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In this paper, Nakamoto described in general terms how a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” Such a system would be “based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.”³¹⁷

In January 2009, Nakamoto posted the first version of the Bitcoin code to SourceForge, the open source software repository. He also created a website, bitcoin.org, and participated in code development and online discussions until late 2010,³¹⁸ when he handed control of the source code and the website to the Bitcoin community. Then he disappeared.

The technology underlying Bitcoin is called “blockchain.” This is a digital version of Datini’s bills of exchange,^§AS2.4.1a no less and not much more. The “no less” part is that it is a system where each block in the chain (Datini bill), is endorsed in every transaction (the transfer of ownership written on the back of the bill), and the record of the endorsement is kept in a ledger. The “not much more” is the duplication of the ledger across many computers, and the cryptographic techniques that are used to verify across all these computers that the record has been faithfully kept. The process of verification is called “mining.”³¹⁹

The people of Yap simply remembered who was the owner of a stone fei, trusting each other’s memories.^§AS2.4a Datini committed to writing the trust that was between trading partners whose acts of exchange were distanced by space and time, so establishing newly attenuated multimodal relations between text, objects, and persons. Late in his life, he institutionalized these textual forms in his nascent banking activities. Soon after, with these same instruments of meaning, the Medicis launched the modern world of finance capitalism.

Consider blockchain just to be writing, huge amounts of text, inerasable, never-to-be-spoken, written over and over again, not practically readable, only to be “read” by other computers for the purposes of multiple verification. Trust in the truthfulness of the chain is established by its exhaustive redundancy (recording over and over again every transaction ever), its multiple distributed recordings, and the fact that the historical record is always read and checked by any miner who chooses to join the chain.

There are some peculiarities in the Satoshi code. There can only be just under 21 million coins, so currencies using the code – Bitcoin is just one – are subject to inflation. And there is so much redundancy in the reading and writing, with the amount of text processed growing all the time, that mining uses environmentally calamitous amounts of electricity.³²⁰ All this energy just for prodigious amounts of practically unreadable writing, over and over again.

Blockchain is a return to the unmediated trust Datini had between partners in the exchange relation, before the establishment of banks and government-regulated finance. For this, it has won the breathless enthusiasm of libertarians who love the market but hate governments and mediating middle people in the form of bureaucratic, institutionalized banks.

Blockchain “disintermediates,” the enthusiasts say. “The simple genius of this technology is that it cuts away the middleman … It does this by taking the all-important role of ledger-keeping away from centralized financial institutions and handing it to a network of autonomous computers, creating a decentralized system of trust that operates outside the control of any one institution.”³²¹

It also dispenses with the need for government-regulated currencies and central banks. So say two authors in their book on the “cryptocurrencies” that have been built on Satoshi’s blockchain code. They were working at the time of writing at the Wall Street Journal. Blockchain is a “truth machine.” In what is perhaps an unconscious riff on Adam Smith, they say, blockchain is “a group of otherwise independent actors, each acting in pure self-interest, coming together to produce something for the good of all.”³²² Or at least, this is repeating the bit of Adam Smith that is selectively quoted by advocates of the unrestrained market.^§AS2.3.2a

And more, blockchain is a “powerful technology that has the potential to make many things in the economy and society more inclusive, secure, efficient, trustworthy and free.”³²³ Cryptocurrency has the potential to “bring billions of people from the emerging markets into a modern, digitized, globalized economy.”³²⁴

Grammatically speaking, when we parse blockchain as a kind of writing, when we analyze the ways in which it mediates differential interests, we find the same tension between solidary trust and antagonistic mistrust that has ever structured exchange relations. The trust is the faith held in the documentary record, in the establishment of roughly equivalent values at the point of exchange and monetization. But exchange also invariably involves antagonism; mistrust is built into its meanings.^§AS2.4b

For all of blockchain’s documentary trust – in ledgers, and cryptography, and expensive redundancy – every one of these artifacts is grounded in the same mistrust always to be found in the world of money. If anything, the greater security of blockchain is grounded in intensified mistrust. Blockchain is writing in the service of limitless mistrust. For this reason, Datini’s psychoses, the psychoses of merchant man, remain essentially unchanged, the same in quality if a lot more in quantity, caught again in the nexus of solidary and antagonistic interests. Says a blogger, Kai Stinchcombe, blockchain is for a “lawless and mistrustful world where self-interest is the only principle and paranoia is the only source of safety.”³²⁵

Now, as always, in the nether regions of the antagonisms of money and markets, inevitably there are to be found people taking the logic too far, where too far is systems-destructive. Phishing^§AS2.4b and scams abound. In the case of Bitcoin, the first was the “Mt Gox” con of 2011, where a very large tranche of bitcoins went missing.³²⁶

