LinkedIn Presents.

The first time journalist Ben Wallace heard the word Bitcoin was in the summer of 2011.

I got a call from an editor at Wired Magazine, which I had written for one time.

The editor was looking for someone to write about this newfangled digital currency.

But I was an unlikely person to call in that I was kind of a ludate former English major,

not a computer guy, didn't know how to code,

but it immediately got my attention.

Because it was totally new, a new kind of money. That doesn't

come along every day. The British pound is 1,200 years old, the dollar 230. And Bitcoin

wasn't just new. It was different. Unlike the pound or the dollar, it wasn't issued by a central bank.

Instead, Bitcoin relied on a network of volunteer computers spread all over the world.

Together, these computers maintained a public ledger, also known as the blockchain, to track every transaction.

Put another way, Bitcoin was independent and decentralized.

It was punk, countercultural, anarchist, libertarian.

It was unregulated and untested, risky and alluring.

And there was something else that got Ben's attention.

This invention that was already beginning to get some traction had an inventor and no one knew

who it was other than this pseudonym.

Satoshi Nakamoto.

Two and a half years earlier, on Halloween 2008, as children donned costumes,

Satoshi performed his own masquerade,

appearing out of nowhere on an obscure cryptography email list to outline his idea for Bitcoin.

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