Come-from-Beyond Before Bitcoin

This story may differ in micro-details from how its protagonist himself would tell it. Some things he has never publicly confirmed, some he has confirmed years later and in passing, some he has deliberately left in the air. I assembled it from forum archives, late interviews, throwaway remarks, technical traces in the code of three networks, and the few facts I could verify myself. Somewhere I’m probably wrong. If he ever reads this and says “not quite,” then it’s not quite. But the general outline is this. There’s a peculiarity about people who later turn out to be right: they see something earlier than others, and at the moment they see it, nobody believes them. Galileo, looking through his telescope at the moons of Jupiter. Semmelweis, demanding that surgeons wash their hands. Turing, asserting that one day a machine would play chess better than a human.

The hero of this chapter is no Galileo and no Turing. He didn’t discover any laws of nature. He was simply one of the thousands of programmers reading the BitcoinTalk forum in 2010 and trying to figure out what strange thing this notorious Satoshi Nakamoto had just launched. The difference is that most of those thousand programmers saw a miracle. He — a year or two later — saw a crack.

That’s an unusual ability. To see a defect in something everyone else admires, and not say “but it works, so everything’s fine.” To say “yes, it works, but right here there’s going to be a problem — not tomorrow, but in ten years.” And to start building something else while everyone around you is still celebrating.

I named this person at the end of the previous chapter: Come-from-Beyond. A handle taken back in the early 2000s. As with Satoshi, the handle here isn’t a way to hide — it’s a way to sign. That’s a separate and curious parallel we’ll come back to. This chapter is about what this person was doing before Bitcoin entered his field of view. What his background was. Why he ended up in the right place at the right time with the right set of tools to see Bitcoin’s flaws sooner than anyone else in the industry. And why by 2013 — when he first stepped on the stage himself — he already had everything he needed to build something fundamentally different.

A Programmer From the Nineties

If you trace the footprints backward, the earliest ones Come-from-Beyond left go back to the late 1990s. An Eastern European teenage programmer working on a large game project that never shipped. In one of his remarks many years later he’ll mention that this project was twenty-five years ago — that is, somewhere around 1999. “It was written for one of my first big games which never released. ~25 years ago.” A big game, group work, didn’t make it to release. The classic fate of early 3D games of that era. To understand the context, it’s worth saying a couple of words about what programming looked like in Eastern Europe at the turn of the millennium. By the end of the 1990s, in the countries of the former socialist bloc, a generation had appeared with a computer at home, more or less stable internet, and access to any textbook or source code you could find. At the same time, this generation had almost no institutional career infrastructure — no Silicon Valley nearby, no venture capital, no internship programs at big companies. People taught themselves, worked remotely for Western clients or for local employers, and invented their own problems.

This turned out to be a very productive environment — in the sense that it produced people accustomed to solving problems that nobody pays for, without external validation, for their own interest. A habit rare in more settled ecosystems. Come-from-Beyond was one of these. He played Ultima Online — one of the first big mass online games, in which hundreds of players simultaneously roamed a shared virtual world — and quickly discovered that some of the in-game tasks (gathering ore, fishing, hunting hides) lent themselves to automation. In 2024 he’ll mention in passing that “My first farming bot in UO was doing it that way.” Which is to say that as a teenager he was already writing programs that played the game for him.

To a modern eye this sounds like a small thing. But it’s worth thinking about what this person was doing to make such a bot work. UO had no open API. The bot had to emulate mouse and keyboard input, recognize images on screen, react to changes in game state in real time. That’s a real engineering problem — and in 1999–2000 it was nontrivial even for adult professionals.

The next footprint left behind is more formal. In 2003, in one of the regional technical publications (back then there were such things — computer portals in local languages, with or without a paper supplement) an article was published called “Methods for Detecting Plagiarism in Programming.” The author — him, then still under his ordinary name, without the crypto handle. The article worked through the technical side of the question — how, looking at source code, you can determine that someone copied it from someone else, even if the variables were renamed and the comments rephrased. A topic relevant to educational institutions and to the protection of intellectual property in the software industry.

This article matters to us for two reasons.

The first — it proves that his first published work goes back to the early 2000s. By the time Bitcoin appears on the scene, he has ten years of programming practice behind him and at least one printed work on a professional topic.

