I wondered this for most of a decade myself.

It turns out that human beings absolutely depend on narrative stories to understand and relate to the things in their world.

Narratives, of course, have characters. Characters without identity are like an itch that must be scratched, because the narrative is central to integrating the thing the narrative is about (bitcoin) into a normal human being’s life. We are social animals and cannot truly consider the “what” independent of the “who”. (Even the “why” is related to the “who”, because it relates to the motivations of the character in the narrative).

The other bit of wisdom I was able to intuit out of this conclusion is that it is absolutely essential to make sure you are constantly crafting and promulgating your own narrative to everyone you know or who might know or know about you. Humans are so narrative-desperate that they will fill in and manufacture a narrative for you (which may or may not reflect any objective reality whatsoever) if they are not provided one in advance.

Tell your own story, loud and often, otherwise others will invent one and tell it for you.

He would reach mythical status if he were found to have upended both the cryptographic industry and financial industry as well as run a multi-continental crime empire.

> if he were found to have upended both the cryptographic industry and financial industry

How exactly has he up-ended the financial industry?

None of the differences in how 99.9% of the world pays for things, over the past 10 years, have anything to do with BTC.

How has he upended the cryptographic industry? Nobody actually building products, or using cryptography for useful things is basing it off BTC.

BTC created a new financial market, sure. It has not 'upended' industries that solve actual problems.

> Name one major bank not working on blockchain tech right now.

Name one major bank actually shipping something blockchain related that works better then what we had before.

Major banks occasionally announce that they are tinkering with it. There's a couple of reasons for why they do so.

1. Some senior engineer who is personally interested in cryptocurrencies with political clout wants to work on a hobby project, and is chums with his boss, who said yes. It's never going to see the light of day, but who said big institutions are smart?

2. They want to be seen as hip places for engineering talent. What better way to do so, then to claim that there's people in the organization working on magical unicorns (Even though none of their work will ever see the light of day.)

3. Idiot board members/shareholders who don't understand anything about banking or crypto are asking directors 'What are you doing about crypto,' so the company builds a Potemkin village, to tick a checkbox on their next quarterly earnings call. The village will be torn down, and the villagers shot, as soon as this checkbox disappears.

In short, the list of valid reasons for a bank to work on cryptocurrency are:

1. Someone with pull started a vanity project that slipped past the beancounters.

2. Cynical marketing for purposes of developer outreach.

3. Covering-your-ass against a powerful idiot, who wants to know why you are busy doing real work, instead of chasing a fad that he read about on Buzzfeed.

Notice how this list omits "Building a useful product that will make us more money."

LMAO - I work in IB and this is spot on.

"Blockchain" is also a really vague term. Depending on your definition, git may well be using blockchain technology, and submitting patches for it could count as working on blockchain stuff.

>Notice how this list omits "Building a useful product that will make us more money."

Absolutely. I remember seeing an email at a previous employer about their new blockchain as a service offerings. I looked at a couple of the examples they gave - the first was an over-engineered revision history system, and the second was a chain of trust that had no way to account for the item being swapped out or tampered with in transit. But I'm sure they bragged about it to their investors.

> What is added to the social value of bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general?

Authoritative leadership. Nakamoto filled this role historically, and since becoming absent Bitcoin has faced a scalability crisis, and resulting loss of confidence leading to forks. Arguably this has prevented Bitcoin gaining greater use as a currency and payment system, rather than as an investment.

Founders often serve the role of a steward in open projects, and help give direction to development. Examples are Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall and Richard Stallman.

Cryptocurrencies in particular need a consensus on what is the canonical version of the software, so lack of authority is detrimental.

> Authoritative leadership. Nakamoto filled this role historically...

I would argue the exact opposite. Satoshi's anonymity is a boon for Bitcoin. As long as he remains unknown, the project rises and falls on its own merits and market forces and consensus hold sway. We're he to be inserted into the picture, especially at this time, a dangerous dependency and cult of personality could arise. Not even going into the issue of what effect the billions of BTC in his name would have.

It matters as much as the new royal baby. People have a fixation with these things.

So that was my initial (curmudgeonly) reaction but I posted my question with an open mind and the responses have honestly changed my perspective.

At the very least, this story matters just the way general human interest stories matter, as entertainment.

It matters for some because whoever Satoshi is, is in control of a whole lot of Bitcoins.

Which have, also interestingly, never been transferred.

Possibly because he's been in jail for the past 7 years.

I dunno, for my part it's interesting to understand that the person who invented Bitcoin also wrote TrueCrypt.

That's two "hits".

The article by no means establishes your assertion.