Prologue

The man leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head. A cool breeze wafted up from the valley, bringing with it the scent of juniper. The canyon was a steep one-thousand-foot drop just a yard beyond the fence that marked the edge of his property line. There was no gate in the fence, because it was certain death to anyone who ventured beyond it. The canyon was narrow, and the sheer, white, pockmarked cliff opposite him mirrored the one that lay below his feet. Beyond the canyon stretched endless miles of untouched mountain range, bathed in orange light by the last rays of the sun as it dipped below the horizon, the elongating shadows veiling him from a world to which he no longer belonged. The view was similar from the front yard. This stretch of the mesa was barely wide enough for the house and a narrow two-lane road, with dramatic drop-offs on both sides. If you wanted to build something and keep it secret, this was a good place to do it.

He gave a deep sigh of relief. It was finished. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up onto his head. At this high of an elevation, the nights cooled off quickly once the sun went down. He smiled to himself, because this was exactly how he’d seen himself depicted in countless online forums and newspaper articles. To the outside world, he was a mysterious man in a hood and dark sunglasses. He didn’t like being portrayed as a shadowy deviant, but it was absolutely necessary he maintained his anonymity. The creation he had just unleashed upon the world made him a marked man. It wasn’t anything illegal, which actually made his situation worse. If it was illegal, he could be arrested and hauled in front of a court and sentenced to prison. Since he didn’t break any laws, the powerful enemies he had just made would undoubtedly work outside the law to bring him down, and they were far less likely to be fair and just.

Somewhere in the distance, he caught the faint hum of a helicopter cutting through the sky. For an instant, he tensed, his fingers curling into his palms. The sound disappeared quickly, as did his momentary anxiety. To the best of his knowledge, no one knew his true identity, but he knew they were looking. He had felt them probing, pressing, and drawing uncomfortably close, but he remained undetected. Anonymity meant freedom, and that was the core tenet of his creation. It was his gift to the world.

He had amassed a small fortune for himself, one that had the potential to grow exponentially over the coming years and make him one of the richest men in the world, but this treasure was not why he worried for his life. The enemies he made were those in the most powerful positions of government and finance across the world. There was literally no more dangerous demographic to piss off. Luckily, most of them did not yet know what he had done.

By giving people this tool for true freedom, he stripped these institutions of their power over the masses. He took away the ability of tyrants to suppress dissent, remove the incentive to fund endless wars, and limit the unfair accumulation of wealth to the unproductive leeches that plague those institutions. This was the potential of what he had just unleashed on the world. It was the means for a revolution that would return agency and sovereignty back to the people, and for the first time in history, do so without the bullet or the sword.

The treasure was not his to keep. He did not earn it, and it did not belong to him. He was merely the vessel through which his creation entered the world. In the wrong hands, the fortune could destroy his project, and humanity may not have many more chances to wrest back control before civilization reached the dystopian event horizon foreseen by visionaries like Orwell and Huxley. The revolution would not be easy, and his accumulated assets may be necessary to ensure victory.

Soon, everyone would know his name. Not his given name, but the one he chose, the one he allowed the world to know: Satoshi Nakamoto. No one in his personal life knew of his achievement, and not even his closest collaborators on the project knew the slightest bit of information about his life outside clandestine email lists and online forums.

He took another deep breath to help calm his mind. It always seemed odd to look down on birds as they were flying, but from his vantage point on his back deck, he quietly observed a hawk as it coasted effortlessly above the valley floor below, scouring the brush for its next meal. The man knew he had put a target on his own back, and the hawks would be circling. His only chance at survival was to remain hidden.

He felt removed from the world. He could picture clearly in his mind how his plan would play out. He had outflanked the governments and their armies. He had outthought the financiers and their hordes of quantitative analysts. He had set in motion a cascade of events that would inevitably bring greater freedom and happiness to people across the world, and now it was time to sit back and watch.