The Legendary Programmer and Cryptographer
He received the first-ever Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto. However, Finney also denied being Satoshi Nakamoto. He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2009, and his condition rapidly deteriorated, ultimately leading to his loss of working capacity. If Satoshi Nakamoto were to be revealed, Finney would be the most desired candidate among Bitcoin enthusiasts due to his tragic hero narrative and the aura of kindness surrounding him — also because he has passed away (he died in 2014), making it impossible for him to create scandalous news through disreputable actions or connections.
Throughout the years, there has been opposition within the Bitcoin community regarding the investigation into Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity. Last autumn, when an HBO documentary proposed that libertarian, Canadian programmer, and cryptography enthusiast Peter Todd was the most likely candidate, the Bitcoin community reacted not only with strong skepticism towards the documentary’s conclusions but also with anger at the undertaking of such a project. He made significant contributions, and thus his desire for anonymity should be respected. What matters is not the person, but the ideas and code.
However, Satoshi Nakamoto has placed his invention in the public square, so I believe it is reasonable to explore who placed it there and the reasons behind it.
I carefully combed through the 60,000 words left by Satoshi Nakamoto. His writing style is plain and straightforward, rarely revealing personal opinions or exhibiting personality. Whenever I captured a hint of unique style, I added it to the “Satoshi Lexicon” — a list that ultimately accumulated over 200 distinctive words and phrases, including “wet blanket,” “sweet,” and “clobbering.”
I wrote a computer program called “Satoshitizer,” which can browse various archived articles suspected of being written by “Satoshi Nakamoto,” scan for Satoshi’s terminology, and generate statistical tables. I can rank the files in real-time using a dozen criteria, including users of Satoshi’s terminology, users of electronic cash terminology, and discussants of the software tools Satoshi used.
One day in late April 2023, I found myself pondering a word I had seen in Satoshi Nakamoto’s writing: “hosed.” Given Satoshi’s writing style tends to eschew personality or connections to any specific environment, the word “hosed” stood out sharply. I hadn’t heard this term recently; it means to tighten or damage, and I vaguely associated it with surfing or fraternity jargon from the 1990s.
I re-examined my archived data, carefully annotating each instance where this word was used. In the Metzdowd mailing list, “hosed” was used four times in the three years prior to October 31, 2008 (the date Satoshi released the Bitcoin whitepaper). Two of these instances came from the same person: James A. Donald.
Although Donald is not active in public discussions about Bitcoin, he has left a brief glimpse in the early history of Bitcoin — being the first person to respond to Satoshi on the mailing list. At that time, he raised technical questions about Bitcoin’s extensibility and exited the discussion after a few exchanges with Satoshi. He was just an ordinary member among many cryptopunks interested in digital currency.
At that time, Donald ranked only 42nd on my suspect spreadsheet, far behind the top three candidates, and his inclusion was limited to his identity as a C++-proficient cryptopunk and libertarian. However, intrigued by the coincidence of the term “hosed,” I revisited the rare word list generated by the “Satoshi Fingerprint Analyzer” to see if Donald had used any other rare Satoshi-style expressions.
Sure enough. In the twenty-year corpus I collected, Donald was the only person to use the term “fencible” (meaning “able to be fenced”), which Satoshi had used once in his writings in the form of “non-fencible” (not able to be fenced). Even more shockingly, Donald’s record of using this word dates back to October 1998 when he spoke on the cryptopunk mailing list. My brain began to sound alarm bells. While “fence” as a verb meaning to sell stolen goods is common slang, the adjective form “fencible” is exceedingly rare. Google search results are sparse, and even when I searched the New York Times historical database, which includes 13 million articles dating back to 1857, the word appeared zero times in relevant contexts.
Unlike conventional terms in the field of digital currency or cryptography such as “trusted third party” or “zero-knowledge proof,” “fencible” and “hosed” are not technical jargon of computer science or cryptography; they are more like fingerprints of personal language style.
I began to investigate Donald further. His online presence is erratic: various websites claim he is Canadian, say he has passed away, and indicate that “James A. Donald” is not his real name. Although he rarely reveals personal information in his posts, small details are scattered throughout. He is from Australia but has been residing in Silicon Valley, and like Satoshi, his writing sometimes employs American spelling and sometimes Commonwealth spelling.
Ideologically, Donald merges radical libertarianism (essentially anarcho-capitalism) with a fervent belief in the transformative power of cryptography. In 1996, he wrote: “Gentlemen, this is our plan — we aim to destroy the state apparatus with higher mathematics. The method is to replace the existing corporate institutional structure with cryptographic mechanisms, allowing more people to evade and resist taxation.”
