I light my cigar in the dull light of my lamp, the smoke dancing lazily in the air. My gaze, almost frantic, catches on a name on the screen: Wei Dai.
It was there, right there, that everything started to accelerate. A name that crackled in my mind like a spark, a glimmer in the dense darkness of this investigation. Wei Dai, the man behind b-money, the one whose work could have been the key to everything. Just saying it sent a wave of icy excitement through me. It was like a jolt, a nervous shiver that ran through every nerve, every fiber of my body. Wei Dai… This enigmatic cryptographer. This name kept me awake, haunted me like a pernicious obsession. Why hadn’t I explored this lead sooner? Everything in his work, in his mathematical mind, seemed to whisper the very essence of Bitcoin. b-money… these two syllables struck my thoughts, bouncing like hammer blows on the anvil of my investigation. This “B”, this simple “B”, like that of Bitcoin. A coincidence? A key? I felt it, there, just below the surface.
Excitement burned in my mind, pushing me to dig, to search further. Wei Dai. He was there, almost within reach.
Wei Dai. Wei Dai. That name echoed in my head, swirling like an endless spiral. My heart was pounding, my feverish fingers desperately searching for an answer, a key in the darkness. Excitement consumed me, burned me from the inside. But why... why was Dai hiding in the shadows? A question that haunted me, gnawed at me, as if everything I thought I knew was about to collapse. I felt carried away, caught up in an uncontrollable dizziness. Wei Dai, yes, it could only be him! Every thought dragged me further, every detail wrapped itself around my mind like invisible tentacles, tightening a little more with each second. I was touching something, I could feel it... But everything I found brought me back to an immense void, to a bottomless pit. I was falling. A whirlwind, a vertigo, as if this truth that I was seeking always escaped me at the last moment, slipping away beneath my feet.
I reread the b-money whitepaper. Its precision, its almost clinical abstraction. Then I switched to the Bitcoin one. And there… something was wrong. A difference. Subtle, but very real. Wei Dai wrote like an architect of darkness, building structures of thought with the coldness of steel, where Satoshi seemed to weave a canvas with finer, almost delicate threads. Another dissonance suddenly struck me. Wei Dai had contributed to the development of Crypto++, a sophisticated cryptographic library. But why… why hadn’t Bitcoin used this tool? Why another way? My doubts rose, invasive, like creeping shadows ready to suffocate me. I found myself smiling, a smile twisted by the tension, by the idea that I was about to unravel the mystery. But no. Satoshi was not Wei Dai. I felt it deep inside me. It was as if I had been chasing a ghost. Dai, for all the similarities, was not that man who fled the light. He too preferred the shadows, but in a different way. He was not lurking in the dark like Satoshi, he was like an architect who observes his work from afar, never demanding recognition. Wei Dai and Satoshi Nakamoto. Two brilliant minds, but distinct. I clung to this conclusion as a cold, hard truth. But the excitement did not subside. No, it continued to grow, to push me to search again, to dig deeper.
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to calm the frantic beating of my heart. But the thoughts still swirled, as uncontrollable as the wind in a storm. Satoshi… Wei Dai… they were all connected, in one way or another, like pieces of a puzzle that I could not yet put together. And in this stretching night, I felt that the investigation, far from coming to an end, was only just beginning. A sprawling, endless investigation, with obscure and elusive ramifications. But I could not stop. Not now. Not after having come this far.
To be continued…
Disclaimer: This text is a work of fiction-reality. Everything written here is based on real events, but told in a way that resembles a detective novel. Although real names are mentioned, the story aims to explore the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto through the prism of a fictional investigation.
