I won't confirm how long I've been involved in Bitcoin, but let's just say that I go way back.
I didn't invent Bitcoin, but most everyone involved in Bitcoin follows me on Twitter. As I write this I have 10,993 followers, a surprising amount of which are verified. I like to say that I create artisanal Bitcoin pasquinade, but others would simply say that I operate the parody Satoshi Nakamoto Twitter account @Satoshi_N_.
"Well, this sucks."
On 6 March, 2014 I woke up to what then seemed like an unimaginable amount of strange news. The CIA announced they were looking into allegations that Senate staffers were being spied on, doctors were suggesting the second child to be born with HIV might be in remission after an intensive treatment following birth, Crimean officials were proposing a referendum to leave Ukraine to join Russia, and Newsweek was claiming to have found Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin.
To me this news was particularly astounding. In these types of situations the tech-savvy Bitcoin community motto is distrust but verify. It took startlingly little time for everything Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto had ever posted online to come under the glaring spotlight. People were even analyzing the grammar of his online reviews of butter cookies. I decided there was a more productive use of my time. I started my first and only parody Twitter account and I tweeted, "Well, this sucks."
I was suprised that this simple first tweet was noticed at all. More than a few folks were scouring teh webz for any trace of Dorian, and folks seemed to delight in the jokes coming from @DorianSatoshi, which was the original handle before I forked it to @Satoshi_N_. It's quite easy to poke fun at such an absurd situation when you start with a little more knowledge than others. I began poking fun at the journalists on Dorian's lawn, using tidbits of information I could glean from the photos they were tweeting. Fun fact: local journalists love to retweet it when you make fun of competing journalists if it's at least slightly funny and not too mean-spirited. There was a plethora of puns to be made using cryptocurrency terminology. Those early tweets almost wrote themselves.
"Many of the smartest people in the world are expecting me to prove a negative. FML"
That Thursday just grew increasingly absurd as the mob of journalists became a desperate caravan careening down the highway after an AP journo's hybrid in the #bitcoinchase. They stopped at a restaurant, and then opted to bring Dorian into AP HQ to feed him the free lunch they had promise, and then question him.
"Hypothetically speaking, how much trouble could one be in if he implied he created Bitcoin in order to get free sushi? Asking for a friend."
To my astonishment I had accumulated more followers with this parody account in 8 hours than I had with my actual Twitter account over the course of 8 years. I suddenly had the ear of powerful venture capitalists, cryptographers, newspaper editors, and many more people that I greatly admired. People like Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, Patrick Byrne, Andreas Antonopoulos, Erik Voorhees, Nic Cary, and Roger Ver. Even Leah McGrath Goodman, the author of the infamous article, became a follower.
"Moving stuff out of cold storage. Specifically my leftovers from Olive Garden. Cold storage is what I call my refrigerator."
Dorian being outed was tangentially going to impact a project I had been working on for months. I still am not sure if that work will one day see the light, but creating that Twitter account was a way for me to cast aside the frustration of having to begin something new. I had no inkling of the profound impact it would have on me, nor how much it would consume me. I was naive to how much deeper down the Bitcoin rabbit hole you have to go if you're going to don the mantle of Satoshi. What had begun as a lark had suddenly led to private discussions with amazing people, and over time would impact my outlook on a great many things.