By now everyone not living in a cave has heard of Bitcoin, the alternative currency born and residing in cyberspace.
How do you trust money which has no existence anywhere, except the world of x’s and o’s? But how do you trust any money…after all, a piece of stiff green paper with a picture of Ben Franklin on it is not, intrinsically, worth $100 of goods or services. The worth of money is convention. It’s sheer belief. It’s popular myth, so universally shared that huge, beautiful yachts are handed over to people who flash enough of it.
But speaking of myth, where is the founder of the Bitcoin community? Awol, while the currency and it’s ever rising value live on.
The journalists at USAToday noted, late in October, that the creator of it all may now be worth something like $6 billion dollars–whomever he or she is. And “Satoshi Nakamoto,” often assumed to be a pseudonym, disengaged from the Bitcoin community a few years after creating it and has been laying low, very low, Thomas Pynchon style, ever since.
The “alleged” Satoshi Nakamoto
“He” owns, apparently, about 5% of the total cryptocurrency, and as trading gradually spirals higher, that could work out to some $100 billion in wealth one day. Wouldn’t that be a phenomenon, the world’s wealthiest individual traveling through life incognito, maybe coming forward to cash in one day, big time, but maybe never. We’re not sure, of course, if this person is alive or dead. Any recent obituary could have been his, or hers.
To the best of our knowledge, the world has never had a mystery multi-billionaire before. Try to imagine a ghost investor called Warren Buffett whom no one has ever seen, whose whereabouts, whose very existence, is unknown.
(Then try to image all that being on the level, not some kind of giant scam.)
It sort of staggers the imagination. Until the cyber age, it wouldn’t even have been possible.
Who and where is “Satoshi Nakamoto?” It’s a kind of missing persons case with an untold fortune at stake.
