Sasha Frere-Jones skriver om vad som verkar vara en udda bok – Above All Waves: Wisdom from Tominaga Nakamoto, the Philosopher Rumored to Have Inspired Bitcoin, sammanställd av en Paul Chan. Med utgångspunkt i texter av den japanska 1700-talsfilosofen Tominaga Nakamoto (aldrig hört talas om) dras en linje till den svårfångade bitcoin-skaparen Satoshi Nakamoto. Det fanns/finns teorier att namnet var inspirerat av Tominaga.
In 2008, someone named Satoshi took stock of the existing coding tools and figured out a way—without inventing anything new or leveraging any authority, but just by remixing old technological ideas in an unexpected fashion—to make a decentralized network that would be confirmed and reinforced by all the users, with no need of masters. Whether or not Bitcoin became a clown car does not change the egalitarian spirit of the technology, which will likely see its best deployment in some other variation of the blockchain. The ruling class and salesmen are the ones who usually put faith in ideas like “innovation,” a shady word in all instances. Tominaga was suspicious of exactly that kind of idea when he wrote that “we should aspire to be profoundly ordinary in all matters.” Within the seemingly ordinary is the actually divine.