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Students take an AP exam at West Potomac High School on May 10, 2011, in Alexandria, VA. | The Washington Post/Contributor via Getty Images This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. In high school, Jayden Dial worked on a podcast, planned school events, and made a film. That was on top of doing her homework and applying to college. But sometimes, she still felt like she wasn’t doing enough. Jayden, now 18, would see kids her age on YouTube talking about their packed routines — “I worked out, I meditated, I read my Bible” — and she’d think, “Oh my God, I need to be so, so productive.” This kind of productivity anxiety is probably familiar to many adults. I, for example, have been known to stress myself out watching reels of parents somehow cleaning their houses while kids play happily in the background.  But according to a new report by the nonprofit Common Sense Media and researchers at Harvard and Indiana University, the pressure to live a scheduled, optimized, perfected life has trickled down to teenagers, leading to symptoms of stress and burnout more closely associated with people decades older. Of the 1,545 teens the researchers surveyed, 56 percent felt pressure to have a “game plan” for their future lives, while 53 percent felt pressure to “be exceptional and impressive through their achievements.”  The findings challenge the stereotype of young people today as lazy and entitled iPad kids who just want to watch videos all day. In fact, researchers found that many teenagers have internalized a drive to succeed at the expense of their mental and physical health: Some reported that they didn’t prioritize self-care practices like getting enough sleep or talking with friends because they weren’t “productive.”  And more than a quarter of teens say they’re burned out, a feeling one likened to being “an overused machine in a factory […] You’re just doing the same thing over and over, and you don’t feel like you really have a purpose.” Such statements are disturbing to hear from kids still in high school. The report’s authors believe that their findings could help explain high levels of depression, anxiety, and sadness in young people. Rising rates of such mental health problems have often been blamed on smartphones and social media, but the Common Sense report paints a more complicated picture: Teens exist within a culture obsessed with achievement and success, while the traditional markers of having “made it” (a home, a steady job, a savings account) feel more out of reach every day.  Social media may intensify these obsessions, allowing kids to compare themselves to more “successful” teens (a depressing concept in its own right). But it’s just one part of a larger problem, one with no easy solutions. What’s needed is “a shift in what’s important,” Jayden said. “There needs to be a bigger emphasis on time to explore.” Teens are already stressed about their future The report’s authors started out by studying the effects of technology on teen mental health, said lead author Emily Weinstein, executive director of Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving, which studies the role of tech in people’s lives. But teenagers told them they needed to widen their lens, to look at everything going on in young people’s lives. The researchers ended up asking a nationally representative sample of kids aged 13–17 about six potential sources of pressure in their lives: the idea of a “game plan,” grades and achievement, appearance, social life, friendship, and activism.  The kids came from all over the country and from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, and the researchers also specifically reached out to Black and LGBTQ+ teens to make sure their experiences were represented. Kids with higher family income tended to feel more pressure around achievement, but there were no consistent differences by race. Teens, the researchers found, are more likely to be stressed out about their grades and their career plans than about having friends or looking good. And “this looming sense that you should have a plan for your future, and you should already be working toward it” has been a theme in the team’s research for some time, Weinstein said. She remembers a former teen adviser to the group who worried that she had “joined LinkedIn too late.” She was still in college. Social media can feed into this pressure. “Before, you just saw things on talk shows about these really amazing, talented, gifted kids. Now, you go on TikTok, you could find 10 of them,” Dial said. But teens told the researchers that the top source of pressure around achievement and future planning was adults in their lives, said Sara Konrath, one of the report’s authors and a professor of philanthropic studies at Indiana University Indianapolis. Parents, teachers, and coaches may be “doing their best to try to help teens, but not really understanding that we’re kind of pushing the teens to internalize some very unhealthy attitudes and behaviors.” Those behaviors include skipping sleep, exercise, or hobbies because they don’t fit into the larger plan. One 11th-grader told the researchers she loves books, but sometimes second-guesses herself because “I just feel unproductive sometimes when I’m reading.” In interviews, teens repeatedly expressed guilt over taking breaks, Weinstein said, feeling that “if you’re not performing, if you’re not striving, if you’re not doing something productive in some area, that somehow that is almost morally wrong.” Such attitudes can lead to burnout, experienced by 27 percent of teens in the study —  a state characterized by “emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and a lack of confidence that your effort will make a difference,” the report’s authors write.  