto is," he says. "We talk about how we should have invested in more Bitcoin. I mean, we're curious about it, but honestly, we really don't care."

Calling the possibility her father could also be the father of Bitcoin "flabbergasting," Ilene Mitchell says she isn't surprised her father would choose to stay under cover if he was the man behind this venture, especially as he is currently concerned about his health.

"He is very wary of government interference in general," she says. "When I was little, there was a game we used to play. He would say, 'Pretend the government agencies are coming after you.' And I would hide in the closet."

2oo8e

比特币
就是一个博傻的游戏
没有最傻
只有更傻

Pentium_5

哈哈哈。