I sold my soul FOR bitcoins

Jake Adelstein and Nathalie Stucky

(Éditions Marchialy, 244 pages, 2019)

*** TEXT IN ENGLISH AVAILABLE ON REQUEST ***

If you look at Bitcoin as a religion, and many people seem to, then Satoshi Nakamoto would be God—an absent and precarious God, but God nevertheless. Roger Ver, who funded many of the Bitcoin start-ups and popularized the currency, would earn the name Bitcoin Jesus . . . and Mark Karpelès would be Saint Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John . . .

—Jake Adelstein

In 2014, American journalist Jake Adelstein began investigating the collapse of Mt. Gox, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange platform, based in Tokyo. Eight hundred fifty thousand Bitcoins, the equivalent of $500 million, disappeared overnight. Mark Karpelès, Mt. Gox’s creator and CEO, became the primary suspect in one of the largest criminal cases of the digital age so far. Mark was a wanted man, sought after not only by the Japanese police and the FBI but also the thousands of individuals who had lost their savings in this new breed of heist. In this riveting investigation, Adelstein takes us into the shady world of cryptocurrency and cybercrime in search of the truth. What really happened? Who did it? Where did the money go? 

Bitcoin is one of the existing virtual currencies that was supposed to do for money what the Internet did for information. Instead, it unleashed real-world chaos—especially in the homeland of its elusive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. As Adelstein tries to track down Nakamoto—a quest that remains inconclusive—he discovers that no one knows who Nakamoto really is. He may not even be Japanese. Turning his attention to the creation of Mt. Gox, Adelstein offers a sardonic portrait of Mark Karpelès, his geeky antihero, a thirty-year-old Frenchman and Otaku who handles millions of dollars from his couch, while stuffing his mouth with pizza in the company of his cat. Yet Karpelès, Adelstein reminds us, did more to spread the gospel of Bitcoin than anyone before him. Initially charged with fraud and corporate embezzlement by a Japanese judicial system in which the notion “presumed innocence” is non-existent, Karpelès claimed his innocence by pointing to the likelihood of external cyber-attacks. In the end, in March 2019, he received a suspended prison sentence of two and a half years.

I Sold My Soul for Bitcoins reads like a thriller filled with genius mathematicians and Internet idealists, speculators and profiteers, Russian hackers and cyberpunks, drug dealers, federal agents, evangelical libertarians, and clueless techies. Not only does Adelstein uncover the secrets of Mt. Gox’s collapse, but he also brings us into the elusive world of cryptocurrency, the seedy depths of the Dark Web, and the corrupt inner workings of the corporate world.

Jake Adelstein has been an investigative journalist in Japan since 1993. Considered one of the foremost experts on organized crime in that country, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the United States, writing for the Daily Beast, the Japanese economic monthly ZAITEN, and other publications. He has served as a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and is the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan (Vintage, 2009), which has been translated into twelve languages, and will be adapted for the TV by Academy Award nominee director Michael Mann.

Nathalie Stucky is a freelance journalist in Tokyo and Europe. She was an assistant correspondent for the Japanese news agency Jiji Press in Geneva and contributed to the book Reconstructing 3/11. She is the chief editor at Japan Subculture Research Center.