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The Behavioral Analysis Unit Returns for Another year of Serial Killer Crime Fighting. We’ve Put together everything you need to know about how to watch criminal minds: Evolution season 18, Including Global Live Streaming Options, WHICH FROM COUNTRY TO COUNTRY.

Criminal Minds: Evolution is a Continutation of the Original Criminal Minds Series, which Aired on CBS from 2005 to 2020. A Little Over Two After The Show Finished Its Network Run, New Episodes of the Series Landed on Paramount Plus with the Evolution Tag and A Deppededly Grittyr Gritti on the. Already Dark fbi drama. Most of the original cast (Including Joe Mantagna, Paget Brewster, Aj Cook, Adam Rodriguez, Aisha Tyler, and Kirsten Vangsness) Return once Again for the Show’s Third As a Streaming ExClusive.

Season 18 (Or Season 3, Depending on Where You Look) Kicks off Just Six months after the events of Last SEASON and Finds the Bau Reckoning with the Fallout of the Attack on Elias (Zach Gilford). But this time, they’re strength to work Alongside Him as they Attempt to put a stop to his followers. While the drama of the new season is shaping up to be a Can’t-Miss Storyline, spreads the most talked-about aspect of the new season is the (temporary) return of Matthew Gray-Gubler as Dr. Spencer Reid. Acciting to Entertainment Weeklyhe’ll be returning for a “Big Life Thing.”

Whether you’re a new or OLD FAN, we’ve got you covered when it is coma to streaming the new season. KEEP READING FOR DETAILS ON WHERE TO WATCH SEASON 18 AND A LOOK AT THE NEW TRAILER.

How to Watch Criminal Minds: Evolution in the US

The New Season of Criminal Minds: Evolution Streams on Paramount plus in the us. New episodes drop Weekly on thighsdays, typically around 12 am pt / 3 am et. Paramount plus is the streaming home to the past 17 Seasons of Criminal Minds, MAKING IT A MUST-HAVE STEAMER FOR ALL BAU FANS. Subscripts Start at $ 8/Month for the Ad-Supported Tier, but you can upgrade to ad-free viewing for $ 13/month. New users can usually get a one-Week Free Trial.

Paramount Plus Essential (Monthly Plan)

Paramount plus is Perfect for Viewers Who Want to Stream CBS TV Shows, Local Nfl Games, and Tons of Content From Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Bet, and MTV. And if you get the premium tier you can also unlock ad-free streaming and access to showtime.

How to Watch Criminal Minds: Evolution in the UK

Although Paramount Plus Exists Oversseas, The International Streaming Home for Criminal Minds: Evolution is, for the Most Part, on Disney Plus. We Expect the New Season to Land on Disney Plus in the UK, Although an Exact Release Date Hasn’t Been Announched. Last Year, the new season Became available in the uk one weeks after it Started streaming in the us, but i looking like it be a long wait this time around. Plans start at £ 5/month.

How to Watch Criminal Minds: Evolution in Australia

As in the UK, Criminal Minds: Evolution is streaming on Disney plus in Australia. New episodes landed on the streamer in australia shortly after they dropped in the us. Subscripts Start at AU $ 14/Month.

How to Watch Criminal Minds: Evolution From Anywhere

Fans Traveling Away from Home Can Still Access Their Usual Streaming Methods With the Help of A VPN, or Virtual Private Network. VPNS are cybersecurity tools that enable you to alter your Device’s Virtual Location. This Way, you don’t need to miss out on any new episodes while abroad sins your go-to websites and apps Will just like they will. The services we’ve highlighted require Country-specific Payment Methods, so this option is best for those who are away away from home.

If you already have a disney plus subscription in your country, but the show remains on a different service, you can use a vpn to be of the aboves’ Contents with your existing once the show lands.

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Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 18 Trailer

Paramount plus dropped a full trailer for the new season in april. IT’S ACTION-PACKED AND SHOWS SOME OF WHAT THE TEAM HAS TO DEAL WITH THIS SEASON, INCLUDING VOIT. JJ, in Particular, appears to be grappling with a lot. In one quick shot, she is seen getting slapped acroSs the face by an Older Woman. “People This This Job is About Staring Down Evil, But Is it not,” Unit Chief Preniss Bau Newbie Tyler Green Partway Through the trailer. “It’s’ About Loss.”

Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 18 Cast

Joe Mantagna, Paget Brewster, Aj Cook, Adam Rodriguez, Aisha Tyler, Kirsten Vangsness, and Ryan-James Hatanaka return to season 18 in Main Cast Role. Fans Can Also Expect to See a Few Other Family Faces, Including Zach Gilford, Matthew Gray-Gubler, Josh Stewart, and Nicole Pacent, Among Others.

Note: The use of vpns is illegal in Certain Countries and Using VPNS to Access Region-Locked Streaming Content Might A Breach of the Terms for Certain Services. Business insider does not endorse or condone the illegal use of vpns.

Lillian Brown

Associate Editor of Streaming

Lillian Brown is the Associate Editor of Streaming on Business Insider’s Reviews Team. A Lifelong Entertainment and Media Buff, She specializes in helping you find how to watch your favorite Shows, Movies, and Sporting Events.ExperienceLillian has ben Writing About Entertainment, Sports, TV, and Film for Over Six Years, Starting Her Career in the Living/Arts Department of The Boston Globe. She Went on to Write Entertainment Features, Roundups, and Conduct Celebrity Interviews for Publications Like Vulnerable, Guide, Esquire, myand The Daily Beast Beppore Jaining Business Insider as specialist streaming. In her current roles, she writes about everything from finding the right vpn for watching oversseas social games to choohween the endless number of streams Out there. When she’s not Writing, She is Editing Stories from freelanders or fellow Reviews Team Members. Lillian is Also an Expert Deal Hunter. She loves the Thrill of Sharing an Amazing Discount with Readers, whereather be on her favor streaming services or on products she knows our team loves and reCommends. She plays an active role in Writing About Sales and Deals for the Reviews Team.Why You Can Trust LillianWhether she’s testing streaming platform interfaces or active commenting channel offferrings BetWeen Services, Lillian Always has Her Finger on the Pulse of What’s New in Enter paininment. She has hassted nearly every streaming service and is an expert we can be comes to vpns. She is the first person to know a streaming service has changed its price, and whereer or not it’s still Worth paying for. AS A SPORTS FAN, She ALSO KNOWS EXACTLY WHERE THE NEXT BIG Playoff Game is streaming, what time it starts, and where they’re playing. Expertise

• Streaming Services
• How to Watch Your Favorite Films, TV, Sports
• VPN Services for Legal Streaming
• Deals

Outside of WorkMost of the time, you can find lillian watching a horror movie, wnba game (Go Liberty!), Or Long-Distance Running. She is located in boston.

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Cutting Carbs is a hot diet fad for Ling Weight or Lowering Blood Sugar, but it is could backfire – especilantly when it is comes to Longer, New Research suggests.

Instead of Fearing Bread and Other Carb-Rich Foods, We Should Focus on Picking the Right Ons to Boost Our Chances Healthy As We Age, Accounting to Scientists from Tufts University.

Their New Research on More than 47,000 Women Found that Just 8% of Made to their 70s with Memory Problems, Physical Limits, or Major Illnesses Like Cancer and Heart Disease.

Their Secret? Eating More Carbs.

Women who eat high-Quality Carbs, starting in their 40s are more lichery to stay healthy by age 70, Accounting to the Study Published May 16 in Jama Network Open.

Carb-rich Foods Like Beans, Berries, Greens, and Oats Could Play a Key Role in Longevity, Said Researchers.

Swapping in these Quality Carbs Instead of Ultra-Processed Foods Like French Fries and Donuts Could Improve Your Health Not Just in the Short-Term, But for Decades to Come.

There may be a benef to be eating the right Kind of Carbs Instra of Extra Protein, The Study Suggests.

“We’ve all heard that different Carbohydrates Can Affect Health Differently, Whether for Weight, Energy, Or Blood Sugar Levels,” Andres Ardisson KorratThe Lead Author of the Study and a Researcher from Tufts University, Said in a Press Release.

“But Rather than just look at the immediatte effecs of these macronutrients, we wanted to the understand what they might for good 30 years.”

What does it mean to age gracefully?

The researchers look at data from female nurses starting in their 40s and 50s, over Three Decades of Follow-Up to Compare Participants’ Eating Habits to How their Health Over Time.

They look at who experiences Memory problems, or Developed Illnesses like type 2 diabetes by age 70, but also asses addsing participants stayed Physically and Mentally Sharp. Their Definition of Healthy Aging Included Being Able Keep Up With Everyday Like Walking, Housework, and Carrying Groces, but Also will a moderate amout of vigorous exercise like Running, Lifting Weights.

About A Third of the Women in the Study Managed to Avoid Chronic Illness by Age 70, and About Half Retained Memory, But Only ARUND 15% WERE CONSIDER FREE FROM PHYSICAL LIMITIONS.

