I finished this book a few months ago but have revisited it recently for the purposes of this review plus the fact that I felt the need to re familiarise myself with its core tenets.

Right off the bat Solstin makes the case for Satoshi Nakamoto in fact being John Nash, the well known mathematician who won a Nobel prize in 1994, suffered from schizophrenia and about whom the film ‘A Beautiful Mind’ starring Russell Crow was made.

There are in fact quite a number of intriguing parallels between the two men and Solstin makes a compelling case.

Both Nash and Satoshi appear to have the same views on Austrian economics and of course on the idea of sound money. Nash published ‘Non Cooperative Games’ in 1950 which expanded on Adam Smiths ideas around Supply and Demand and the ‘Invisible hand of the market’ and which later became referred to as the ‘Nash Equilibrium’.

In 2002 John Nash published Ideal Money and lectured on the concept of ‘Asymtotically Ideal Money’ a decentralised and emergent money which as far as I can tell is no different from what Bitcoin has become.

The other aspect of this that I have pondered is that Satoshi (if he was an individual) was clearly a genius not just as a computer scientist and coder but also as an economics and maths whizz. John Nash for me is one of the very few people who had the breadth of skills to have written the white paper and bootstrapped Bitcoin.

There are actually so many parallels between the two men that Solstin describes and refers to as Nash Nakamoto ‘signatory attributes’.

Nash was apparently working on something secretive that he called the ‘big bang’ but which he never formally revealed before he died in 2015 in a car crash. Could this have been Bitcoin which he revealed anonymously in 2008 while at the same time publicly lecturing on Ideal Money?

The book is a short read and Solstin gets to the point without any unnecessary fluff which I found valuable. He also reiterates many of his key arguments throughout the book coming at the same information from different angles which actually kept me interested. His style as a writer I haven’t come across before and I found it refreshing.

If you guys are interested in Bryan Solstin he did a good podcast with Robert Breedlove where he talks about much of what is revealed in the book.

Was John Nash Satoshi? I don’t know for sure but it feels more plausible to me than most of the other candidates that have been put forward over the years. And Solstin presents a good case.