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The $100 Billion Ghost

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On the afternoon of 26 April 2011, a man or a woman or possibly several people wrote a short email to a programmer in England. The email was about a minor technical matter. At the very end, almost as an afterthought, the author wrote: “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”

Then they closed the laptop. And disappeared.

Seventeen years later, the “other things” they walked away from is now worth roughly two and a half trillion dollars. A personal wallet holding around 1.1 million Bitcoin, left behind and untouched since 2010, currently valued at over a hundred billion dollars, sits on the public ledger like a buried treasure that everybody can see and nobody can open. Its owner has never sold a single coin.

Nobody knows who they are.

Confession:

Bitcoin has always been a ghost to me. I have never owned any, never mined, never traded. But after my article on the global banking system, one of my readers asked the same question; what about crypto? So here we go.

The Halloween Paper

On 31 October 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis, an email went out to a small cryptography mailing list. It was signed by someone calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto, a name nobody on the list recognised. Attached…