The Most Elite Group of Women Did All of the Above, the 8% of Total Participants Who Met the Definition of Healthy Aging.

Carbs v. protein for longevity

The researchers found that, for Living Longer, more protein isn’t necessarily better.

Eating 5% More protein instead of carbs Lowered the Odds of Healthy Aging in the Study. Extra Carbs May Actually be more important, the observed researchers.

Swapping in 5% More Carbs Instead of Saturated Fat or Animal Protein Could Make You Likely to Age HealthFully, The Data Model Suggested.

How to Pick the Healthiest Carb Sources

Swim all carbs were consider equal in the study.

Women Who More Carbs from High-Fiber Foods — Vegetables, Whole Grains, Fruit, and Beans – were more likes to be healthy agers.

Of Course, Refined Carbs Such As Added Sugars, Pastries, and Pizza, Along With Starchy Processing Foods As French Fries and Potato Chips, Were Linked to Lower Odds of Healthy Aging. That’s in Large part in duue to the excess salt, sugar, and luck in processing that can can be wreak havoc on ours if we eat much of it.

Without more research, though, the study can’t say for sura howrt Certain Foods Directly cause Better Longevity of Lower Disease risk. Its Also Limited Because It Relations on Surveys of What Participants’ It, Which Can Be Unrelible People Rarely have an exact memory of their meals and snacks.

Howver, The Results Help Confirm Once Research About the best Way to Eat for a Long, Healthy Life. For now, evidence is stacking up that that whole Grains, beans, and produce are Safe bets.

“The More We Can Undersand About Healthy Auging, the More Science Can Help People Live Healthier for Longer,” Said Ardisson Kor.

After my son was Born on a Sunny Sunday AFTHNOON, I WAS DONE HAVING KIDS. First, we had a daughter, and then ours Son joined the mix, and i knew two was enough.

But nor any parenting story goes, things didn’t turn out out planned.

Three years late, I was surpassed to find myself nesting again. This time, i traded a crib for a desk. When I Prepared for My Teenage Nephew’s Arrival, I Envisioned Him Hunched over the Wooden Table, Cramming for A Calculus or Writing His College Essays.

This Vision Actually Did Come True – he was studious and haad a prity steady head on his shoulders wen he arived on our doorstep. But Much of what Had I planned for Him was different from the detailed Picture i had painted in my head.

I was potty training and raising a teen

Be my 15 -ear-op nephew moved in with us in 2020, THOUGH I DIDN’T KNOW IT THE TIME, I WAS GREDED WITH THE GIFT OF IGNERANCE. I was raisiting little ones, 6 and 3, fully immersed in potty training, sleep regression, and fooder stiffed in unfortunate Crevices All Around My Home. I was in the messy littles wind, a physically taxing period of parenting.

Maybe i was dumb and naive to think that parenting a teenager wouldn’t be much harder than Handling Little children, but i like to think that going is what helped with Raise through his high school years.

My nephew’s parents deal with Additionion, and when we were heard and moved out of his mom’s and bounced between extended family, my husband and i wand to help. We offended a safe and dependable place for Him to finish growing up, two hours away from His hometown.

He Left Everything and Knew, Including His Little Half-Sister, Beinding With His Mom and Her Boyfriend and Started New with us. But, really, we started anew with each Other. In those Next three years together, we’d learn what raising a teenager would mean. We quickly learned to offten switch our mindsets and come at each obstacle from Scratch. I had to learn to let go. I had to learn to Trust that he had to go out and make -mistakes.

We had clear bon

I had to realize that Much of that foundation stuilt in his earlier years is already there. I Can’t Change What Happened in His past, but Can i Guide Him on what to do with the cards he was dealt? It was about witnessing what he could with it, without us. I learned to be there for wen the bones and drywall are nailed in, and let Him decide whereeryding goes, with smart boundaries.

I OFTEN BOUNCED BETWEEN SERN AND SERIOUS OR GOOFY Auntie, but i always made it a priority to make boundaries Clear Becausee i learned that child minds in adult bodies Need, though they are pistsed at the moment in the moment.

Maybe it was easier for me to look at it is that – after all, he wasn’t my son; We didn’t start together from the Very Beginning in Those Messy, Hands-on Days. Some Can Say I Wasn’t AS Invested, But Maybe That’s What Workd for US. I COULD BETTER REMOVE THAT LAYER OF OVERPROTECTION MODE, I FEEL, WHEN I’M WITH MY ON KIDS.

I tried to remember what it was like to be a teen

Becuser he wasn’t my son, I COULD Change Gears More Easily. I’m not a risk taker, but this guardian dynamic made with operate more like a startup, shith with Changing Market Conditions. IT MADE MANY MANY CALLS TO CLOSE FAMILY AND FRIENDS WHO’VE DEALT WITH THE TENSED AND ASKED FOR THEIR ADVICE. I was learning as i went, and when things got really hard, i relied on the memory of what it was like to be a teenager.

We dealt with it all with HIM: Moving in, Dealing with His Parents, Friends, Girls, Sex, Curfews, Drugs, Alcohol, Getting A License, Driving, Grades, Sports, Jobs Out of the House, Chooking Colleges, APPLYING TO COLLES, AND, AND, ULTATY, Moving Him Out and Sending Him off to the Dorms into the Next Chapter of His Life.

I MADE MANY MISTAKES ALONG The Way, Such as LoSing My Cool or Trying to Micromanage bits where i did not Belong. While I dwelld on someone isssues for too, tried to move on and reconnect when i can. I made an effhority to make special Outings, just with and my nephew. It was always Simple; I FED HIM HIS FAVORITE FOODS, TOOK HIM OUT THRIFTING, OR DID HE LOVES JUST SE he knows i care. AFTER ALL, IT’S NOT ABOUT ME.

Will Someone Remind Me of This Wen My Kids Become Teenagers in a Few Years? Thanks.

Geordie Greep Will Tour the United States This September, Extending His Dates Bebind The New Sound To include CITies not previously visited. GREEP DESCRIBED IT IN A PRESS RELEASE AS “The Greatest American Tour and the Next of Many, Mary More to Come….” Gray Will Be Joined by A Band of Charlie Schefft, Ethan Marsh, Dave Strawn, Cameron Campbell, and Santiago Moyano. Check out the former Black Midi Frontman’s itinerary below.

Geordie GREEP: Live in the USA Tour

Geordie GREEP:

07-17 Cardiff, Wales – Tramshed
07-18 Manchester, England – O2 Ritz Manchester
07-19 Glasgow, Scotland – Queen’s Park Arena
08-07 Gothenburg, Sweden – Slottskogen (Way Out West)
08-08 Oslo, Norway – Tøyenparne (Øyafestivalen)
08-15 PAREDES de Coura, Portugal – Praia Fluvial Do Taboão (Vodafone Pares de Coura)
08-25 London, England – Southwark Park (Rally 2025)
09-06 Athens, GA – Georgia Theater
09-07 Birmingham, Al – Saturn
09-09 Nashville, TN – The Basement East
09-10 Louisville, this – Headliners Music Hall
09-12 Lawrence, KS – Liberty Hall
09-13 St. Louis, Mo – Delmar Hall
09-14 Chicago, Il – Metro
09-15 Detroit, Mi – St. Andrew’s Hall
09-17 Lakewood, Oh – The Roxy
09-18 Columbus, Oh – The ATENAEum Theater
09-19 Pittsburgh, Pa – Thunderbird Music Hall
09-20 Washington, DC – Black Cat
09-22 Norwalk, CT – District Music Hall
09-23 Portsmouth, NH – 3S Artspace
09-24 pawtucket, re – the Met
09-26 Jersey City, Nj – White Eagle Hall
09-27 Alentown, Pa – Arrow at Archer Music Hall
09-28 Philadelphia, Pa – Mummers Museum
11-09 São Paulo, Brazil – Tokyo Marine Hall (Balaclava Fest 2025)

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

If Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin, was who I believed him to be, he was not going to acknowledge it. He probably wouldn’t talk to me. And seeing him was going to mean sitting on a plane for 20 hours and driving another eight. But I needed to try to have a conversation with him, and it had to be face-to-face.

Nakamoto had disappeared in the spring of 2011. I learned about him that summer, when I wrote one of the first magazine feature articles about bitcoin, the internet-based currency that operates beyond the control of a government or bank. Twelve years later, bitcoin’s creator remained unknown and his enormous, multibillion-dollar fortune untouched. The modern history of science supplied no precedent for someone who brought a revolutionary technology into the world without taking credit, or spending a penny of the billions of dollars it earned him.

Denied a flesh-and-blood human to venerate, acolytes of bitcoin had conferred on the pseudonym the halo of legend. In 2022, Kanye West stepped from an Escalade in Beverly Hills wearing a Satoshi Nakamoto baseball hat. In Budapest, adherents unveiled the first statue of Nakamoto, a depiction in bronze of a hooded, spectral figure. A trio of libertarians bought a decommissioned cruise ship, christened it the MS Satoshi, and recruited settlers for the world’s first sovereign bitcoin-powered society. More than one fellow technologist lobbied for Nakamoto to receive a Nobel Prize.