Public conversations about burnout typically focus on adults — Anne Helen Petersen’s viral 2019 BuzzFeed essay “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” was about people in their 20s and 30s. But according to the Common Sense report, a lot of teens feel like they’re part of the burnout generation, and they’re experiencing the same ill effects many adults do, including fatigue, lack of interest in formerly fun activities, and potentially an elevated risk of developing depression. In addition to providing a clue about what might be driving some of the troubling trends in youth mental health, the research also offers a counter-narrative about why teens and young adults today aren’t reaching certain milestones — like starting to date or getting a driver’s license — at the same rate as their elders. “They’re kind of adulting in many other ways,” Konrath said. “Maybe the reason they’re not getting their license is because they’re in school all day and they come home and do five hours of homework.” How to help burned-out teens Though many adults wish kids would put their phones down and go play outside, we are the ones who created hustle culture and the obsession with productivity, as well as the economic conditions behind them.  Today’s young people are less optimistic about their economic futures than previous generations, Konrath said — they see what their parents are going through and worry about whether they’re going to be able to afford a house one day. They’re also constantly reminded of how much more unattainable the traditional markers of middle-class life are becoming, starting with annual headlines about record numbers of students applying to college (which could soon cost $100,000 a year).  It’s no wonder teenagers feel like they should already be on LinkedIn. “Certain aspects of childhood or teenagehood have been taken away from people my age,” Jayden said. Restoring what’s been taken from them won’t be easy. Self-care behaviors like exercise and spending time with friends do help — kids who engaged in them were less likely to be burned out, the report’s authors found. But “just giving kids another to-do list” is not going to fix the problem, Weinstein said.  Instead, kids need grownups to look at potential root causes of pressure and burnout, including a culture of “constant quantification” enabled by apps that allow schools to share every test score and assignment grade immediately with parents, Weinstein said. They also need to consider the world kids are growing up in, from climate change to school shootings. “When you’re a young person, a lot of times it can feel like the people in power do not have sympathy,” Jayden said. Jayden, now a first-year student at Stanford, does have some advice for teens her age and younger who feel like they have to have their lives all figured out. “It’s much better to experience newness and try new things rather than trying to figure out everything,” she said. “You have the rest of your life to be an adult.” What I’m reading USA Today columnist Marla Bautista wrote about evacuating her family ahead of Hurricane Milton, and the toll disasters like this can take on kids. “While the physical destruction receives significant attention,” she wrote, “there is much more damage that you don’t see, including the mental and academic destruction wreaking havoc in the lives of children.” A UK elementary school is encouraging kids to play in mud. Experts say it’s a great idea. UC Berkeley researchers studied how kids react to misinformation. Their study is very fun and involves aliens with dark glasses and lies about zebras. They also have advice for exercising kids’ “skepticism muscles.” My little kid has discovered Truman, a book about a brave tiny turtle (with an important guest appearance by a city bus). My big kid, as befitting the season, is into The Book of Mysteries, Magic, and the Unexplained. From my inbox In lieu of reader emails, today I’m going to share a few perspectives from students that I didn’t get to include in my recent newsletter on kids and politics. “I first got interested in politics in 7th grade through my National History Day year-long research projects, an enthusiasm that strengthened when I was in 8th grade during the 2020 election,” Hannah Cho, a high school senior and the national chair of the High School Democrats of America (HSDA), told me in an email. “I still remember watching the inauguration unfold on T.V. during breakfast and being eager to discuss President Biden’s inaugural address and Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem among other events that occurred during the historical day with my history teacher, Mrs. Linck.” Rishita Nossam, 16, the HSDA communications director, told me she started to get more interested in politics after seeing posts about Black Lives Matter on social media. Today, the biggest issues for her include gun violence, media safety, civics education, and reproductive rights: “Government should not have a right to interfere in the decisions that women make about their own bodies.” Finally, I’d love to hear what you’re hearing from kids and teens in your life about the pressure to achieve or plan for the future. Are the teens you know experiencing these pressures? And what’s the role of parents and caregivers in helping them navigate all this? Let me know at anna.north@vox.com.

