
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto
A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto
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Narrated by:
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Benjamin Wallace
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By:
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Benjamin Wallace
About this listen
A “highly entertaining” (The Wall Street Journal) investigation into the mysterious identity of Bitcoin’s creator and a deep dive into crypto’s utopian origin story—from The New York Times bestselling author of The Billionaire’s Vinegar
“Could be the best mystery story of the past twenty years.”—James Patterson
“The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto will leave you amazed, enlightened, and utterly breathless.”—Robert Kolker, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road
In October 2008, someone going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper outlining “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” called Bitcoin to an arcane listserv populated by Cypherpunks. No one in the community had heard of Nakamoto, and just as people were starting to wonder who he was, he vanished. As the years passed, and the scope of Nakamoto’s achievement became clear, the truth of his identity grew into the greatest unsolved mystery of our time.
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto traces Benjamin Wallace’s attempt to unmask the figure behind the currency and the world it wrought. Nakamoto’s Bitcoin at first seemed destined to fulfill the dreams of fringe 1990s utopians for a currency set free from governments and big banks. Yet after he disappeared, his creation took on a strange new life in the financial markets, where rampant speculation fueled a vision of crypto as a potential windfall, inviting charlatans and scammers and opening a vast gulf between Bitcoin’s idealistic origins and its troubled reputation.
But who was Nakamoto? Whoever he was could rightly claim to have invented one of the most important technologies of the new century. And Nakamoto was a billionaire—his Bitcoin wallet held an untouched eleven-figure fortune waiting to be claimed.
With the same propulsive-narrative flair that made his New York Times bestseller The Billionaire’s Vinegar an instant success, Benjamin Wallace presents a page-turning work of investigative journalism. Tracking leads from London to Oslo to Los Angeles, from coastal Australia to the Arizona desert, he takes listeners through a rogues’ gallery tour of Nakamoto suspects—from benevolent geniuses like cryptographer Hal Finney to difficult ones like a reclusive polymath known to his followers only as Jim; from the mercurial Australian Craig Wright, who claims to be Nakamoto, to a secret team at the National Security Agency. With the forensic skill of Sherlock Holmes and the storytelling verve of Arthur Conan Doyle, Wallace follows the trail of computer code and personal writings to the heart of the Nakamoto mystery while interrogating the very nature of mystery itself.
©2025 Benjamin Wallace (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Highly entertaining. [Wallace] deftly creates drama. The book proceeds like a . . . murder mystery, introducing one suspect after another in what seems like an open-and-shut case, before puncturing the promising narrative with an inconvenient fact. The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto [is] an education in the pleasures and pitfalls of investigative journalism.”—The Wall Street Journal
“The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto could be the best mystery story of the past twenty years. I’m not sure whether Ben Wallace should win a Pulitzer, be institutionalized for taking on this massive project, or both.”—James Patterson
“Wallace is an elegant historian and a talented anatomist of the Satoshi affair, and The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto deserves a wide readership.”—The New Yorker
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Overall
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We tend to think of our memories as impressions of the past that remain fully intact, preserved somewhere inside our brains. In fact, we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them. Memory Lane introduces listeners to the cutting-edge science of human memory, revealing how our recollections of the past are constantly adapting and changing, and why a faulty memory isn't always a bad thing.
By: Gillian Murphy, and others
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Four Red Sweaters
- Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust
- By: Lucy Adlington
- Narrated by: Esther Wane
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker, Chana Zumerkorn, and Regina Feldman all faced the Holocaust in different ways. While they did not know each other—in fact had never met—each had a red sweater that would play a major part in their lives. In this absorbing and deeply moving account, award-winning clothes historian Lucy Adlington documents their stories, knitting together the experiences that fragmented their families and their lives. Adlington immortalizes these young women whose resilience, skills, strength, and kindness accompanied them through the darkest events in human history.
By: Lucy Adlington
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Rooms for Vanishing
- A Novel
- By: Stuart Nadler
- Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy, Bruce Mann, Kathleen Gati, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In Rooms for Vanishing, the violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family.
By: Stuart Nadler
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The Snares
- A Novel
- By: Rav Grewal-Kök
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency, Neel Chima, a former naval officer and federal prosecutor, is recruited to join a new federal intelligence agency—one with greater than usual powers and fewer than usual restrictions. Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in the surveillance of domestic terrorism suspects and the selection of foreigners for drone assassination—men who often look just like his Sikh family members. As both his ambitions and his moral qualms mount, he is drawn farther and farther away from his wife and two young daughters.