When I first wrote about Nakamoto in 2011, I couldn’t have foreseen that more than a decade later his identity would remain a mystery. Since then, numerous attempts to unmask Nakamoto had failed, sometimes spectacularly. In 2014, Newsweek confidently identified the wrong guy, a California systems engineer whose real name was Dorian Nakamoto, unleashing a media siege of his house that lasted for days. Even 60 Minutes, with untold resources and a deep bench of seasoned investigative journalists, threw up its hands and declared the challenge “mission impossible.” Yet now, against all odds, I believed I had cracked it.

I was nervous. This was someone who’d gone to great lengths to be unfindable. And what I’d learned about him was disturbing. He was nothing like how people had imagined Satoshi Nakamoto. He’d repeatedly described himself as dangerous. He had guns.

He also owned at least four properties on two continents. I’d initially thought he was hiding out in a remote part of Hawaii’s Big Island, but now, in the summer of 2023, I’d come to believe that he lived in a small beach community on the eastern coast of Australia.

I was fretting about all this when I met my sister for dinner.

I told her my anxieties. She’d been a TV-news producer for 20 years and had been onsite in Montana with 48 Hours after the FBI raided the Unabomber’s property and arrested him.

She suggested I take professional security people with me. And that I wear a bulletproof vest. And give local police a heads-up.

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

Later that night, she texted me: “Couldn’t sleep not sure why.”

It was 4:09 a.m.

“Two thoughts. Maybe doorstep him in a public place if he ever leaves the house. Also might be worth having someone video the encounter (from a safe distance) for evidence.”

Eighteen months earlier, on New Year’s Eve 2021, an email had arrived in my inbox.

“Subject: New information re Satoshi.”

Since writing that early bitcoin article, I’d periodically receive emails like this. Someone was always shopping a new Satoshi theory.

Usually, I paid little heed to these, which tended to rekindle a fleeting hope of learning something fresh before proving unconvincing. This email had no text, but a link led to a blog post titled “I’m the SpaceX Intern Who Speculated Satoshi Is Elon Musk. There Is More to the Story.” The author, Sahil Gupta, had produced a ripple on the internet four years earlier with another post making the case that Musk was “probably” Nakamoto. Now he presented further evidence: an account of an interaction he’d had with Musk’s chief of staff, Sam Teller. It seemed slight and ambiguous, and I didn’t respond.

Two days later, I received another email from the same address. This one contained a link to Gupta’s detailed case for Musk as Nakamoto. I didn’t know what to make of his arguments, which ranged from vague to highly technical. Still, I wrote back.

Sahil told me that in 2015, when he was an undergraduate at Yale, he’d scored a summer internship writing inventory-management software at the SpaceX rocket factory in Hawthorne, California. Musk was in the office maybe three days a week, and Sahil would see him in the hallways. Sahil was majoring in computer science, and for a senior thesis he proposed a central-bank digital currency called fedcoin in which the U.S. improved the dollar by taking the best aspects of bitcoin. The paper’s acknowledgments thanked “Satoshi Nakamoto for being a straight up legend.”

While researching the thesis, Sahil steeped himself in cryptocurrency literature, starting with the nine-page white paper where Nakamoto first described bitcoin. Reading the bitcoin creator’s writing, he was struck by similarities to Musk’s language. Both spoke of “order of magnitude” reasoning and used the word bloody. Nakamoto talked about money in a conceptual way, as Musk had done when he was an executive at PayPal in the early aughts. Musk, like Nakamoto, had a history of programming in the C++ language and was knowledgeable about cryptography. Sahil began to wonder: Might the inventor of bitcoin have been in front of us all along, hiding in the dazzle of his own celebrity?

When Sahil graduated from college, he decided he wanted to work directly for Musk. After emailing Musk several times, he got a phone interview with Teller, his chief of staff.

As the call with Teller drew to a close, Sahil took a chance:

“Is Elon Satoshi?”

“Teller didn’t say anything for 15 seconds,” Sahil told me.

“Then he said, ‘Well, what can I say?’”

“That was another big clue,” Sahil said. “It’s pretty clear what’s going on. Like, I surprised him. The answer I got is pretty telling.” Later that year, Sahil wrote his “Elon Musk Probably Invented Bitcoin” blog post. He argued that the bitcoin community, which had been riven by strife over how and whether to mainstream the technology, would benefit from the return of its founder to guide it. A few cryptocurrency blogs picked up Sahil’s theory, and Bloomberg News covered it. For his part, Musk tweeted: “Not true. A friend sent me part of a (bitcoin) a few years (ago), but I don’t know where it is.”

As the years passed and he connected more dots, Sahil became even more convinced that Musk was Nakamoto. He noted that Luke Nosek, a co-founder of PayPal, had once said that the company’s original goal was to develop a currency free from banks. Musk, like Nakamoto, had a history of using two spaces after a period in his writing. Musk regularly flew in and out of Van Nuys airport, which matched up with perhaps the only security lapse Nakamoto had ever made: Early in bitcoin’s history, an email from Nakamoto to another software developer inadvertently betrayed an IP address in northern Los Angeles. Sahil learned that early bitcoin coders had considered Satoshi “bossy”; Musk was certainly that.

In late 2021, Musk had recently been named Time’s Person of the Year. SpaceX had successfully docked a capsule at the International Space Station. Musk had even tweeted playfully about dogecoin, a meme cryptocurrency (it subsequently went parabolic in price, then crashed). Sahil felt that the media might now finally be ready to accept that Nakamoto, who was now seen almost universally as a benevolent genius, and Musk were the same person.

Sahil told me he was “99 percent sure” about his theory. He chalked up others’ doubts to prejudice against Musk.

Okay, but Musk wasn’t humble, so why would he deny being bitcoin’s creator? To Sahil, this was evidence of Musk’s savvy. “Unlike a company that needs marketing, bitcoin was stronger and could grow faster, in the early days, when it had the aura of an anonymous founder.”

I didn’t know if Sahil was right, but I could relate to his fixation. Bitcoin had recently hit an all-time high of nearly $70,000 for a single coin, and the market value of all bitcoin in circulation had passed $1 trillion. El Salvador had recognized bitcoin as legal tender. In 2011, it hadn’t seemed like such a big deal that no one knew who Nakamoto was. But how was it possible that even now no one knew?

Six months later, I quit my job to devote myself full time to unraveling the mystery that had first beguiled me a decade earlier.

On Halloween 2008, someone going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto had posted a short write-up outlining “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” on an obscure, moderated email list about cryptography informally known as Metzdowd. That none of its subscribers had heard of Satoshi Nakamoto didn’t strike anyone as odd. Metzdowd was frequented by people devoted to secrecy. They were used to aliases.

In his write-up, Nakamoto described a new kind of money. It would run on a network of volunteers’ computers. It would use a transparent public ledger collectively maintained by the network, rather than relying on a bank’s or government’s database of debits and credits. Nakamoto included a link to a more detailed formal description that would come to be known as “the bitcoin white paper.”

A few members of the list gave Nakamoto feedback on the software he was writing, and he gamely welcomed it. “I appreciate your questions,” he told one in an email, adding, “I actually did this kind of backwards. I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper.” In early January 2009, Nakamoto released an alpha version of bitcoin on SourceForge, then a popular site for open-source software projects, which welcome any programmers who want to take part. The first day, according to one early bitcoiner, 127 people downloaded the bitcoin software.

A lot of the first participants were programmers who thought money was overdue for a product update. Paper bills and coins faded, wrinkled, tore, got dirty, spread germs. They were available only in fixed denominations, could be counterfeited, and were hard to move in any significant quantity. Bitcoin was durable, unforgeable, almost infinitely divisible. It might finally realize the internet commerce dream of microtransactions. You could send any amount of it anywhere instantly.

Bitcoin, as a currency based on 0’s and 1’s in a cloud maintained by far-flung, ordinary individuals, was also immune to meddling by central powers. Unlike bars of gold, bitcoin couldn’t be seized. Unlike a bank account, it couldn’t be frozen. Unlike a national currency, it couldn’t be devalued at the whim of a central bank or subjected to capital controls by a dictator.

At the heart of Nakamoto’s creation was something called the blockchain, an ever-lengthening record of all transactions (buy, sell, etc.) that had occurred in the system. Approximately every ten minutes, the latest batch of transaction records were bundled into a “block,” and the block was “chained” onto the block that had preceded it using some clever math that made it impractical for anyone to go back and tamper with the block’s contents. This record, or ledger, which in traditional finance would be maintained by an institution such as a government or bank, was maintained by a network of volunteers’ computers, each of which ran the bitcoin software and stored constantly updating copies of the ledger.

Although bitcoin was an open-source project — an it-takes-a-village group effort — someone needed to be in charge, and for the first 20 months that was Satoshi Nakamoto. He would release code, other developers would suggest patches, and he would integrate the ones he liked.