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The Oura Ring 4 costs $350 and you have to pay an additional $6 monthly membership fee to access all of its features. | Paige Vickers/Vox; Oura Sleep tracking sounds like a dream. You get a gadget that tells you how you slept and then gives you tips on sleeping better and — boom — you’re better rested. As a parent of a young child, I know this is not how it would work for me, but I’ve been feeling desperate lately. If I’m sleeping less, then maybe with the help of a wearable, I could simply sleep smarter. That’s how I got drawn into the promise of the Oura Ring, a $350 device you wear on your finger to track a number of different health metrics, including sleep. You’ve probably seen a celebrity wearing one in the tabloids. Mark Zuckerberg wears one to optimize his sleep.  The big problem is that wearables don’t come with any guarantees. This fall, we’ve seen these gadgets gain new abilities like detecting sleep apnea and working as hearing aids, making wearables seem more and more like medical marvels. However, research over the years has shown that doctors don’t currently find data from these devices very useful in a clinical setting, and left to their own devices, consumers might feel worse when using a wearable. The positive effects of sleep trackers, in particular, are difficult to nail down. But if I just wanted a few data points to direct me toward better habits, surely a little ring couldn’t hurt. After spending a couple of days scouring medical journals in order to make a better decision about what a wearable could do for my sleep, however, I now feel more exhausted than ever. Buying a new gadget won’t fix that for a number of reasons. Nevertheless, if you’re thinking about using a wearable to improve your health, it’s helpful to know where the marketing stops and the proven benefits begin. Despite what the marketing suggests, very few wearables are FDA approved The Oura Ring 4, out this week, uses a variety of lights and sensors to measure your heart rate, respiration rate, blood oxygen, temperature, and movement. For an extra $6 monthly membership fee, you get access to things like detailed sleep analysis, advanced temperature monitoring, and reproductive health insights. The ring doesn’t have a screen; it connects to your phone via Bluetooth so you can see all your health data there. The Oura Ring “is not a medical device.” This is the first thing the company’s PR team told me when I reached out to them for this article. In its marketing, however, Oura does bring up the potential health benefits often, and it promotes its medical advisory board prominently on its website. Jason Russell, Oura’s vice president of consumer software, explained that the company is tapping into a real demand. “People want to understand their bodies and live long and healthy lives, but they don’t want another tech device to manage,” Russell said, flagging the discreteness of the Oura Ring. You can also use your health savings account (HSA) and flexible spending account (FSA) funds to buy an Oura Ring, which is confusing since you’re only supposed to use those for medical and dental expenses. The Oura Ring does not have FDA clearance, although it can be used with the FDA-cleared Natural Cycles app for menstrual cycle tracking. According to some reviewers, it is especially useful for women for this very reason. Natural Cycles describes itself as “a hormone-free alternative to the pill that is 93% effective with typical use.” This maze of regulations and clearances makes it hard to know if the Oura Ring, which is being marketed as a device that can improve your health, comes with real medical benefits. The same is true for other wearables, like the Apple Watch, which recently got FDA clearance for detecting sleep apnea. That’s on top of the device being FDA-cleared for detecting irregular heart rhythms and for recording electrocardiograms. (Smartwatches and fitness trackers from Google, Samsung, and Fitbit have similar clearances.) Even Apple AirPods Pro got clearance from the FDA this year for a new feature that turns them into “the first over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aid software device.” None of these devices are FDA approved. There’s a difference between FDA approval, which is a very involved process, and the less rigorous FDA clearance. There’s also a third designation called “de novo classification” reserved for low-risk devices that don’t already exist in the market. (The new hearing aid feature on the AirPods Pro got this designation recently.) The FDA acknowledges that its name gets tossed around in misleading ways, so much so that it has a whole explainer on what FDA approval actually means. So even though I can use this year’s leftover FSA dollars to buy an Oura Ring, the FDA has not put its stamp of approval on the device. Thanks to its partnership with Natural Cycles, the Oura Ring does enjoy a bit of that FDA-cleared glow, but that has nothing to do with the rest of its features.  