Q&A With Benjamin Wallace 

I recently finished a copy of Benjamin Wallace’s new release The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto released today on March 18^th! Benjamin has also written the book The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine. Benjamin has been a features writer at New York and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. 

Q: Benjamin, would you give a brief description of both of your books starting with The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto? 

A: Both books are works of narrative nonfiction, illuminating a particular world through a page-turning true story. The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto is about one of the strangest mysteries of our time: No one knows who invented Bitcoin. In the book, I attempt to crack this mystery and figure out who is behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, why they didn’t use their real name, why they walked away from the project in 2011, and why they haven’t touched their $100+ billion Bitcoin fortune. The investigation winds through some fascinating utopian subcultures of Silicon Valley, including the cypherpunks (who believed cryptography was, as Homer Simpson said about alcohol, both “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”) and the extropians, who were interested in extreme life extension, including signing up to be cryonically preserved when they die (or, as they’d say, are “de-animated”).

The Billionaire’s Vinegar is about another mystery: that of a single bottle of red wine, supposedly discovered in a bricked-up Paris cellar in the mid-1980s, and sold at auction for the then-record $156,000, to the Forbes family. The bottle was engraved with Thomas Jefferson’s initials and was said to have belonged to him. From the beginning, experts raised doubts about its authenticity, and the book tries to get to the bottom of that question while telling the stories of a bunch of fantastically eccentric people who intersected with the bottle and delving into the pleasures and mystique of wine.

Q: For those who don’t know, would you explain what bitcoin is & what interests you about bitcoin? Since you were on a quest to unveil who Satoshi Nakamoto is & it was a fifteen-year quest, did it take you that long to write The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto?

A: Bitcoin isn’t easy to explain briefly, which is one of the reasons I wanted to write a book about it, but I’ll give this a shot: With the money most of us use, a government or central bank mints it, controls its supply, backs its value, and polices counterfeiting. With Bitcoin, a crowd of volunteers, or in computer terms a peer-to-peer network, collectively manages a piece of software that controls the minting, the money supply, and the authenticity, and the wider market has given it value by buying it for higher and higher prices as it has become more popular.

What first got me interested in Bitcoin was a serendipitous assignment from Wired magazine in 2011 to write about it. Until then, I’d never heard of it. But several elements grabbed my attention. The idea of a rogue parallel money system had a romantic allure that reminded me of the fictional underground postal system in Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49. The idea of money that somehow existed, and had value, without having any connection to a bank or government, was mind-bending. And the mystery of who had invented it—a person or group using a pseudonym had launched this revolutionary invention into the world and then vanished without a trace—enthralled me.

After I worked on the 2011 Wired piece, Bitcoin and the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto were never far from my mind, even as I wrote about all sorts of other things for various magazines. Every few years, I’d get an unsolicited email from someone claiming either to be Satoshi or to know the identity of Satoshi. And every few years, a journalist or hobbyist investigator would announce some new Satoshi candidate. In late 2021, I received another of those emails (making the case that Elon Musk was the real person behind the pseudonym), at a time when Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were going mainstream. It got me really thinking about how incredible it was after all this time, and even as Bitcoin had become a household word, no one had cracked the mystery of its origins. A few months later, I quit my job and started investigating the mystery full-time and drafting early chapters.

Q: What lessons do you hope readers learn from both The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto & The Billionaire’s Vinegar?

A: Both books aspire to take subjects—wine and cryptocurrency—that can be intimidating and hard to get your head around, but which are also intriguing and useful to understand, and make them accessible and entertaining to a general reader.

Q: What will the topic of your next nonfiction book be?

A: I welcome suggestions! ben@benjaminwallace.net

Q: Over the years do you still think the suspects from years ago are still candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto? Or have any new suspects popped into your head recently? 

A: Some of the candidates who’ve been proposed over the years are worthy contenders, and I consider each of them in depth in the book. Newsweek ran a cover story in 2014 naming Satoshi a guy who barely knew what Bitcoin was; that theory was quickly debunked, and nothing has happened since then to put him back into serious consideration. I do name several new candidates in the book and also spend some time on the theory that Bitcoin was produced by an agency like the NSA.

Q: You’ve been a features writer at New York & a contributing editor for Vanity Fair! That sounds so impressive! What’s it like being a writer and contributing editor at Vanity Fair & would you say that they helped with researching and writing your books?

A: I grew up seeing magazines as magical things. As a kid, I had a subscription to National Geographic’s World, which was the forerunner of Nat Geo Kids, and was excited whenever a new issue arrived. When SPY came out in the late 1980s, I thought it was the best thing ever. So, it was truly a dream fulfilled to get to write for editors and alongside writers whose work I’d admired for so long, to write for these legendary general-interest magazines about a vast range of topics (Guantanamo Bay, Kim Kardashian, you name it), and to make a living doing it. These are places where I got the editing and support and space to do deep reporting and longform narrative writing, which can be both time-consuming and expensive. So yes, magazines are where I learned to do in microcosms what books afford the luxury of doing at greater length and depth.