Four months after Gavin Andresen, a software developer, began contributing programming code to the bitcoin project, his dedication and computer-science chops seemed to have won Nakamoto’s trust. First, Nakamoto gave Gavin direct access to the source code. Then, around September 2010, Nakamoto told Gavin that he was getting busy with other projects, and over the coming months he would hand over control of both the code repository on SourceForge and the project’s “alert key,” which allowed the broadcasting of urgent messages to all machines running the bitcoin software. For an open-source project, these were the closest things to a leadership badge; at that point Gavin effectively became the project’s head developer, guiding a team of five other volunteer coders.

Over the next few months, Nakamoto continued to chime in occasionally on technical questions, but Gavin’s openness chafed against his reclusive tendencies. After PayPal and Visa froze WikiLeaks’ accounts, a faction of bitcoiners argued that the cryptocurrency could be helpful to the controversial organization. “Bring it on,” someone wrote on a forum called BitcoinTalk. Nakamoto bristled. “No,” he replied. “Don’t ‘bring it on.’ The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin … The heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”

For journalists covering bitcoin, Gavin had become the natural person to call first. His mild, reasonable manner and willingness to use his real name made him the bitcoin ambassador Nakamoto had never been. But Nakamoto seemed to grow uncomfortable with Gavin’s interactions with media. In late April 2011, Nakamoto emailed Gavin: “I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle.”

This turned out to be the last time Gavin heard from Nakamoto. When I first spoke with Gavin that July, he said he hadn’t communicated with Nakamoto “in a couple months.” After Gavin told Nakamoto in an email on April 26 that he’d agreed to give a talk on bitcoin to the crypto-curious CIA at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Nakamoto never responded. Around the same date, Nakamoto wrote emails to at least one other programmer who’d worked on the project.

Then he went silent. He’s never been heard from again, with the possible exception of a single forum post years later that may or may not have been Nakamoto’s.

Gavin and the other early bitcoin developers agreed on a few things about Satoshi’s identity. The second place Nakamoto had announced his white paper was the website of the P2P Foundation, an idealistic nonprofit dedicated to peer-to-peer networks of all kinds. In his profile on the site, Nakamoto gave his residence as Japan. But no one believed he was Japanese. His English was flawless. He sounded British. In both the bitcoin source code and his posts to the BitcoinTalk forum, Nakamoto favored Anglo spellings like colour and optimise. 

Nakamoto guarded his identity closely. When registering the domain bitcoin.org, he had done so through a masking service called anonymousspeech.com, which itself had been registered from a temporary-housing broker in Tokyo. That service gave him an email address at vistomail.com, which offered the option of manipulating the date and time an email was sent. A third email address Nakamoto used was from gmx.com, another free webmail provider. In communication, Nakamoto expressed himself with a practiced opacity. He’d answer technical questions but would ignore attempts to draw him out on personal matters.

Nakamoto’s programming style was a bit dated, suggesting he might be on the older side. He used something called Hungarian notation, a convention of variable naming popular among Windows programmers in the 1990s.

Gavin had the impression that the bitcoin code had been written by a small group or even just one person. When programmers collaborate, they tend to insert regular comments in their code, telling one another what this or that block of instructions is supposed to accomplish. The bitcoin software contained few of these. Others felt that bitcoin worked too smoothly from the moment it launched to be the product of a single brain. And the white paper used “we,” which suggested Satoshi Nakamoto must be the catchall for a group of people or an institution.

Even before Nakamoto evaporated, he was coming to be revered. On April 16, 2011, a BitcoinTalker named Wobber pointed out how varied Nakamoto’s expertise was, and how unusual his behavior — to come up with something so innovative, not take credit for it or exploit his stature, and leave without telling anyone. Someone likened Nakamoto to Zorro or a masked David who’d aimed his slingshot at the Goliath of banks and governments.

Might the name itself contain a clue? Satoshi Nakamoto, roughly translated from Japanese, could mean “central intelligence.” Perhaps this pointed to the role of spies in bitcoin’s creation. Maybe the National Security Agency was playing a long game, launching an off-the-books financial network it could use either to pay assets in the field, anywhere in the world, or as a honeypot where adversaries would transact with a false sense of security while the spooks at Fort Meade monitored their every move.

It wasn’t a totally crazy idea. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory had birthed the Onion Router, the anonymizing software known as TOR that enabled the dark web. The FBI would later secretly create its own line of encrypted phones and a messaging service, ANOM, that were unwittingly adopted by organized criminals, resulting in more than 800 arrests. And in the summer of 1996, researchers in the Cryptology Division of the NSA’s Office of Information Security Research and Technology had internally published a paper, later made public, titled “How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash.”

You could also read Nakamoto’s name as a portmanteau of big tech-company names — SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, MOTOrola — so maybe a corporate cabal was behind it. Redditors pooled their deciphering skills, also finding Satoshi Nakamoto to be an anagram of, among other phrases, “Ma, I took NSA’s oath” and “So a man took a shit.”

Dan Kaminsky, who’d shot to prominence as a young programmer in 2008 when he discovered a technical glitch that could have undermined the entire internet, thought Nakamoto might be a group at a bank. “I suspect Satoshi is a small team at a financial institution,” Dan told me. “I just get that feeling.”

But Kaminsky added that he didn’t think that Satoshi’s identity “is that critical to what bitcoin is. Bitcoin is larger than Satoshi.” This jibed with a sentiment I’d heard voiced more than once: The whole idea of Nakamoto as an unknown pseudonymous entity who’d dematerialized was an integral part of bitcoin’s design.

At the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Satoshi Nakamoto was, in absentia, everywhere. The Nakamoto Stage, where the keynotes and most important panels took place, was flanked by illuminated screens featuring a rotating display of snippets from his writings. They had the Dianetics-like quality of being banal to outsiders and profound to insiders.

Imagine if gold turned to lead when stolen.

I’m sure that in twenty years there will either be very large Bitcoin transaction volume … or no volume.

The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. 

Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder turned venture capitalist, emerged stage right and threw a wad of $100 bills into the front rows: “It’s kind of crazy that this stuff still works, you know?” Bitcoin was a warning, he said, that the fiat system was over.

What stood in the way of the crypto revolution, Thiel said, were “the enemies of this movement,” among whom he enumerated Warren Buffett, JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. Thiel told the crowd that the enemies he’d named were “extensions of the state.” Bitcoin, by contrast, wasn’t a company and had no board. “We do not know who Satoshi is,” Thiel added for emphasis.

We do not know who Satoshi is. Back in 2011, he’d been the no-name coder of an experimental money that was of interest mainly to a fringe community. Ten years later, he was the mythic founder of a project with a $1 trillion market capitalization, making it the ninth-most-valuable asset in the world, just below Tesla and above Meta. Whoever Nakamoto was, he was fantastically rich. Through some clever analysis of the early blockchain, a computer scientist named Sergio Demian Lerner had estimated that, at the time, Nakamoto held some $40 billion worth of bitcoin (today the figure is much higher). Nakamoto was by far the largest holder of the currency.

When the crypto exchange Coinbase went public in the spring of 2021, one of the risk factors listed in the prospectus the company filed with the SEC was the public identification of Nakamoto. It wasn’t hard to think of scenarios where who Nakamoto was — and what his motives and intentions were — might be relevant. In the bitcoin realm, the Nakamoto mystery was coming to be seen as necessary — a feature rather than a bug. To be truly decentralized required that bitcoin have a virgin birth. Depriving it of a human figurehead, a flawed individual with a particular identity that might be palatable to one group but not to another, gave it the best shot at being taken up en masse.

And so the Nakamoto alias had come to be hallowed. While some people conjectured that the bitcoin creator had gone to ground mainly for his own protection, lest he be prosecuted for tax evasion or physically attacked for his coin stash, the common view was that he’d acted selflessly. The most zealous bitcoiners treated inquiries into Nakamoto’s identity as a sort of blasphemy, as if they were Scientologists being asked about Xenu.

In the summer of 2022, I tacked a spreadsheet of the hundred-plus candidates who’d ever been proposed as Satoshi Nakamoto onto my office wall. Most of the leading candidates were cypherpunks whose names had been floated as possible Satoshis many times over the years. There were more obscure names from adjacent fields like math, cryptography, and economics. Some were programmers involved early on with the bitcoin software project. Others were creators of newer cryptocurrencies. Many were just Famous Smart People: Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Musk.

For a number of years, the consensus leading candidates have generally been considered to be Nick Szabo, Adam Back, and Hal Finney. Szabo, a programmer who had advocated for decentralized money years before bitcoin appeared, had conceived a kind of bitcoin precursor called “Bit Gold” in the late ’90s. He had the necessary technical skills, and there were superficial similarities between his writing style and Nakamoto’s. But he has always denied being Satoshi, and no definitive evidence linking him to Nakamoto or to bitcoin’s early development has ever been produced. Adam Back’s name was mentioned in the bitcoin white paper as the creator of another cryptocurrency precursor, hashcash, and his email address is one of the first to have been contacted by Nakamoto. He, too, denies being Nakamoto, and his writing style matches up less closely than Szabo’s. Hal Finney, a legendary programmer and cryptographer, received the first-ever bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto. But Finney, who also denied being Satoshi, was diagnosed with ALS in 2009, declining rapidly to the point where he was physically incapacitated. If ever Satoshi were to be unmasked, Finney is the most hoped-for candidate among bitcoiners because of his tragic-heroic story and his general aura of kindly benevolence — and also because, being conveniently deceased (he died in 2014), he can’t create unsavory press with unsavory behavior or associations.