In any case, you’d be forgiven for thinking a device you can buy with funds set aside for health care costs from a company that name-checks the FDA in its press release would lead to health benefits. When it comes to wearables, this isn’t always the case. What wearables do for our health At the end of the day, you might not need a stamp of approval from a government agency to know whether a gadget is useful to you. I bought an Apple Watch not because I wanted something to alert me of an irregular heartbeat but because I liked getting notifications on my wrist. It’s easier to glance at a text message on my watch than it is to pull out my phone. The fitness tracking that comes with the watch is a bonus, and I can confidently say I move my body more because my watch tells me to. Research suggests that smartwatches and other fitness trackers are best at this. A systematic review covering nearly 200,000 study participants published in the Lancet in 2022 found that wearables indeed improved physical activity and helped people lose weight. People who wore fitness trackers walked an extra 1,800 steps a day, on average. But they had little effect on other health markers, including blood pressure and cholesterol. A smaller meta-analysis in the BMJ, a peer-reviewed journal from the British Medical Association, showed similar conclusions: over 1,200 extra steps a day. Fitness tracking, it seems, leads to better fitness. Sleep tracking is not so clear-cut. Whether it’s on your wrist, under your mattress, or wrapped around your finger, a sleep tracker will measure everything from your movement and body temperature to your heart rate and blood oxygen in order to determine how long you’ve slept and how well. The idea here is that by having more details about how you slept, you could link what you did before bed — say, rigorous exercise, drinking, or doomscrolling on your phone — with your quality of sleep. If bad habits lead to bad sleep, you can stop the bad habits. Many sleep trackers will crunch all that data through an algorithm that spits out a score. (The Oura Ring’s app gives you three scores: one for sleep, one for activity during the day, and one for “readiness” which tells you on a scale of 1 to 100 how ready you are for the day.) Experts warn that these scores can be arbitrary, if not downright useless. Plus, most trackers can’t directly measure brain activity, which is the standard for diagnosing sleep disorders. Furthermore, obsessing over sleep data, scores, and metrics can actually increase anxiety and lead to worse sleep, according to a recent study from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. It’s possible that some of this data could come in handy in a clinical setting. Newer Apple watches can perform an ECG that’s roughly as good as what you’d get in a doctor’s office, according to one study. The problem is, for now, it’s not always easy for doctors to get access to the data collected by wearables. This is not to say that doctors aren’t optimistic about a future in which they can access that data. Many doctors tell their patients to buy wearables and use them to help manage disease, especially heart-related issues that devices like the Apple Watch are designed to detect. Medical device or not, all wearables come with benefits and drawbacks, largely depending on how you use them. The Oura Ring rabbit hole I fell into left me feeling more confident about how I was using the one wearable I own, my Apple Watch. It also talked me out of buying an Oura Ring. To be clear, I haven’t tried the new Oura Ring, and for now, I’m holding off. Even though I do have some FSA funds to spend before the end of the year, I think the sleep-tracking function would make me anxious in the long run. At this phase of my life, sleeping smarter isn’t exactly an option. I simply need more hours in the day, and that gadget has not been invented yet. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Ian West/PA Images via GettyA hotel worker called 911 to request urgent assistance before musician Liam Payne fell to his death from the third floor of the building in Buenos Aires on Wednesday.The 31-year-old British singer and former member of the boy band One Direction died after he “jumped from the balcony of his room,” Buenos Aires Security Ministry Communications Director Pablo Policicchio told the Associated Press. He added that police had been called to the Casa Sur Hotel in the Argentine capital after receiving an emergency call shortly after 5 p.m. local time about an “aggressive man who could be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.”A transcript of a 911 call published by the BBC shows a worker at the hotel telling the operator that they have “a guest who is high on drugs and who is trashing the room” and the staff therefore “need someone to come.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