By: Rav Grewal-Kök
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Lincoln's Peace
- The Struggle to End the American Civil War
- By: Michael Vorenberg
- Narrated by: Landon Woodson
- Length: 16 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he’s decided he won’t return to Washington until he’s witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end.
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The Age of Diagnosis
- How Our Obsession with Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker
- By: Suzanne O'Sullivan
- Narrated by: Suzanne O'Sullivan
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in an age of diagnosis. Conditions like ADHD and autism are on the rapid rise, while new categories like long Covid are being created. Medical terms are increasingly used to describe ordinary human experiences, and the advance of sophisticated genetic sequencing techniques means that even the healthiest of us may soon be screened for potential abnormalities. More people are labeled "sick" than ever before—but are these diagnoses improving their lives?
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Interesting though ableist
- By A. Cruz on 03-31-25
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Theft
- A Novel
- By: Abdulrazak Gurnah
- Narrated by: Ashley Zhangazha
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.
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Bader
- By Paul on 03-21-25
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Blazing Eye Sees All
- Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age
- By: Leah Sottile
- Narrated by: Leah Sottile
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Known for deep dives into true crime, extremist ideologies and fringe subcultures, journalist Leah Sottile turns her investigative eye toward American New Age culture. Today, tarot cards, astrology and crystals are everywhere—from Instagram and TikTok, to upscale boutiques and pricey wellness retreats. Sottile investigates how the recent surge of interest in New Age ideas speaks to a culture that is woven into the very fabric of America, and how self-professed gurus like Love Has Won's Mother God and the mysterious channeler Ramtha have built devout followings because of it.
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In-depth, complex storytelling
- By Bree Rydlun on 04-19-25
By: Leah Sottile
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The Pacific Circuit
- A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City
- By: Alexis Madrigal
- Narrated by: Alexis Madrigal
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and an intimate portrait of an essential American city that has been at the crossroads of the defining themes of the twenty-first century. Oakland’s stories encompass everything from Silicon Valley’s prominence and the ramifications of a compulsively digital future to the underestimated costs of technological innovation on local communities.
By: Alexis Madrigal
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Fool's Gold
- The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All
- By: Susan Crabtree, Jedd McFatter, Peter Schweizer - foreword
- Narrated by: Brian Troxell
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Take a close look at today’s Democratic Party power brokers and you’ll quickly realize most of them share one thing in common: California. Residents are fleeing the Golden State in droves, the state’s homelessness crisis is the worst in the country, drug-related deaths are skyrocketing, and violent crime and smash-and-grab retail theft is now commonplace. For too many across the state, pursuing the Californian Dream is now a fool’s errand. But what people don't know is what's driving these failures and why California leaders have allowed them to spiral.
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3 Out of Four
- By Annua on 03-16-25
By: Susan Crabtree, and others
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The Prosecutor
- One Man's Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice
- By: Jack Fairweather
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of the Nuremberg trials in 1946, some of the greatest war criminals in history were sentenced to death, but hundreds of thousands of Nazi murderers and collaborators remained at large. The Allies were ready to overlook their pasts as the Cold War began, and the legacy of the Holocaust was in danger of being forgotten. In The Prosecutor, Jack Fairweather brings to life the heroic story of Fritz Bauer who survived the Nazis as a gay Jewish man to force his countrymen to confront their complicity in the genocide.
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- By janine on 03-25-25
By: Jack Fairweather
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Homegrown Magic
- By: Jamie Pacton, Rebecca Podos
- Narrated by: Jeremy Carlisle Parker, Dani Martineck
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Yael Clauneck is more interested in drinking and flirting than joining their powerful family’s business. They’re on the precipice of a predetermined life when they flee their own graduation party, galloping away in search of . . . well, they’re not sure, but maybe the chance to feel like life can still be a grand adventure. Margot Greenwillow—talented plant witch, tea lover, and greenhouse owner—has never felt further from adventure in her life. She’s been desperately trying to keep what remains of her family’s magic remedies business afloat.
By: Jamie Pacton, and others
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The Fifteen
- Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America
- By: William Geroux
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The revelatory true story of the long-forgotten POW camps for German soldiers erected in hundreds of small U.S. towns during World War II, and the secret Nazi killings that ensnared fifteen brave American POWs in a high-stakes showdown.
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Interesting and Largely Forgotten History
- By John on 04-08-25
By: William Geroux