There had always been the faction hostile to inquiry about Nakamoto’s identity. Last fall, when an HBO documentary posited that a libertarian Canadian computer programmer and crypto enthusiast named Peter Todd was the most likely candidate, the bitcoin community reacted not just with strong skepticism about the documentary’s conclusion but with anger that such a project had even been undertaken. He has made a valuable contribution, so his wishes for anonymity should be honored. What matters is not the person but the idea, the code.

But Nakamoto had plunked his gizmo in the public square, so I felt it was reasonable to inquire who’d put it there and why.

I combed through the 60,000 words Satoshi Nakamoto had left behind. He wrote in a plain style, rarely opining or showing personality. Whenever I found the slightest hint of individual style, I’d add it to a list of Nakamoto-isms, which eventually included more than 200 words and phrases. Wet blanket. Sweet. Clobbering. 

I wrote a computer program, the Satoshitizer, which trawled through the archived writings of various suspects, scanning for Nakamoto-isms and generating tables of statistics. I could instantly rank an archive using more than a dozen criteria, including users of Nakamoto-isms, users of e-cash terminology, and discussers of software tools employed by Nakamoto.

One day in late April 2023, I found myself thinking about a word I’d seen in Nakamoto’s writings: hosed.

Given Nakamoto’s tendency to write in a style stripped of personality or association with any particular milieu, hosed stood out. I hadn’t recently heard the word, in its sense of screwed or wrecked, and vaguely associated it with turn-of-the-1990s surfing or fraternity lingo.

I went back through my scraped archives and noted each time someone used the word. I looked at Metzdowd. In the three years leading up to October 31, 2008, when Nakamoto first announced bitcoin there, the word had been used four times. Twice it was by the same person: James A. Donald.

Though Donald hadn’t played much of a role in the public discussion of bitcoin, he’d had a cameo in its early history as the first person on the discussion list to respond to Nakamoto. Donald’s response had been a technical criticism related to bitcoin’s scaling potential, and after a few exchanges with Nakamoto he’d dropped out of the conversation. He was just one of many cypherpunks who’d been interested in digital money.

At that point, Donald was only No. 42 on my Suspects spreadsheet, far below the consensus leading candidates and on the list at all primarily because he was a cypherpunk and libertarian who had coded in C++. But intrigued by the “hosed” coincidence, I went back and looked at the lists of rare words the Satoshitizer had compiled. I wanted to see whether Donald had used any other rare Nakamoto-isms.

He had. Donald showed up as the only person on any of the two decades’ worth of lists I’d scraped who had ever used the word fencible — in the sense of stolen goods “able to be fenced.” This was a word Nakamoto had used once, in the expression non-fencible. And it appeared in a post by Donald on the cypherpunks list in October 1998. My brain started pinging. The verb fence was common enough slang, but the adjective fencible was an oddity. A Google search turned up hardly any instances on the internet. When I queried the archives of the daily New York Times, which went back to 1857 and included more than 13 million articles, fencible, in the sense I was interested in, hadn’t appeared once.

Unlike, say, trusted third party or zero-knowledge proofs, which are unexceptional in conversations among digital-cash or crypto experts, fencible and hosed weren’t words unique to cryptography or even to computer science. They were more revealing of someone’s voice.

I began looking more closely at Donald. He had a slippery internet presence. Websites variously declared that he was Canadian, that he had died, and that “James A. Donald” wasn’t his real name. In his posts, he almost never revealed personal details, but a few were strewn here and there. He was Australian but had lived in Silicon Valley for many years. Like Nakamoto, he sometimes used American spellings and other times used Commonwealth spellings.

Ideologically, Donald had fused a libertarianism so extreme that it was really anarcho-capitalism with a fervent conviction in the world-changing power of cryptography. “So guys, that is the plan,” he wrote in 1996. “We destroy the state through higher mathematics. We do this by replacing the current institutional mechanisms of corporations with cryptographic mechanisms. This will give more people the opportunity to evade and resist taxes.”

He had a particular interest in digital money. “Eventually people will bypass the banks, directly transferring funds to each other,” he wrote in 1995. On Metzdowd, between 2006 and 2009, Donald employed more of the e-cash vocabulary Nakamoto used than any other poster.

I examined Donald’s programming style. In the late 1990s, he’d promoted a piece of communications encryption software called Crypto Kong. He’d written it in C++, the language Nakamoto used for bitcoin. Using the Wayback Machine, I found an archived copy of the source code. Crypto Kong bore other similarities to bitcoin. Like Nakamoto, Donald had coded the software for Windows and, more esoterically, used the Hungarian notation that Nakamoto did. Like Nakamoto, Donald used sweeping lines of slashes to separate sections of code. Like bitcoin, Crypto Kong used elliptic curve cryptography to generate private-public key pairs.

I gleaned more information about Donald. He was born in 1952, so was now over 70 — fitting the profile of an older programmer that various early bitcoin developers had noted Nakamoto’s coding style suggested. Donald wasn’t on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, at least under his own name. His $2.8 million Palo Alto house was blurred on Google Street View, as was his $400,000 Austin house. This was an option you could exercise only by submitting a formal request to Google (or perhaps by working at Google, as one of Donald’s two sons had). There were no easily found photographs of him. Like Nakamoto, Donald used a privacy-focused email provider, Switzerland-based Proton Mail. He had a blog titled Jim’s Blog, untethered from his last name. He had spent, he’d told the blog’s readers, “a lot of time off the grid.” Click-click-click. The tumblers were falling into place.

I now began to think about the significance of Donald’s response to Nakamoto being the first. I pictured Nakamoto in 2008: He’d just launched his work of genius into the world and … crickets. So he decided to both nudge things along (while also creating a useful misdirection) by lobbing a criticism at himself.

Jim’s Blog revealed a few more clues. In the run-up to October 31, 2008, Donald had been focused on the financial crisis. His post on October 11, titled “The Cause of the Crisis,” began: “The bailout will fail.” This was notable because the London Times headline embedded in the bitcoin Genesis block, the first block in the chain produced by Satoshi, had been “Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout.”

I found further coincidences. Donald owned several pieces of property in Hawaii. On June 19, 2008, a few months before Satoshi Nakamoto began communicating with the world about his invention, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser had run an obituary for “Satoshi Nakamoto,” a veteran of World War II who’d died at 84. Could Donald have lifted the name when casting about for a pseudonym?

Though “Jim” rarely mentioned any details that betrayed his identity or location, he revealed things about his beliefs in various posts. Before he was a libertarian or crypto-anarchist, he’d been a radical leftist. At age 15, he’d joined the Spartacists, a faction of Trotskyites, but “I became disillusioned with the sparts, and disillusioned by participatory democracy—and none too keen on representative democracy either.” At 17, he joined two other radical groups, the anarcho-socialists and the Maoists, “mostly because these were the two groups most hated by the trots.” Eventually he concluded that freedom lay in property rights, and he became an anarcho-capitalist.

I spoke with people who’d known him when he was a graduate student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. Bob Hewitt, who was on the department faculty, interviewed Donald as part of the application process. Donald had come from Melbourne, and Bob recalled him as “bohemian”; asked whether he’d arranged for a place to stay in Sydney, Donald said he’d sleep under a bridge. He was “a friendly kind of guy,” Hewitt said, “just strange.”

Donald never completed the Ph.D. program. Every student was supposed to give a colloquium, but “no one understood what he was saying,” Hewitt recalled. “We couldn’t say he was brilliant, but he was certainly incomprehensible when he tried to explain his paper.” Donald ended up dropping out after his dissertation, “Assumptions of the Singularity Theorems and the Rejuvenation of Universes,” was rejected.
He started writing software for Apple computers, then moved to the U.S. and programmed video games for Epyx. Later, he worked at database companies.

Poring over Jim’s Blog, I saw that Donald had an authoritative understanding of bitcoin and its vulnerabilities; he clearly took a long, historical view of it as a stepping stone toward a particular future he wanted. Bitcoin, he wrote, “is a prototype that is prematurely being used as the final system.”

I’d never shared the presumption, prevalent in the bitcoin world, that Nakamoto must be a benign figure. I’d always felt that the bitcoiners who elevated Nakamoto to semi-divine status were indulging in wishful projection: that he was selfless. That he was humble. That he had come from the future to exalt humanity. Hal Finney had made for a particularly appealing Satoshi Nakamoto because he lived up to that image.

