In November 2011, journalist Benjamin Wallace published “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin” in Wired magazine (issue 19.12) — one of the earliest major feature articles on Bitcoin in mainstream media. The article traced Bitcoin’s entire arc to date: from Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper, through the mining boom and price explosion, to the hacks, scams, and disillusionment that followed.
On the early praise Bitcoin drew, the article gathered notable voices:
Wei Dai, inventor of b-money, calls it “very significant”; Nick Szabo, who created bit gold, hails bitcoin as “a great contribution to the world”; and Hal Finney, the eminent cryptographer behind RPOW, says it’s “potentially world-changing.”
The article described how Gavin Andresen bought 10,000 bitcoins for $50 and created the Bitcoin Faucet, giving them away — the faucet’s own article covers the giveaway itself but not this funding detail. Laszlo Hanyecz conducted the first real-world Bitcoin transaction — paying 10,000 BTC for two pizzas.
For an exact figure, the bitcointalk.org migration entry records precisely 575 posts by Satoshi, from November 2009 to December 2010.
On Satoshi’s identity, the article floated theories:
Perhaps, it was suggested, Nakamoto wasn’t one man but a mysterious group with an inscrutable purpose—a team at Google, maybe, or the National Security Agency.
Laszlo Hanyecz:
“I exchanged some emails with whoever Satoshi supposedly is. I always got the impression it almost wasn’t a real person. I’d get replies maybe every two weeks, as if someone would check it once in a while. Bitcoin seems awfully well designed for one person to crank out.”
On Satoshi’s Wikileaks plea (December 5, 2010), the article quoted his rebuff:
Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto on December 05, 2010, 9:08:08 AM UTC“No, don’t ‘bring it on.’ The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to Wikileaks not to try to use bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”
On Satoshi’s disappearance, Wallace wrote:
Then, as unexpectedly as he had appeared, Nakamoto vanished.
Wallace described how Andresen was one of the last people Satoshi communicated with. On April 26, 2011, Andresen told fellow coders:
“Satoshi did suggest this morning that I (we) should try to de-emphasize the whole ‘mysterious founder’ thing when talking publicly about bitcoin.”
Then Nakamoto stopped replying even to Andresen’s emails. Bitcoiners wondered plaintively why he had left them. But by then his creation had taken on a life of its own.
On Satoshi’s coding style and likely age, the article gathered guesses.
Amir Taaki:
“His style of notation was popular in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Maybe he’s around 50, plus or minus 10 years.”
Dan Kaminsky:
“I suspect Satoshi is a small team at a financial institution. I just get that feeling. He’s a quant who may have worked with some of his friends.”
On the deeper question beneath it all, Wallace turned reflective:
And yet, unmistakably, beneath the paranoia and infighting lurked something more vulnerable, an almost theodical disappointment. What bitcoiners really seemed to be asking was, why had Nakamoto created this world only to abandon it?
On trust and security failures, Jeff Garzik was blunt:
“People have the mistaken impression that virtual currency means you can trust a random person over the Internet.”
Garzik on the end of the mining gold rush:
“People are getting sick of the high electric bills, the heat, and the loud fans.”
On Stefan Thomas’s timestamp analysis, the article noted:
Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and active community member, graphed the time stamps for each of Nakamoto’s 500-plus bitcoin forum posts; the resulting chart showed a steep decline to almost no posts between the hours of 5 am and 11 am Greenwich Mean Time.
Chain Bulletin would revisit this same GMT-based approach nearly a decade later, drawing on a far larger dataset of 742 timestamped forum posts, commits, and emails to reach a similar conclusion — see Chain Bulletin’s 2020 London hypothesis analysis.
In closing, the article returned to Garzik on Satoshi’s identity:
But Garzik, the developer, says that the most dedicated bitcoiners have stopped trying to hunt down Nakamoto. “We really don’t care,” he says. It’s not the individuals behind the code who matter, but the code itself. And while people have stolen and cheated and abandoned the bitcoiners, the code has remained true.