Bitcoin and Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto have been leading the news cycle all week, but why does the world care so much about the online currency and a retired Californian?
Part of it may be our love affair with soap operas, the other our inability to look away from a car crash.
Bitcoin itself has been the center of controversy since it was created in 2009. Banks and nations have fretted over what it could do to traditional currencies and the bankruptcy of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox last month is causing further worries over the viability of the currency and the fact that the largest such exchange simply lost or could not find 850,000 Bitcoins priced at the time at around $500 billion.
That is a lot of money, real or digital.
Then this week the burner was turned on full blast with the revelation by Newsweek that the mysterious man behind Bitcoin was an unassuming retired engineer named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto has denied he is the brains behind Bitcoin and that until recently he had never even heard about Bitcoin, but Newsweek is sticking by its story.
Since then Nakamoto has had to lead a life more akin to a Hollywood celebrity, with dozens of reporters chasing his every move.
The urge to discover who truly is the founder of the digital currency is understandable. That person could potentially be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and if a face could be connected with the service it could help make it even more successful or at least save it from an early death.
A famous definition of money is that it's an idea backed by confidence, something that is lacking right now. A currency depends on people believing that it is a safe haven and there is little reason for any confidence to be placed on Bitcoin now with the only names associated with Bitcoin either denying their affiliation or trying to explain why their firm went bankrupt or dying.
The most important failure may well be that the entire Bitcoin universe is nothing but a house of cards waiting to topple.
"Mt. Gox is not alone. Forty-five percent of Bitcoin exchanges to date have failed, in most cases with their customers' money. The digital currency industry's track record on fiduciary responsibility is abysmal," wrote Ken Griffith.
The other aspect of this that has to be studied is whether or not a currency, digital or otherwise, can be sustainable without being governed and backed by a national entity.
At Hackingdistributed.com Bitcoin exchanges were compared to the infamous Nigerian prince Internet scams, but these are actually targeted at tech-savvy people.
Even if the Bitcoin protocol were perfect, and it isn't, our computing infrastructure is not up to the task of handling high-value transactions. The exchanges are built on the latest hyped technologies that have incredibly poor guarantees, and routinely run into technical problems," the site wrote.