Donald did not. On his blog, Donald espoused a dark ideology called neoreaction that had beguiled certain people in Silicon Valley. Neoreactionaries believed that society had been hijacked by what they called the Cathedral — academic and media and bureaucratic elites. They disdained efforts to achieve social justice. The best way forward, they argued, was to jettison democracy and restore a monarchy. Donald’s particular flavor of neoreaction also incorporated an overtly Christian element and a generous dose of paranoia; he attributed the COVID pandemic to a Jesuit conspiracy.

Along with his baroque politics, Donald produced a regular feed of racist, homophobic, and misogynist opinions and offensive language. He was so abrasive that, in 2014, even Slate Star Codex, an influential Silicon Valley blog with a history of tolerating discussion of taboo subjects like IQ science, had banned him. But on his blog, hosted on a relatively uncensorable domain in Laos, he advocated “whipping a woman on the buttocks or upper back” to keep her in line and argued that “very few rape accusations are true.” Donald had a substantial following in the red-pilled, alt-right blogosphere.

If Donald was Nakamoto, wasn’t it obvious why he’d chosen a pseudonym when launching bitcoin? He wanted his work of genius to be taken on its own terms rather than dismissed because it was his. He had hidden not because bitcoin could be a risk to him but because he could be a risk to bitcoin.

I wondered whether there were crypto people who knew or suspected that Donald was Nakamoto. If Nakamoto were a harmless private citizen like Dorian Nakamoto, “Satoshi deserves his privacy” would be at least a reasonable position to take. If Nakamoto were a dissident living under an autocratic regime, I’d want to protect his secret too. But if Nakamoto were Donald? It would undermine the narrative of bitcoin’s inventor as a crypto Christ who’d passed up fame and treasure for the sake of a higher good. Was it possible that some of the Satoshi-deserves-his-privacy people, recognizing that it would be a PR calamity for Bitcoin to have been invented by a far-right whackjob, were really just safeguarding the reputation of their religion and the value of their investments? In June 2020, the hashcash founder Adam Back, himself long suspected by some of being Satoshi, had tweeted: “Maybe we should get mentally prepared to disown Satoshi. Nuke the nym from orbit, just to be safe.”

“Satoshi’s identity doesn’t matter,” Ray Dillinger, who along with Hal Finney had done code review for Nakamoto before bitcoin’s launch, wrote. “The protocol is what it is. If it’s a third-world dictator, a homeless guy living under a bridge in Belize, a Bedouin working from a cell phone as she traverses Bir Tawil on a camel, or a pushcart vendor in Nairobi, the protocol is exactly the same as it would be if it were a cryptanalyst working for the NSA or someone at a ‘troll farm’ drawing a salary from the GRU, or a well-known Security researcher or Cypherpunk. ‘Satoshi’ doesn’t exist outside that protocol. Satoshi is just a hat somebody wore while they were developing it. And it doesn’t matter who was wearing the hat.”

I wrote to Jim Donald asking for an interview. Several days later, to my surprise, I heard back from him. “Email discussion would be convenient,” Donald wrote, but he might be able to talk over phone or video. He’d have to let me know in a few days.

Two months later, Donald still hadn’t made himself available for a live conversation. Should I travel all the way to Australia to find him in person? One thing that gave me pause about Donald as Nakamoto was that Nakamoto, in his communications, displayed a recognizable range of emotion. He could be appreciative (“Many thanks”), compassionate (“poor thing”), humble (“my apologies”), and modest (“I’m better with code than with words”). I scrolled through years of Jim’s writings, squinting for a trace of empathy or gratitude or enthusiasm, hoping to see an exclamation point, or an apology, or a moment of sympathy or fellowship. Instead, I saw only flatness.

But of all the cypherpunks preoccupied with digital cash, only one had ever said they knew Satoshi’s identity. “I know who Nakamoto was,” James Donald had written in a comment on a comment on a post on Jim’s Blog, “and what his political and social goals were.” If true, this would make him the only person on record who credibly possessed this knowledge. I decided I needed to see him.

Though Donald had spent most of his career in California, he clearly owned or had owned a house in Australia. Looking through real-estate assessment records for his various U.S. properties, I’d found that for a couple of years in the aughts, a house he owned in Austin was registered to him at a street address on the northeastern coast of Australia. In more recent assessments, the U.S. properties were registered to him in the same Australian town, though now only a P.O. box was given. I knew his wife had died in 2016, and using the Find a Grave site, I found a photograph from the Australian town’s cemetery of a plaque memorializing her. Five years later, he’d posted a small photo on his blog of what appeared to be the view from his deck: In the foreground was a small glass and a jug of what he described as homemade moonshine. In the distance was a gleaming blue sea, the horizon disrupted by a couple of small islands. I compared this view with other ocean-view images taken from the same town, and they seemed to match.

I found a private investigator, Daniel Quinn, who lived within a reasonable drive of the seaside town where I suspected Donald was. I sent Quinn the house address and a 20-year-old photo of Donald I’d found on an abandoned college blog of one of his sons.

A few days later, Daniel sent me a surveillance report. “The yard is in a very unkempt state with very long grass and overgrown shrubbery and trees, he’s definitely not a plant lover.” He attached a photo of James’s house and the patchy driveway it shared with two other homes. There was a lonely palm tree near the curb, and up the hill was a bungalow on stilts, set amid the overgrowth, with a deck looking out at the Coral Sea.

Daniel didn’t see James that day, but several weeks later, I awoke to a message: Daniel had managed to get a photo of a man standing in the house’s doorway. He was a clear 20-years-older match to the man in the photo I’d sent. Same dense beard, though now it was white. Similar large metal-rim glasses. Same fleshy nose. Three days later, I was on a plane to Australia.

There was a screen door and no doorbell, so I knocked on James’s doorframe. My mouth was dry from nerves. While I wasn’t convinced that James himself was necessarily Nakamoto, I thought he might have been part of Nakamoto. In any case, he was the sole remaining person I knew of who claimed to know who Nakamoto was.

I worried about how he’d receive me. James had gone out of his way to be unfindable.

Crossing his porch toward the front door, I could see Donald sitting at a computer in the living room and wearing headphones. His latest blog post, put up just a few hours earlier, was a rambling screed about how Georgians (as in the country of Georgia) don’t want “their Churches destroyed or turned into shrines of Gaia and gay sex, their old and beautiful buildings bulldozed and replaced by demonic postmodern eyesores.”

Western NGOs were working to see “Georgia faggotized and thrown into the meat grinder against Russia.”

When he didn’t respond to my knock on the doorframe, I knocked directly on the front door. A moment later James opened it and stepped outside in black long johns and a red camouflage long-sleeved shirt.

I started talking. I’d sent him an email and —

“Oh, I’m rather sporadic at reading my emails,” James said. I reminded him of our exchange the prior year and of the book I was writing.

“Ah, right,” James said.

I said something about how I’d have been remiss if I didn’t make every effort to speak with him.

“Okay,” James said. “Well, the short of it is that I can’t even tell you what I don’t tell you.” His tone was pleasant, bemused.

I pointed out that he’d publicly insisted he knew who Nakamoto was and what his social and political goals were. Could he elaborate?

“No, sorry.”

“Okay … Do you really know? Or do you sort of think you have a strong idea of who it might be?”

“I have a very good idea of who it might be, but I don’t actually, uh, no.”

“Do you think it was Hal Finney?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Is that just because you’re respecting his privacy?”

“I’m not allowed to tell anyone anything, and I’m not allowed to tell people what I’ve already told ’em.”

Could I buy him a beer while I was in town?

“Ah,” James said. “In wine there is truth. And I’m obligated not to tell people the truth.”

“Lunch?” I offered.

James laughed. “Look,” he said. “I have a tendency to talk too much, and I have a big tendency to talk too much after a few drinks, so I’m sorry.”

I tried to keep the conversation going — giving him my contact information along with a previous book I’d written — but his answers became monosyllabic.

“Well, I can understand why you’d live here,” I said, gesturing at his stunning view.

“Yeah,” James said, looking down.

I thanked him and made my way back down the hill.

I’d spent 15 years trying to identify Satoshi. In pursuit of this quest, I’d learned to code, recruited a machine-learning expert and a stylometry specialist and a private investigator, and made a 37-hour journey for a three-minute encounter. I was pretty sure no one had spent as much time as I had in trying to solve this. I was starting to feel a kinship with Sahil Gupta, who couldn’t be persuaded that Nakamoto was anyone other than Elon Musk. At some point, I needed to stop.

Perhaps someday AI will allow us to definitively identify Satoshi. But I am now convinced that, barring some unpredictable declassification of a government secret, we will likely never know beyond a reasonable doubt who he was. Memories fade. People die. There is no paternity test for bitcoin, no way to prove who Nakamoto is unless he comes forward and demonstrates that he has the relevant private keys, or at least non-forged contemporaneous documents supporting his story. As years pass, the trail, if there was one, grows fainter.

