The Satoshiness of Tominaga Nakamoto

Tom was basically a workaholic since he was a teenager. He grew up on his grand-daddies' knee, learning about computer code and human intelligence. His Grandfather had trained at the Marconi school of Wireless and their house had been one of the first to have Television in it.

Growing up, he'd been obsessed with all things Japanese. His mother's boyfriend had shown him a lot of kindness and he enjoyed martial arts, particularly Karate.

His mother worked hard. Sometimes three jobs to provide for him and his three sisters. Tom was the eldest. He adored his sisters and they adored him, although sometimes he was a bit mean to them, teasing them by hacking the computer games they'd play, making them die quickly, so he could have more time to play himself.

That was Tom. He had a big brain, and he knew how to use it, and he wanted to use it for good, but sometimes, every now and then, he'd use it to get up to naughty stuff. Like the time he changed everyone in his class's grades to reflect a little lower than they'd got, but left his own the same. Or the time he argued with his teacher in front of the whole class, and almost got expelled for correcting a text-book which explained something badly, or was just plain wrong.

Tom's childhood wasn't all idyllic, but it wasn't bad. He'd had to go to school with holes in his shoes sometimes, because his mother couldn't afford to pay for everything. The family who owned the fish-shop in his local neighbourhood seemed rich to him, and even the kids on welfare often seemed to have it better than him sometimes.

Growing up in that environment had made Tom acutely aware of the role of money in society, and how painful it was to live without it. But watching his mother work three jobs also gave him an example to follow. He wouldn't take welfare, and he decided that he'd never become a ward of the state.

Sometimes, he'd be left alone with the computer in his grandfather's study. It was an old Digital Equipement Corporation in a big clunky beige box with a green screen. If Tom typed too fast, the screen would lag and he'd have to wait for the words to catch up with him. He began exploring the networks that began to pop up. The universities had back doors and passwords were often simple 'password'. It was a golden era for hackers. There was tons of fun to be had.

As a chef, he'd been introduced to the idea of monetary tracing. If someone came in with a credit card and tried to pay, there was a book which the waitresses had to check to see if it was stolen or not. It was just a small detail, but Tom, who'd wanted to learn everything he could about money had picked up on this and gotten interested. How on earth did this stuff work? He wanted to know more.

As a chalkboy at the Melbourne stock exchange, he'd learned about trading and how an exchange worked. Money attracted him, it was endlessly fascinating. Why couldn't he create his own, and in fact, 'how' could he create his own? It was a question that he'd asked himself for as long as he could remember, a question that went to the core of his soul.

His grandfather had taught him a lot. They spent hours together, talking about how the world worked. Since his grandfather had worked in intelligence, he'd explained to young Tom that mostly, intelligence worked on the flow of information about money. He used the example of the Rothschild's messenger at the Battle of Waterloo to demonstrate his point at first. How the German banking family had used their 'pony express' to get the signal to their agents on the London Stock Exchange first, that Napoleon had lost, and instructed them to act sad, as if Nelson had lost, so that those British Bankers who were watching them would instantly want to sell their Sterling.

The Rothschilds, legend has it, made a killing right there on the floor of the London Exchange.

It was stories like this that demonstrated to young Tom the value of information, and he realised very early that the very nature of money was intimately entwined with it and how, as Isaac Newton had remarked, 'Knowledge is Power'. To him, it seemed that not only was information, money, but money, information.

And thus the stage was set. Young Tom set to work to discover everything he could about money and how to create a currency that could accurately price information, including the bits and bytes of a computer. You might say that it was his destiny.

When Tom reached adulthood he learned about the work of Satoshi Nakamoto, a little read Japanese economist and philosopher who'd set himself the task of understanding history according to the Buddhist scrolls. He noted that the local lords over the years had changed and interpreted the scripture to suit their own purposes, and wondered if were possible to create a system whereby history could not be changed or altered.

Satoshi, it turned out, had had some very dangerous ideas about trading with the western countries, ideas that had got him killed in the end. A sad ending for a briliant and quiet man, who'd struggled not only with the difficulty of recording truth accurately, but also with the economics of wealth amongst ordinary people. Nakamoto's position was that it was the people's right to trade freely with the world, but the Shogunate disagreed.

Tom became obsessed with Satoshi's ideas. In his 20s he created company after company as he learned more and more about how money worked, and as he created and worked, he learned more. It was intoxicating. He'd spend 20 hours a day at his computer screen, learning every language and technical approach to programming he could, eventually, he arrived at Nakamoto's solution, a 'Time Chain', a hashed record of every historical event in sequence, paid for with a tiny bit of money, a bit of "Bitcoin".

From the moment he'd read about the idea of a single world money in 1988, he'd strived to achieve his goal. It took him 20 years of dedication, hard work and grief, but his creation of Bitcoin was, he felt, perhaps his finest moment. He'd created an honest system of money that could blend information and value together into a giant global supercomputer.

He'd solved the problem of how to keep track of every little thing of value in the vast global economy, and yet, nobody knew his name. It should have been his crowning moment, but sadly, no one seemed to understand his invention, they just wanted digital gold, they wanted to buy and sell drugs, and launder money.

For Tom, who'd worked his entire life towards this end, it was gutting. He turned away from the project in digust, leaving another gentleman in charge with the simple words "I've moved on to other things".

He took a job as a suitcase man with the US military with a Narcotics Task Force down in Bogota, Columbia. For now, he was done with "Bitcoin". It was time to hunt terrorists and human traffickers.