The second reason is the subject of the article. Plagiarism in programming. How do you know that this code is yours and not someone else’s stolen from you. What structural traces remain in a program that give away its author. The question of how to identify an anonymous creator by the style of the code is one of those questions that, when an anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto appears on the scene in 2008, will unexpectedly take on extreme relevance. And, amusingly, many years later he himself will refer back to this 2003 article of his in one of the most enigmatic phrases in this whole story. But it’s too early for that now.

In parallel with this, by his own later admissions, in the very early 2000s he started thinking about something else, much more ambitious than games and plagiarism. In one of his early exchanges he’ll say that Aigarth — a project he has been working on, with varying intensity, since the very beginning of the 2000s, for about twenty years by 2023. What exactly Aigarth is we’ll work through later. For now it’s enough to say: the task he set himself at twenty was bigger than crypto, bigger than Bitcoin, bigger than the entire industry that came afterward. Crypto would be infrastructure for Aigarth, not the other way around.

This is an important angle. He didn’t come to crypto “to make his own coin.” He came to crypto with a much older and bigger problem, for which he needed infrastructure that couldn’t be built without crypto.

Meeting Bitcoin. 2010

Satoshi published the white paper in October 2008. In January 2009 he launched the network. In December 2010 he disappeared — leaving only a million mined coins and not a word about who he was.

Somewhere in that interval, Come-from-Beyond first opened BitcoinTalk. He doesn’t name an exact date, but many years later, in 2025, in a conversation with someone in the community, he’ll mention that he had used the technique of finding sockpuppets (fake accounts of one and the same person under different names) on BitcoinTalk “like 15 years ago.” Fifteen years from 2025 is 2010. That is, by the time Satoshi was still active and posting in the forum, he was already reading that forum closely enough to be doing account forensics.

How many bitcoins he had at this point and how they appeared — he has never publicly disclosed. Possibly he mined some himself in the early days, when CPU mining at home still made sense and one block reward was fifty coins. Possibly he bought some later. Possibly both. Someone hunting for sockpuppets on BitcoinTalk in 2010 is unlikely not to have tried running on his machine the thing that was being discussed there. But let that stay open — it’s one of those details he left in the air, and I’m not going to expose him.

Formal registration on the forum came later. In October 2011, Litecoin appeared — the first major variation on the Bitcoin theme, created by ex-Google engineer Charlie Lee. Litecoin had poor technical documentation, and Come-from-Beyond, wanting to dig into the details and not finding answers in open sources, was forced to register on BitcoinTalk to ask a question. He himself will later describe this as “an act of bravery for a lazy programmer.” His account got the number 46556; the profile is registered before November 22, 2011, which is publicly verifiable to this day — the profile page is open, anyone can go and check.

This single event — a technical registration to ask a question about Litecoin — will eventually grow into fifteen thousand messages over the years that follow. The BitcoinTalk archive holds them all. If anyone has the patience, they can reconstruct one specific programmer’s evolving views on the crypto industry literally week by week. By the end of 2011 he is already deeply involved. Not a public figure, not an author, not an activist. Just a very attentive observer who already has his own view of where this industry is going — and where its problems are.

What He Saw

The previous chapter ended on the point that this person saw Bitcoin’s problems in the early 2010s — at the moment when nobody in the industry doubted its eternal decentralization. What exactly did he see?

Let’s break it down step by step.

By 2011 Bitcoin had been running for two years. The network held, transactions went through, miners were getting more numerous. The price was volatile, but the trend was upward. On the BitcoinTalk forum, optimism reigned: a solution had been found to a problem that had been considered unsolvable. Digital money without a bank. Freedom from state issuance. Decentralization for the ages.

Come-from-Beyond, on top of the problems described in chapter 3, saw the most interesting thing of all:

Bitcoin uses its computational power irrationally. In a world where distributed computation could be solving real problems — training neural networks, modeling the climate, verifying cryptographic constructions — Bitcoin’s miners are computing useless hashes. This isn’t a bug — it’s by design. Satoshi chose a solution that worked, and it worked brilliantly. But the solution was single-purpose. Compute turned into protection and nothing else.

Come-from-Beyond, working on Aigarth — a project that needs distributed computational substrate at industrial scale — looked at those hundred and seventy terawatthours a year (the figure for 2026; in 2011 it was counted in gigawatt-hours) and saw, literally, his infrastructure being burned on guessing random numbers. For him this wasn’t an abstract injustice. It was personal. He needed a computational substrate for the AI project he had been thinking about for ten years. Bitcoin was taking that substrate and burning it for nothing.