I felt some relief in accepting this. I remained dazzled by the achievement of Nakamoto’s invention — but almost equally by the perfection of his vanishing. As a utopian project, bitcoin had never stood a chance. But as a new asset class, it has proved resilient. Its price continues to rise and fall, and rise again, reaching a new all-time high above $109,000 in January. (As of this writing, it’s at $85,000.) Fidelity now advises retail clients to allocate a small portion of their investment portfolios to cryptocurrency. The spread of blockchain technology feels inevitable.

Satoshi Nakamoto was something that whoever was behind the pseudonym could never be — an idea that, without a body or a history to drag it down, would live forever.

Excerpted from The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto by Benjamin Wallace (Crown), out March 18.

Photo-illustration: Intelligenmer; Photos: Amazon

Here’s an Experiment you can run yourSelf. Open Up A Category on Amazon-Electronics, Toys, Home Garden & Tools, Whatever-and Scan the first page for a product line with no obvious brand, or spread a semi-brand like ocbyhz, bank, or claqqed. Take a look at the Product Photos and Description, and Note the Price. Next, try to find the Product on Temu, the Discount App With the Super Bowl Ads, and Check How Much It Costs. Next, try to find it on aliexpress, the international e-commerce subsidiary of the Chinese Alibaba Group, or on Tiktok Shop. Finally, you can look for it on alibaba proper, where it might be available as well, Shipped Straight from China.

Sometimes, not always, but more than you might expect, this work. heels This Dress From Cupshe, Listeed on Amazon at $ 47.99, with more than 4,200 ratings, shatly positive. On TEMU, WHERE IT ALSO Ships for Free From A “Local” (Read Domestic) Warehouse, ITI’S LISTED AS “WOMEN CASUAL BOHO Lace Floral V Neck Long Beach Dress Party Maxi Wedding Dress” and Costs Just $ 16.49. On Tiktok Shop, it’s on Flash Sale with Free Shipping for $ 27 Dollars. On Aliexpress, IT’S AVAILABLE AT LOTS OF PRICES FROM DIFFERENT SELLERS, FOR $ 9.90 WITH $ 9.60 SHIPPING, OR, ON PROMOTION, SHIPPED FREE WITH AN ALEGED 85.2 PERCENT CHANCE OF ARRIVING 14 DAYS for $ 8.66.

Photo-illustration: Intelligenmer; Photos: Temu, Tictok Shop, Amazon, and Aliexpress

I didn’t order these dresses, so i can’t verify that they have been exactly or that one isn’t a rip-off of another, will i know Enough about boho dresses to tell you are a rip-off of a dys-chommer World.

Photo: Amazon

But again, this isn’t uncommon. One Popular Speaker, For Example, Branded AS T&G, Is $ 15.75 on Amazon, $ 8.38 on TEMU, and $ 4.94 with Free Shipping on Aliexpress. It”s Clearly… inspired by popular speakers From 78-Yaar-Old Company JBL, WHICH ALSO SELL ON AMAZON, ALBEIT for $ 89.95 on Steep Discount.

Photo: Aliexpress

The process works acroSs categories: A Pair of Bike Shorts Goes From $ 19.99 to $ 11.77 to $ 2.30; A Folding Utility Wagon Goes from $ 95 to $ 38.99 (indentinguishaable from the family Purchased on Amazon in 2023 for $ 110.59). Are these the exact Same Products? Maybe, and in most probably. Its Possible they’re made from the same reference by DIFFERENT Factories; in other caes, they might be sold by the same sellers on different platforms.

But for any willing to take a little time to comparison accross Big Online, IT’S CLEAR Something is Happening: Amazon is Becoming More Like Temu, SHOP, Shein, and Aliexpress while Chinese e-Commerce platforms are Becoming, in America at Least. The Big Story Are All Selling the Same Brandlesss Imports from China, Sometimes at Wildly Different Prices, and Converging on Similar Logistical Strategies: Temu is shifting seller inventory to American Warehouses to Reduse Shipping Times; Amazon is planning to launch a dedicated discount section with products that Ship from overseas in about a week.

In the broadest sense, this is prity family stuff. DIFFERENT STORES OFFERING SOME OF THE SAME PRODUCTS AT DIFFERENT PRICES WITH DIFFERENT Levels of Convenience is the story of Big-Box Physical Retail and Groces, Too. But is is different in some ways that are are obivious and others that are more subtle. These aren’t Chain Stoles Offering Occussional Discounts on Branded Products with Msrps But Rather Marketplaces Full of Sellers Who Are Individualy Price Based on Fluctuations in Waresing Rates, Shipping, and The Cuts Taken by the E-Commerce platforms. Additionally, The Products We’re Talking About Range from Junk to Solid Unbredd Alternatives – This Is, Across the Board, Discount Shopping. You Might Score a 90 Percent Discount on A Fast-Fashion Shirt or Some-Décor Dupes, But You’re Not Going to Get A Shocking Temu Deal on, Say, A PlayStation, Although You plow Buy say there, whic wasn’t really true when it first launched.

These companies are apprroaching the same e-commerce strategy from Very Different positions as well. TEMU, AN INTERNATIONAL SUBSIDIARY OF E-Commerce Giant Pinduoduo, is Spanding Heavily to Break Foreign Markets Including the United States, in Many Cases Subsidizing Shipping and Reportedly Operating at A massive loss; Aliexpress has Been Making Slower Inroads With Its Product, which is more overtly a cross-border whole-adjacent marketplace, with long shipping and minimal domestic marketing.

Amazon’s Drift Into Cross-Barder e-commerce predates the likes of temp and these other comparts. Since the late 2010s, a major of Amazon’s sales have ben attributable to third-party Sellers, Mary of WHOM Pay substantial Fees to the Company for Logistical Support (Warehousing, Shipping) and Advertising. This strategy has ben great for amazon in a lot of ways: it shifts market research and risk to sellers; Rather than Stocking Their Own Products, The Company Charges Sellers to Stock Theirs; The Company Is Now the Third-LARGEST PLAYER IN Digital Ads, Behind Meta and Google, Owing Mostly to Fees It Amazon Sellers to Be Visible onto Amazon. IT’S ALSO Changed the Product in More Complicated Ways. American Sellers, Many of the WHOM Sourced or Manufactured Their Products Oversseas, Soon Founds Competing With Sellers with More Direct Connections with Chinese Factories; Amazon, for its part, Courted oversseas Sellers. American Sellers Were Made to Look Like Middlemen, Which in Some Ways they were-the Companies they were building well brands to say High-Ranked-and-Reviewed Amazon Lisings, and the Manufactures they work with Knew exactly what Kinds of the Were Getting.

Now, something Similar is Happening to Amazon as a whole. While the platform has been-moving downmarket, becoming more hostile to name brands whose products are being undercut and in some case plainly ripped off, china-baed completitors are attaking it from below, WORKING WITH SOME OF THE SAME Manufacturers and Sellers to Cast Amazon as the Middleman with Needlessly High Prices. While amazon initially pushed into cross-border e-commerce on its Own Terms, Now Its Doing SO defensively.

Amazon Still Has Huge Advantages here. It is profitable, widelly like and trusted, and still by Tens of millions of Americans to Buy Mainstream Products from Recognizable Brands. Customers who use it to buy an oCCACABAL CUPSHE DRESS, ON WHICH AMAZON and A Third-Party Seller Are Collecting Huge Margins, Are Likely to Be Buying Batteries or Detergent, Too. And no Company, foreign or domestic, can come close to Amazon’s Prime Shipping Infrastructure.

But there are obivious risk, too. Customers like cheap Things, but they like cheaper things more. IT’S NOT CLEAR THAT AMAZON CAN PROFITABLY WIN IN A RACE TO THE BOTTOM, OR THAT IT WONT DAMAGE ITS REPUTION TRYING. Amazon Risks Making Its Marketplace Fully Uninhabitable for More Established Brands and Hostle to Domestic Sellers, Some of Who Have called Its temp -i plans a “slap in the face.”

THEN THERE ARE CUSTOMERS. An ornate $ 9 Dress on Aliexpress is an ethical and environmental nightmare, a semi-discussion Garment of sewn-together externalities. But so is the one on Amazon – which is also something work, at least in the eyes of the marketplace: a really bad deal.

Late Last Year, The Safety of Dry Shampoo Was Called Into Question Wen an Independent Testing Facility reported that it has found a known carcinogen Called benzene in 70 percentity of the dry shampoos it tested. Headlines About Health Issues Linked to Benzene (Like Blood Disorders and Cancers) Were alarming, to say the least, especilantly for those who use shampoo on a weekly basis.

