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The World
Bitcoin’s Greatest Mystery
The creator of Bitcoin has hidden behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto for 17 years.
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By
Katrin Bennhold
I’m the host of The World.
April 16, 2026,
5:12 p.m. ET
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My mum, a privacy-minded German in her 80s, hates using her credit card. She still carries around wads of cash to pay for everything: a coffee, her weekly supermarket shopping — even a plane ticket to visit me in Wales.
She would get along with Satoshi Nakamoto, the legendary inventor of Bitcoin who operates under a pseudonym and created the first cryptocurrency — a form of electronic cash that leaves no digital trace for banks and governments to follow.
Nakamoto is a godlike figure in the crypto community. But who is he really? Countless people have tried to unmask him. My colleague John Carreyrou, an investigative reporter who uncovered
the Theranos scandal
, thinks he figured it out. I spoke to him about his investigation.
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The New York Times
Unmasking Bitcoin’s creator
So John, I want to talk about
your fascinating Bitcoin investigation
. But before we start, can you just give me the 101 version of the Bitcoin origin story?
Bitcoin was a revolution in the world of finance. It was the first cryptocurrency and it has given rise to many others. And it was first laid out in a paper that appeared out of nowhere in an obscure corner of the internet in 2008.
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