THE HUNT FOR SATOSHI
– Author's Note

Bitcoin is a remarkable work of imagination – an attempt to remake the world’s financial system, without intermediaries. So remarkable, in fact, one might compare it to a religious concept and, in keeping with the early days of many religions, it has attracted a series of manias and perversions.

This novel is a work of fiction, but all the background information on Bitcoin is accurate. I’m not going to list the main sources, because they are largely blue chip investment firms who would not like their research used in fiction, but the names of individuals who have been particularly helpful are listed in the acknowledgements.

The FT journalist Jemima Kelly has been a source of good sense in an extraordinary sector. I also listened to many podcasts on both crypto and conspiracies, though Rostam and Dread’s show is the only one I know which explicitly takes on both subjects at the same time. I’m not going to list the podcasts, simply because I don’t want to increase the quantity of disinformation in the world.

The sorry morality tale of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX played out in real time while I was writing this novel. Indeed, at a time when FTX was valued at above $30bn, Spider had a conference call with a character loosely based on Bankman-Fried. Sadly for all concerned, reality has caught up with FTX, and I therefore took it out of the book. Enthusiasts of the intersection between crypto and theft will recognise that Betty Dai’s Axie Infinity bridge heist took place in March 2022, which is an anachronism, as the events in novel take place between January 11 and February 14 of that year. Oops.

Much time has been spent attempting to identify the *real* Satoshi Nakamoto. You’ll have to read the novel for my take, but the timing and context of the launch of Bitcoin is a matter of public record.

Satoshi’s White Paper did appear on Halloween 2008, and it included quotations from the UK newspaper The Guardian, in which the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alastair Darling, explained quantitative easing in very simple terms. To my knowledge, no other major financial figure in modern history has made public the magical nature of money in quite such a fashion. It can be no coincidence that it was as people realised the illusory (one might say ‘fictional’) properties of money that an alternative system was created.

There are several non-fiction books about this subject – all too current for me to wade into criticism here – but it seems to me a subject well suited to story telling. The crucial plot point of Satoshi embedding extranonces to track the activity of the Bitcoin 64 is taken from an Cornell academic report, ‘Cooperation among an anonymous group protected Bitcoin during failures of decentralization’. I have taken considerable liberties with this report, which has a number of authors: Alyssa Blackburn, Christoph Huber, Yossi Eliaz, Muhammad S. Shamim, David Weisz, Goutham Seshadri, Kevin Kim, Shengqi Hang, Erez Lieberman Aiden. I hope they will forgive the latitude taken for the purposes of this novel.

While the spirit of ‘The Hunt for Satoshi’ is quite different to the following books of sci-fi/speculative fiction, I owe a debt to Neal Stephenson’s ‘Cryptonomicon’, William Gibson’s ‘Pattern Recognition’ and especially Vernor Vinge’s ‘True Names’. The latter was packaged with a collection of relevant essays with an introduction by Hari Kunzru in 2016. For anyone interested in the origins and philosophy of crypto, I’d suggest starting with those essays.

Rostam and Satoshi were both mathematicians before they were cryptologists. The books I most enjoyed reading while putting myself inside their heads were Piers Bizony’s ‘Atom’, Apostolos Doxiadis’ ‘Logicomix’ and ‘Uncle Petros and the Goldbach Conjecture’ (fellow fans will notice Goldbach’s Conjecture making a cameo appearance in this novel), ‘The Man Who Loved Only Numbers’ by Paul Hoffman, ‘The Music of the Primes’ by Marcus du Sautoy, and the peerless ‘A Mathematician’s Apology’ by GH Hardy. The amazing Maryam Mirzakhani features in the novel as the hero of both Rostam and his Mom, Maryam. The best resource about her life and work (for those of us who can’t aspire to understand her work itself) is the documentary ‘Secrets of the Surface’.

There are more speakers of American than British English in this novel (as well as Japanese, Balinese, Canadian, Irish and Iranian). Nevertheless, home bias made me decide on English spellings. I hope it isn’t too jarring. If it is, please let me know.

The Iranians Maryam, Zadi and Hosein use a variety of common Farsi vocabulary – junam (my dear), kuchaloo (darling), taarof (a system of etiquette), bori-kalor (well done).

If a novel can be said to have a point, this one’s is to tell the story of Rostam and Millie. However if, after reading the book, you’d like to debate any of the issues within it, please sign up for Arlo’s reader club, below.

I promise to respond.

– ARLO FOX