My Embarrassing Secret

I have an embarrassing secret. I am Satoshi Nakamoto.

That isn’t my real name, of course. Otherwise everyone would already know who I am. My famous pseudonym is actually a compilation of two different names. Satoshi was my best friend when I was a boy, and Nakamoto was the last name of Katsuya Nakamoto, a Japanese freestyle skier who competed in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. My real name is Hideo Sasaki.

So why is Bitcoin my embarrassing secret? Well, because I could have been a billionaire, but I made an idiotic mistake I don’t want to be known for. I don’t want people looking at me with pity. Don’t cry for me; I became a millionaire, but not one of the wealthiest people in the world, like I could have been.

My idea for Bitcoin came in the 1990s, when I was getting ready for university. The Japanese economy had been booming when I was a child, but then the economy tanked. It was an era of economic uncertainty. I had been into computers from a young age, and asked myself “what if there we could electronically store value and send money to each other, outside of the yen?”

At the university I studied computers and became especially interested in cryptography. This idea continued to bubble in my soul, and my roommates thought I was crazy for staying up late at night, “doing my homework.” I was actually working on this secret project of mine. For graduate school, I went to the University of Tokyo, where I finished the Bitcoin whitepaper and wrote its initial code. I emailed it, anonymously, to several people I knew who I had classes with. On January 3rd, 2009, I began mining, which is how people make new Bitcoin.

So far so good, right? I was mining Bitcoin, married a beautiful lady named Akemi, and had a great job in network security. In a little over a year, I mined over a million Bitcoin, and it was taking off. People traded Bitcoin for real money on Bitcoinmarket.com. Things couldn’t have been any better.

Only, I made the one mistake you would think the “great” Satoshi Nakamoto never would have: I didn’t back up my work.

One afternoon while I was at work, I received the call.

“Hideo?” My wife’s voice was frantic.

“What’s wrong?”

“Now, don’t panic. Everything’s okay now.”

“What. Happened.”

“There’s been a little accident.”

Fear built up in my chest. “Tell me.”

“Your computer caught on fire. I was in the kitchen and put it out with the fire extinguisher before there was much damage. I hope you didn’t lose too much work.”

My heart sank. I hadn’t backed up my private keys. A private key is a string of 64 letters and numbers that allow you to access your wallet. The way Bitcoin works, if you don’t have your private keys, you don’t have your coins. They’re impossible to recover without it.

In the very early days, Bitcoin wasn’t really worth much, so I hadn’t bothered to back up my keys. Now, all the Bitcoin I had mined was worth about $10,000. Akemi didn’t know what they were worth, and I wasn’t about to tell her. She was expecting our first baby. Maybe there was somebody I could take the hard drive to and recover them.

I couldn’t focus on work for the rest of that day. All I could think about was that hard drive. The second hand on the clock crawled. As soon as I could, I left for home to see the damage.

The hard drive was charred and melted. I took it into a repair shop, but they couldn’t retrieve the data. $10,000 worth of Bitcoin—gone forever.

I bought another computer and started over, but it wasn’t the same. So many other people were mining bitcoin now, I was only able to get a fraction of the Bitcoin I used to.

My heart wasn’t in the project anymore, so I wrote to some of the other Bitcoin developers and handed off the responsibility.

I kept my miner running, only this time, I backed up my keys. I backed them up on a USB drive. I backed them up on a piece of paper I keep in a safe. I sent a copy to my mom to keep in her safe. There was no way I’d lose them this time.

Today, the Bitcoin I lost is worth billions. Instead, I have millions, like many of the Bitcoin enthusiasts who got started in 2010. I live in a comfortable home and could retire if I wanted to, but I like my job. I cringe whenever I read an article speculating about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.

So why am I writing this? I think people should know the truth—someday. When I’m gone. My doctor diagnosed me with cancer yesterday. I don’t know how much longer I have to live.

After I print this confession, I’ll delete the original file and put this in my safe. The one with a copy of my private keys. Since you’re reading this, cancer must have claimed me. Now you know the truth.