AFTER DOING MY ONTEARCH AND READING UP ON EXPINIONS, I CONTINED TO USE DRY SHAMPOO AND DON’T PLAN ON CUTTING IT OF MY BEAUTY ROUTINE ANYTIME Soon. (Dr. Michelle wongA Cosmetic Chemist and Science Educator Based in Sydney, Australia, Told the Cut in November 2022, “This News DOES NOT ME ANY EXPUSE to Benzene Will Cause Cancer, Who is How People to Interpret it. It ‘s Probability Based on the Amounts and the Expos and the risk is really small. “) i will take a closer look at inggdents lists, though, especilantly we are perusing the Druugstore beauty aisle). “You should definitely avoid dry shampoo with inggdiers such as propane, butane, and benzene, which can be found in some cheap mass-march,” Iudina Says. IT’S a good idea to use Dry shampoo in moderation, read up on recent health concertns, and avoid products that were well RECALLED BY THE FDA Last year.

Their High-School Reunion is impending.
Photo: Elizabeth Morris/Netflix

Has a forehead kiss ever been so sad? Season One of Netflix’s Judy Blume Adaptation Forever Ended with a Reunion BetWeen Its Two Lovestruck High-School Graduates, The Howard-Bound Keisha (Lovie Simone) and the Aspiring Music Producer Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.), JUST KEISHA HEADS TO COLLEGE. She ends the Season Walking Away from Justin while Frank Ocean’s “Moon River” Plays. This is though justin tells her “maybe they’ll be ready for each other in ten years” with a bittersweet forehead kiss, audiences won’t have to be long for more. Below, everything we know about the second seson of Forever.

Netflix renewed Forever For a Second Season, Announcing The News at Its May 14 Upfronts Just Six Days After The Series Premiered. “This Show Was Never Just About First Love – it was About Being Seen,” Creator Mara Brock Akil Said in a Statement. “About Letting Teenagers Be Soft, Complicated, and Real. And the World Showed up for that. Season Two is Letter Back to the People Who Said, ‘Yes, This for Me.’ We’re honored, we’re excited, and we’re ready to go deeper. “

Mara Brock Akil is Already Thinking About What the Next SEASON OF THEIR LIVES WILL LIKE LIKE. “Who are they going to be on the Other Side, or During that First Semester?” she said in a Tudum interview. “Howard is keisha’s first boyfriend, let’s just be honest. I want to see who is in this environment. For Justin, what is he go to this gap year, now he got a directing?

Forever May Be Based on the Judy Blume Novel of the Same Name, but that Story isn’t giving US ANY MORE MORE CLUS. The adaptation already diverges in extreme ways (for one, the original is set in 1975 new jersey, while the series is in 2018 los angeles). Plus, Blume Never Wrote a sequel to the “Controversial” Novel About Teen Sexuality.

Lovie Simone and Michael Cooper Jr. Are Pretty Much Guarani to be returning as keysa and justin, respective, but there’s no stupidity confirmation on casting. Keisha’s Story, in Particular, Will Have to Be Populated With New Characters. Maybe Howard Alumni Taraji P. Henson Will Cameo As a Math Professor, Since She’s an Expert at Writing Equations on Blackboards from Hidden figure.

In Her Statement, Brock Akil Promised, “Season 2 Coming Soon!” Nonspecific, but givans us hope that this won’t be a Stranger Things Situation. We can’t win forever.

CLOCKWIS FROM Top: Final Destination: Bloodlines, Welcome to Wrexham, Elderand Overcompensing. Photo-illustration: Vulture; Photos: Warner Bros., Jackie Brown/Prime, Lucasfilm Ltd., FX

The Weekend May Be Over, but Your Hunger for Entertainment Remains. To be help, this article has been updated to include one highly worry pic from the week ahead.

Freshly promoted film-studio chief matt remick (set rogen) has made a lot of unforced errors in the first season of this Apple TV+ Comedy, but with the Future of Continental Studios on the line, he and his team are going to have to play off a flawless Cinemacon Presentation. Unfortunately, Nearly Everybody Set to Appear Onstage – Including Continental’s CEO (Bryan Cransston) and Major Actors Ze Kravitz and Dave Franco – Are Eothier still or tripping from the Drugs Matt Like Like Literal Candy. Would it really be a show About Show Business with some star-stuphed drama with a heavy dose of spectacle?

The idol wasn’t enough. Abel Tesfaye (or the Weeknd) is Willing to Put Audiences Through Another “Odyssey” with Hurry up TomorrowWhich Includes Jenna Ortega Dancing Around to “Blinding Lights.” (To be fair, it is a bop.) But more likes, you’d be into a new Final Destinationthe first in the franchise in over a decade. These Movies don’t need to be art; they just Need to kill in freaky Creative Ways. Though, as someone more into chomedies, i’ll just stick with the Charli xcx-EECTIVE-PRODUCED COMEDY, Overcompensing; Here’s everything Else.

Family Gatherings Can Already be A Pain, but imagine that Pain Being Asinine Deaths that CLAIME EVEREONE ONE BY. Its hard to believe there haen a new Final Destination Movie in 14 Years. But in Bloodlines, Final Destination Haunts a whole family marked for Death Because of an incident 50 years prior.

➼ here’s every Final Destination Death, Ranked, Plus Our Take On Bloodlines.

If you asced with if this show is good or swimming, i is couldn’t tel you. I HAD SO MANY QUESTIONS. (What year is this set? Why is every naïve College fremman here 30 years old?) And the yet i watched all of it, so take that you will. Created by Benito Skinner, AKA Benny dramaAKA ”Kourtney Kardashian” Overcompensing is a comedy series loosely based on Skinner’s Own Coming-Out Experience. He stars as a College Freshman Struggling with Staying in the Closet and Beppies Fellow Student Carmen (Wally Balam) As they awkwardly try to hook up.

Welsh Football Club Wrexham AFC is back and hoping to continue it rise through the English League System. The International Spotlight (and Considerable Resources) Brought by Co-Awners Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mcenney Will Surely Help, But Honestly, We’re Watching This Show for the Stories About Wrexham’s Players and Longime Local Fans. After all, while the fx series has just returned, the soccer he season is already over, and it is prey to find out the aneswer to the Question that Looms Over New Episodes: Can They Win Back-to-Back-to-back Promotions? —Tolly Wright

Will This Crash and Burn Like The idolor is Jenna Ortega’s Star Power Enough to Save Abel Tesfaye’s New Thriller? Does it help that Barry Keoghan is Also along for the Ride? A Companion Piece to His Album of the Same Name, The Movie Follows A FICTIONALIZED Version of the Weeknd, Spiraling from Drugs and Personal Stressses, WHO CROSSES PATHS WITH AN EQUALLY TROUNLOD FAN (ORTEGA). —Be

Sci-Fi Has Long Warned of the Dangers of Sentient Robots, But Murderbot wants to terminate that line of paranoid thinking. The adaptation of The Murderbot Diaries Stars Alexander Skarsgård as a Security robot that must hide it newly acquired free will. Also, His Real-Life Best Friend Jack McBrayere Makes an Appeaance, and That’s Nice! —Rexana Hadadi

Touring Comedian Tom Segura Tackles a Lofty Concept: What if a Show Could Be as Dark and Speculative AS Black Mirror But Also Function As A Sketch Comedy? He is aided in this efffort by head work Jeremy Konner, who co-created a simillar mash-up concept with the Cult hit Drunk History. – Rh

JJ abrams and latoya morgan created this’ 70s CRIME SHOW ABOUT A BLACK FBI AGENT (Rachel Hilson) Attempting to Take Down a Crime Syndicate with Help Who Works for It Its (Josh Holoway, Doing the Kind of Sawyer He Did On On On On On Lost; SOMESTEMES LIFE IS Good like that). –Jen Chaney

Hulu’s New Hit Reality Series is Back, Much to Our Recapper Olivia Crandall’s Delight. Read the rest of her recaps on the entertaining, bonkers sees here.

Move over, Thunderbolts*! Ryan Coogler’s Vampire Thriller is Getting Another Life in A Handful of Imax Theaters, Being Shown in 70-Mm. Get to it, though; this run isn’t eternal.

➼ if Sinners isn’t coming to an iMax theater near you, don’t worry: it shouldnt be out on Digital Soon. Probably.

It ‘s stacked year for drama – Severance, The Last of US, The Pitt, Squid gameto name a few – but if if Elder Gets No Emmys Recognition, I’ll Start a Rebellion of My Own. Tony Gilroy’s Series Is The Best Star Wars Show by a mile and has ben an incredible series by any Measure, with a poignant final serving as anching send-off: not just to diego luna, who starts his journey as cassian ten years, but to a fantastic supporting cast two-seasones anchorying. Elder. AFTER YOU’RE DONE, DIG INTO Rogue one and A New Hope.

➼ and, Scarlett Johansson is hosting the final of Snl50 this, well, you know when.

Brady Corbet’s Towering Oscar Winner – IT Left the 2025 Ceremony with Stators, Including Best Actor for Adrien Brody – Captivated audiences with its beautiful production, meticulous craft, and mercipul intermsion. How Will It Play at Home, Minute by Minute? At least that restroom line will be short.

➼ Plus, you can screen “Chicken Jockey!“In the Comfort of Your Own Home With A MINECRAFT MOVIE out on digital. For chiller vibes, Paddington in Peru is Now on Netflix.

Want More? Read Our Recommendations from the Weekend of May 9.