If Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, was who I believed him to be, he was not going to acknowledge it. He probably wouldn’t talk to me. And seeing him was going to mean sitting on a plane for 20 hours and driving another eight. But I needed to try to have a conversation with him, and it had to be face-to-face.

Nakamoto had disappeared in the spring of 2011. I learned about him that summer, when I wrote one of the first magazine feature articles about Bitcoin, the internet-based currency that operates beyond the control of a government or bank. Twelve years later, Bitcoin’s creator remained unknown and his enormous, multibillion-dollar fortune untouched. The modern history of science supplied no precedent for someone who brought a revolutionary technology into the world without taking credit, or spending a penny of the billions of dollars it earned him.

Could It Be Elon Musk?

The Vanishing

“We Do Not Know Who Satoshi Is”

But What If Bitcoin’s Founder Is a Toxic Villain?

“I Know Who Nakamoto Was”

‘I Have a Tendency to Talk Too Much’

There Is No Paternity Test for Bitcoin

Excerpted from The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto by Benjamin Wallace (Crown), out March 18.