In the “dark web,” drug dealers, money launderers, extortionists, arms dealers, assassins, and their ilk have liked the way Bitcoin is outside the jurisdiction of governments. The FBI was trying to track down the drug trade, not the money trade, when it busted Ross Ulbricht, mastermind of “The Silk Road,” in 2013.³²⁷ A sign of recognition of the reality of currency, though immaterial, was that the FBI sold 144,336 Bitcoins it confiscated from Ulbricht for over $48 million.³²⁸

Unless the whole thing is, in a sense, fraudulent. No less an authority than Jamie Dimon, head of the bank, JPMorgan Chase, declared that Bitcoin was a “fraud”, and that he would fire any employee found trading the cryptocurrency for being “stupid.”³²⁹ Not that the ledgers of the big banks were any less than fraudulent in the lead-up to the 2008–9 financial crisis.

Sataoshi Nakamoto left a few tantalizing clues about his social agenda, his interest. The so-called “genesis block,” the first block of Bitcoin, was mined by Nakamoto himself on January 3, 2009, and includes the headline of the Times of London for that day, “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”³³⁰ Before he went silent, he said in a Bitcoin discussion forum, “It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly.” If it is, “we can gain a new territory of freedom.”³³¹

This is how the Satoshi Nakamoto of Temple City, California got swept into the conflicting swirl of interests around Bitcoin, and with this, the psychoses of exchange and markets that have plagued merchants and money movers since Datini.

Eleven days after publication, Newsweek published online at the foot of its article, the following statement:

My name is Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. I am the subject of the Newsweek story on Bitcoin. I am writing this statement to clear my name.

I did not create, invent or otherwise work on Bitcoin …

My background is in engineering. I also have the ability to program. My most recent job was as an electrical engineer troubleshooting air traffic control equipment for the FAA …

I have not been able to find steady work as an engineer or programmer for ten years. I have worked as a laborer, polltaker, and substitute teacher. I discontinued my internet service in 2013 due to severe financial distress …

My prospects for gainful employment has [sic] been harmed because of Newsweek’s article …

Temple City, California

March 17, 2014³³²

When Nakamoto asked a reporter for Milton Friedman’s proverbial “free lunch,”^§AS2.4a he was offered one, and accepted.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s public log showed that some Satoshi Nakamoto, somewhere, had retained almost one million Bitcoins, valued in December 2017 at US$19 billion.³³³

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³¹⁶ Leah McGrath Goodman, 2014, “The Face Behind Bitcoin,” Newsweek, 6 March.

³¹⁷ https://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/#selection-7.4–9.38

³¹⁸ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/

³¹⁹ https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page; John Lanchester, 2016, “When Bitcoin Grows Up,” London Review of Books 38(8):3–12; Roland Berger, 2017, “Enabling Decentralized, Digital and Trusted Transactions: Why Blockchain Will Transform the Financial Services Industry,” Munich: Roland Berger GMBE.

³²⁰ Alex de Vries, 2018, “Bitcoin’s Growing Energy Problem,” Joule 2(5):801–05.

³²¹ Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey, 2015, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order, New York: St Martin’s Press, p. 5.

³²² Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, 2018, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything, London: HarperCollins, pp. 5, 12.

³²³ Roland Berger, 2017, “Enabling Decentralized, Digital and Trusted Transactions: Why Blockchain Will Transform the Financial Services Industry,” Munich: Roland Berger GMBE.

³²⁴ Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey, 2015, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order, New York: St Martin’s Press, p. 4.

³²⁵ https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec

³²⁶ Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, 2018, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything, London: HarperCollins, pp. 87–88.

³²⁷ Nathaniel Popper, 2015, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, New York: HarperCollins, pp. 73ff.; www.wired.com/2013/11/silk-road/; www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/

³²⁸ http://fortune.com/2017/10/02/bitcoin-sale-silk-road/

³²⁹ www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/11/daily-chart-23?cid1=cust/ddnew/email/n/n/20171129n/owned/n/n/ddnew/n/n/n/nNA/Daily_Dispatch/email&etear=dailydispatch

³³⁰ https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

³³¹ https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

³³² Leah McGrath Goodman, 2014, “The Face Behind Bitcoin,” Newsweek, 6 March.

³³³ https://medium.com/@altcoininvestor/will-the-real-satoshi-nakamoto-please-stand-up-897189c4bdfb

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 287–291. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Satoshi Nakamoto’s Blockchain §AS2.4.1b