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In 2009, someone going by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin — the world’s first cryptocurrency. | Getty Images/Janos Kummer Despite what a new HBO documentary suggests, the identity of one of the richest people in the world is still unknown. By now, the story is so famous that it’s taken on the aura of a creation myth: one day in early 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the inventor of bitcoin, released the world’s first cryptocurrency. Two years later, Nakamoto vanished seemingly forever. Since then, countless theories on who the real Nakamoto is have been advanced, with no single candidate coming out on top. Whether Nakamoto’s anonymity is merely an entertaining mystery, a necessity for privacy, or a worrisome concern depends on who you ask. For filmmaker Cullen Hoback, whose documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery premiered on HBO last week, finding the mysterious bitcoin founder is a matter of public interest — and Hoback believes he has unmasked him as a 39-year-old Canadian bitcoin developer named Peter Todd. Since the film’s release, Todd and other prominent voices in the community have dismissed Hoback’s arguments. According to them, Nakamoto remains an enigma. Many bitcoin enthusiasts prefer it that way. But it’s obvious why the search has endured over the past 15 years. Bitcoin is far and away the most popular digital currency in the world, with a market cap of about $1.3 trillion at the time of writing. (For comparison, the second biggest, ethereum, has a market cap of $312 million.) For those who believe a decentralized alternative to government-issued currencies — like the US dollar — is crucial to protect individual privacy and freedom, Nakamoto is akin to Prometheus bringing the gift of fire from the gods. Then there’s this mind-boggling possibility: if reports that Nakamoto might hold as much as 1.1 million bitcoins are true, they could be sitting on a fortune of over $70 billion, making them one of the 25 wealthiest individuals on Earth, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires ranking. But Nakamoto doesn’t seem to have spent any of it — at least, not anything in their confirmed bitcoin wallets.  What does it mean for the rest of us that such an enormous treasure chest remains in the hands of an unknown entity, whose true aims and intentions can’t be determined? Who benefits if Nakamoto remains in the shadows — and who benefits if they’re revealed? What we know about the bitcoin creator The internet user Satoshi Nakamoto first appeared in 2008, when they published a paper to a cryptographic technology mailing list laying out a system that they had dubbed bitcoin. It would function as a form of digital cash that people could use to send money back and forth without involving any kind of bank. In other words, one could reliably make and receive payments completely anonymously. There was a clear ideological aim: in Nakamoto’s view, the ability to keep your financial record out of the surveillance and reach of powerful authorities, whether it’s large private banks or the government, is an important personal freedom. Such institutions, after all, aren’t infallible. In one illuminating forum post in 2009, Nakamoto wrote that “the root problem with conventional currency” was “trust.” “Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve,” they continued. “We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.” When Nakamoto created the very first block that would become the bitcoin blockchain, they included a message referencing a headline in the British newspaper The Times that day: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” The top suspects, and why Nakamoto’s identity is still up for debate Nakamoto’s writings indicate that they’re most likely someone with a strong understanding of economics, computer science, and modern cryptography — which involves methods and technologies for keeping information secure, like encrypting a message that can only be unlocked with a special key. Unsurprisingly, the commonly advanced candidates for who Nakamoto could be are self-identified “cypherpunks” — a community of mainly computer scientists who advocate for using cryptography to protect digital privacy. According to