The brains behind Bitcoin is not a young tech genius or a pseudonym for a team of Silicon Valley geeks — but a secretive, 64-year-old Japanese-American man who builds model trains and whose own brother calls him "an a- -hole," Newsweek reported Thursday.
The magazine said it solved the mystery that has intrigued fans and foes of the virtual currency for years by tracking down shadowy ex-US military tech contractor Satoshi Nakamoto at his modest home in Temple City, Calif.
"He's wearing a rumpled T-shirt, old blue jeans and white gym socks, without shoes, like he has left the house in a hurry. His hair is unkempt, and he has the thousand-mile stare of someone who has gone weeks without sleep," wrote investigative reporter Leah McGrath Goodman.
"He stands not with defiance, but with the slackness of a person who has waged battle for a long time and now faces a grave loss."
The magazine said it conducted an exhaustive, two-month investigation of public records and interviewed a number of Nakamoto's Bitcoin cohorts and estranged family members before they were certain it was him.
But when they confronted him outside his home near Los Angeles, he refused to answer questions in any detail — then called the cops, Newsweek reported.
"So, what is it you want to ask this man about?" one of the officers asked Goodman. "He thinks if he talks to you, he's going to get into trouble."
"I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto," who personally owns as much as $500 million in Bitcoins.
"What?" the officer responded. "This is the guy who created Bitcoin? It looks like he's living a pretty humble life."
Nakamoto — who has done classified work for major corporations and the US military — at first corresponded via email with the reporter, who was posing as someone mainly interested in model trains and computer-aided design.
"He has been buying train parts from Japan and England since he was a teenager, saying, 'I do machining myself, manual lathe, mill, surface grinders,'" Goodman wrote about the mystery man, who has a degree in physics from California State Polytechnic University and has used the name Dorian S. Nakamoto since 1973.
But as soon as she asked about Bitcoin — which had worldwide transactions of as much as $500 million a day — Nakamoto clammed up.
The magazine also reached out to his relatives, including his youngest brother, Arthur Nakamoto, an engineer at a California company that makes radio frequency amplifiers.
"You want to know about my amazing physicist brother? He's a brilliant man. I'm just a humble engineer. He's very focused and eclectic in his way of thinking. Smart, intelligent, mathematics, engineering, computers. You name it, he can do it," he told the magazine, adding a warning.
"My brother is an a–hole. What you don't know about him is that he's worked on classified stuff. His life was a complete blank for a while. You're not going to be able to get to him. He'll deny everything. He'll never admit to starting Bitcoin," he said before hanging up.
Bitcoin is a virtual currency that can be sent like email anywhere in the world without bank or exchange fees and is stored on cellphones or hard drives until it is used again.
But it can be easily lost if the hard drive malfunctions or if the data is stolen by hackers.
"The whole reason geeks get excited about Bitcoin is that it is the most efficient way to do financial transactions," Bitcoin's chief scientist, Gavin Andresen, 47, told Newsweek.
Nakamoto, relatives and associates said, may have invented the computer code creating Bitcoin over his frustration with paying high fees when he was buying model train parts from England and Japan.
Andresen said working with Nakamoto could be difficult.
"He was the kind of person who, if you made an honest mistake, he might call you an idiot and never speak to you again," he said.
"He doesn't like the system we have today and wanted a different one that would be more equal. He did not like the notion of banks and bankers getting wealthy just because they hold the keys," Andresen said.
Nakamoto's family describe him to Newsweek "as extremely intelligent, moody and obsessively private, a man of few words who screens his phone calls, anonymizes his emails and, for most of his life, has been preoccupied with the two things for which Bitcoin has now become known: money and secrecy."
He was born in July 1949 in Beppu, Japan, a descendant of Samurai and the son of a Buddhist priest.
His mother, Akiko, divorced and brought Nakamoto and his two brothers to California in 1959. The 93-year-old woman now lives with him.
The brainy recluse has six children from two marriages, though he separated from his second wife, Grace Mitchell, 56, of Audubon, NJ, in 2000.
Nakamoto, she said, worked on security and communications as a software engineer for the Federal Aviation Administration in New Jersey after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"It was very secret. He left that job sometime in 2001 and I don't think he's had a steady job since," she told Newsweek, adding that her husband has had a stroke and prostate cancer in recent years.
Neither family nor colleagues could say why Nakamoto remained so secretive about his work — and the millions he has made from Bitcoin.
Andresen speculated that he simply wanted to keep flying under the radar.
"If you come out as the leader of Bitcoin, now you have to make appearances and presentations and comments to the press and that didn't really fit with Satoshi's personality," he told the magazine.
The revelation came after the suicide of 28-year-old Autumn Radtke, the CEO of First Meta, a Singapore-based Bitcoin exchange, jumped from a nearby 25-story apartment building last Wednesday.
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