He showed a special interest in digital currency. In 1995, he predicted, “People will eventually bypass banks and transfer funds directly.” Between 2006 and 2009, the number of Satoshi-style electronic cash terms used by Donald in the Metzdowd mailing list far exceeded those of other participants.
When examining his programming style, it was discovered that in the late 1990s, Donald promoted a communication encryption software named “Crypto Kong.” This software was written in C++, the same language as Bitcoin. The source code obtained from the Internet Archive shows that Crypto Kong shares multiple commonalities with Bitcoin: both support Windows systems; both use Satoshi’s preferred Hungarian naming conventions; code segments use prominent slash delimiters; both employ elliptic curve cryptography to generate public-private key pairs.
Deep investigation into personal information reveals that Donald was born in 1952 and is now over seventy, aligning with the characteristic noted by early Bitcoin developers that “Satoshi’s coding style suggests he is older.” He has not been active under his real name on mainstream social platforms, and his Palo Alto home valued at $2.8 million and a $400,000 property in Austin are both blurred on Google Street View (this feature requires formal application to Google or internal permissions like that of Donald’s son who worked at Google). It is difficult to find his photo in public channels, and like Satoshi, he uses the Swiss privacy email service Proton Mail and operates an anonymous blog called “Jim’s Log,” claiming to have “long lived in seclusion.” The clues click together like gears.
At this moment, reconsidering the significance of Donald as the first respondent, the 2008 Satoshi flashes through my mind: throwing a groundbreaking work to the world but receiving no attention, thus orchestrating technical doubts to drive discussion and create misdirection.
Furthermore, his blog reveals more clues: on the eve of October 31, 2008, Donald was deeply focused on the financial crisis. His blog post on October 11, titled “The Roots of the Crisis,” opens with the assertion that “the bailouts will inevitably fail,” while the headline embedded in the Bitcoin genesis block is “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
More clues surface: Donald owns multiple properties in Hawaii. On June 19, 2008 (just months before Satoshi announced his invention to the world), the Honolulu Star Bulletin published an obituary for World War II veteran “Satoshi Nakamoto,” who passed away at the age of 84. Could this be an identity theft in pursuit of a pseudonym?
Although “James” rarely exposes identity information, his ideological trajectory is clearly discernible in his blog posts: he was once a radical leftist, joining the Trotskyist Spartacist League at the age of 15, later withdrawing due to “disillusionment with participatory democracy and lack of fondness for representative democracy.” At 17, he successively joined anarcho-socialist and Maoist organizations, “simply because these two factions were most hated by Trotskyists.” Ultimately, he concluded that property rights equate to freedom, transforming into an anarcho-capitalist.
To verify his academic background, I contacted a knowledgeable source at the University of Sydney’s physics department. Professor Bob Hewitt, who participated in the interview at the time, recalled that this applicant from Melbourne “had quite a bohemian vibe” — when asked about accommodation arrangements, Donald claimed he was “prepared to sleep under a bridge.” While he left a “friendly yet eccentric” impression, his doctoral thesis, titled “Assumptions of the Singularity Theorems and the Rejuvenation of Universes,” was rejected because it was “unintelligible,” leading to his eventual withdrawal from the program.
Career trajectories show that Donald initially wrote software for Apple, then moved to the U.S. to develop electronic games for Epyx, and later transitioned into the database field. His blog reveals profound insights into the essence of Bitcoin: “This is just a prototype system, yet it has been prematurely treated as the final solution.” He has always viewed Bitcoin through a historical lens, seeing it as a stepping stone to an ideal future.
I have never accepted the common assumption in the Bitcoin community — that Satoshi Nakamoto must be a benevolent figure. I have always felt that those who mythologize Satoshi into a demigod are merely projecting their wishful thinking: imagining him as selfless, modest, and a prophet from the future come to save humanity. Hal Finney’s appeal as a candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto lies precisely in his perfect alignment with this idealized image.
Donald, on the other hand, is entirely different. In his blog, he promotes a dark ideology called “Neo-Reaction,” which has entranced some individuals in Silicon Valley. Neo-Reactionaries believe that society has been hijacked by what they call the “Temple” (a group composed of academic, media, and bureaucratic elites). They disdain efforts to pursue social justice, arguing that abandoning democratic systems and restoring monarchy is the best path forward for humanity. Donald’s version of Neo-Reaction is further infused with naked Christian fundamentalism.