Hoback, director of Money Electric, Peter Todd fits the bill. Todd is a libertarian pro-privacy advocate who, among other things, is a huge proponent of using cash because it’s harder for governments and banks to track your spending. As a teenager, he was already communicating with older, respected cypherpunks and seemed unusually knowledgeable about bitcoin despite his youth. Todd would have been 23 years old when the bitcoin white paper was published. Hoback builds his case primarily on the fact that Todd joined the message board Bitcointalk.org in 2010 right before Nakamoto stopped posting. But the crux of Hoback’s argument hinges on an interaction between Todd and Nakamoto on Bitcointalk. Nakamoto had posted something technical about how bitcoin transactions work; about an hour and a half later, Todd replied with a small disagreement. Hoback contends that the reply actually reads more like someone finishing their previous thought — that Todd had signed into the wrong account to make an addendum to the original Nakamoto post. In the film, he also points to a chat log in which Todd calls himself a foremost authority on sacrificing bitcoin, which Hoback connects to the fact that Nakamoto hasn’t done anything with their coins in all these years (at least, that we know of). It’s an intriguing interpretation, but not exactly a smoking gun.  Hoback, both in interviews and within Money Electric, portrays Todd as someone who enjoys playing games over whether he could be the bitcoin founder, laughing on camera as the filmmaker explains why he believes Todd is Nakamoto — at one point saying with a smirking grin, “Well, yeah. I’m Satoshi Nakamoto.” On X, though, Todd has firmly denied that he’s Nakamoto. In an email to Vox, Hoback wrote that Todd stopped speaking to him after filming this scene. The other main person of interest in Money Electric is Adam Back, a British cypherpunk in his 50s whose work toward a functional digital currency was cited in Nakamoto’s original bitcoin paper. One reason Hoback finds Back suspicious is that he became more active in the bitcoin world — specifically concerned with how to make transactions completely anonymous — right after speculation emerged that Nakamoto controlled over 1 million bitcoins, more than previously thought. Unlike Todd, Back has stridently distanced himself from even joking suggestions that he could be Nakamoto. Other commonly floated contenders include prominent cypherpunk figures such as Hal Finney, who died in 2014 and was the recipient of the first test bitcoin transaction that Nakamoto sent, and Nick Szabo, who came up with the concept of “smart contracts,” a crucial function of many blockchains today. One wild suggestion claims that the Japanese etymology behind Satoshi Nakamoto can roughly translate to “central intelligence,” a sign that bitcoin was in fact invented by the CIA as some sort of trap. Another conspiracy theory — practically a meme at this point — posits that Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk is the real Nakamoto. (He denies it.) It isn’t clear whether Nakamoto is still alive, or even whether they’re one person rather than a group of people working together. Early this year, an unknown person sent 26.9 bitcoins (worth approximately $1.8 million today) to Nakamoto’s dormant wallet, firing up fresh excitement over where Nakamoto is and what they might be doing.  How do you track down a mystery like Nakamoto? Should you even try? Since 2011, Nakamoto hasn’t emailed or posted anywhere under their username. They also haven’t used the crypto wallets associated with that name. But even if someone is determined to remain in the shadows, and has left no obvious evidence giving them away, there are bound to be some breadcrumbs. Much of the theorizing around Nakamoto depends on analyzing their style of coding and writing. Hoback, at one point in the film, nods to the fact that Nakamoto and Todd both used slurs that could indicate immaturity. Another commonly noted marker is that Nakamoto often used British English spelling (such as “favour”), and Todd is Canadian. But other linguistic comparisons of commonly used words and phrases have been made that inconclusively point to other candidates. On the forum, Nakamoto often uses a double space at the start of a sentence, while Todd does not. Both Back and Todd pepper in dashes to break up clauses in a single sentence — Nakamoto doesn’t. Could the stylistic differences be a cunning, intentional misdirection? No one knows. Ultimately, none of these tics add up to definitive proof. Many in the bitcoin world conjecture that Nakamoto disappeared because WikiLeaks — the site where Julian Assange published many leaked documents — appeared poised to start accepting donations in bitcoin, which might lead to more attention on Nakamoto. In one of their last known communications, Nakamoto wrote to bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, “I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle.” In the last known email, sent in April 2011, Nakamoto claimed they were no longer involved with bitcoin. It’s clear that Nakamoto never intend to out themselves — and, indeed, they seem to argue that there’s no point. Bitcoin is now out of their hands. So how much does their identity matter? Hoback argues that it matters a lot due to how important bitcoin has become. “Bitcoin is already being baked into our financial system,” he told Vox, referring to its acceptance as legal tender in some countries and the fact that it could now be included in 401(k)s. Nakamoto potentially controls a significant portion of the total limited supply of bitcoin; if they one day decided to come forward and start moving (and spending) the coins in their possession, such an enormous sell-off could be destabilizing for the cryptocurrency. If they spend their riches, there’s also arguably a public interest in knowing where so much money is going, and whether it has any political impact. Acknowledging the possibility that Nakamoto could be multiple people, Hoback continued, “This group is making themselves super rich while saying no one should look into Satoshi. Isn’t that a little suspicious?” If you believe that holding the powerful to account is important, then Nakamoto’s insistence on anonymity stands against the transparency that such accountability requires. It’s no secret that many of the world’s richest people have historically cleaved to remaining as private as possible, using elaborate financial structures and tax havens to avoid scrutiny of what their money is funding. Then again, there’s no proof that Nakamoto has spent any of their fortune. Their known bitcoin hoard is a rough value of net worth, not yet used for anything — and we know this because all bitcoin transactions are part of a public ledger. If they started cashing in their bitcoin stockpile, that could make it easier for people to find their real-life identity, which is an incentive for Nakamoto to leave that stash untouched. (It is curious, though, that in late September about $13 million worth of bitcoin mined in the very early days of the cryptocurrency suddenly moved.) Perhaps there’s a better question than whether it matters who Nakamoto is: How important is it that the inventor of bitcoin remains a mystery? From the perspective of the cypherpunks, it’s crucial. There’s a financial motivation — the reveal of Nakamoto’s real identity could tank the price of bitcoin. But Nakamoto’s lasting anonymity is also an ideological resistance to government authority in an increasingly surveilled digital world. Many key figures in the bitcoin community unequivocally express a desire for Nakamoto’s identity to stay a secret – according to Hoback, Todd seemed displeased that people had found Nakamoto’s million-plus bitcoin stash, and told him to leave Nakamoto alone. There’s also the potential danger someone could be in if others think they’re Nakamoto. In a comment to the New Yorker, Todd told the publication that Hoback had put his safety at risk by accusing him of being a multi-billionaire, and that he would soon be doing “some unplanned travel.” (He has not responded to an email from Vox.) Todd isn’t wrong that prior attempts to unmask Nakamoto have disturbed people’s personal lives — take the case of Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a former engineer and programmer in California who was the subject of a Newsweek report claiming he was the bitcoin God. Dorian Nakamoto has categorically denied even knowing what cryptocurrencies are, and has said the accusation and public scrutiny caused a “great deal of confusion and stress” for him and his family. In response, Hoback told Vox that other people long suspected of being Nakamoto — like Nick Szabo and Adam Back — are fine. Toward the end of the Money Electric, Todd says that the hunt for bitcoin’s Nakamoto is yet another example of “journalists really missing the point.” The point, he elaborates, is “to make bitcoin the global currency.” But if that came to fruition — and it isn’t close to becoming reality yet — then ironically, Hoback’s argument for hunting down the bitcoin mastermind would only become more compelling to both the general public and almost certainly to governments around the world. The surest way to protect Nakamoto’s anonymity seems to be for bitcoin to not become a widespread alternative threatening government-issued currencies — to not become too important.

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