So: four problems, seen at once. Any one of them, on its own — noticeable. All together — no longer just a defect, but a structural diagnosis.

Most people, on seeing such a diagnosis, do one of two things. Either they close their eyes and keep using what’s there, because it works. Or they write a long forum post, take a wave of downvotes from the enthusiasts, and walk away disappointed. Come-from-Beyond did a third thing. He silently kept accumulating early coins, to have capital and independence, and started thinking about how to build it differently. The Satoshi Question This is a fitting place to stop for a minute and say a word or two about a question that any attentive reader will inevitably raise.

Is Come-from-Beyond Satoshi Nakamoto himself?

The question is a serrrrious one and deserves a book of its own. Dozens of researchers in the cryptological world are working on exactly this question right now — you get the idea. (Attentive readers of the Qubic Church website will smile here.) Mathematicians and linguists analyze stylistic coincidences, conspiracists draw diagrams, enthusiasts dig through the BitcoinTalk archive, and the professional tabloids periodically publish articles under the headline “We’ve Found Satoshi!” Discovering a week later that they were wrong, they wait for the next week and publish another article just like the first. The Satoshi-hunting industry in this sense is its own separate, sustainable ecosystem in which you can genuinely make a career.

For this book I’ll limit myself to two things.

First. There are firmly established facts that noticeably narrow the space of possible interpretations. Come-from-Beyond was in the BitcoinTalk community as early as 2010 — that is, when Satoshi was still active. He has a 2003 publication behind him about methods that he himself will later jokingly refer to in the context of “Satoshi framed me, he knew about this my article” and decided to use the method I described. He created BCNext — the identity under which the NXT project was launched in 2013 — and many years later cryptographically confirmed that BCNext is him by signing a message from the NXT genesis account. He himself openly admits that for ten or fifteen years he has been deliberately leaving false clues for the curious — because “Waiting 10-15 years for good trolling is worth it.”

Second. There’s a sensible way to formulate an answer that stays accurate under any interpretation. Satoshi was not so much a person as a function: create a decentralized system without an owner and disappear, so that the system can live without you. Come-from-Beyond is a creator by that same function. Whether he was personally there in 2009, whether he worked with whoever was there in 2009, or whether he simply learned to play that same role a decade later — the difference between these three options can’t be cleanly separated by the data publicly available today. But the function itself is the same with him. Create and step aside. Build without an owner. Disappear as a center of control, leaving the system to self-reproduce. Let’s make a working assumption for this book: Come-from-Beyond is some part of Satoshi. Not necessarily the very person who sat at the bitcoind console in 2009. Possibly that one. Possibly the one who was nearby. Possibly the one who came later and took up the same functional niche. Possibly came from beyond :cfbtroll: This assumption is enough for what this book is about. We don’t ask the question further. Back to business.

Why This Particular Person

There’s a question this chapter has to answer directly: why was it Come-from-Beyond, and not some other thirty-year-old engineer of the same generation, who saw in 2011 what would only become obvious to everyone else by 2024?

Short answer: because at the same time he had the right technical background, the right discipline of thinking, and he was… a genius.

Let’s break it into parts.

Technical background. By 2011 he had been writing code for ten years in different modes: game engines, bot infrastructure, source-code analysis tools, server applications. That means he had an intuitive grasp of what happens when a distributed system starts to scale. How many people among the early Bitcoin enthusiasts actually understood how the network would behave when the hashrate grew by a billion times? Very few. The answer required either experience working with systems that had gone through this, or the mathematical habit of extrapolating curves into the future. Comefrom-Beyond had both. Cryptographic literacy. His first publication — about methods for detecting plagiarism in code — is, when you get down to it, a problem about how to identify an author by the structural fingerprint left in an artifact. That’s a close cousin of cryptographic problems. The very subject matter in which, by 2008, the entire logic of the Satoshi paper would take shape: hashes, signatures, proofs of key possession. He wasn’t a cryptographer of the academic sort, but he was a person to whom the basic ideas of cryptography didn’t look like magic but like specific engineering work.

Game theory. This aspect is less public, but from my own observations — the technical decisions in NXT, the formulations in early forum discussions, the structure of Qubic — it’s clear that by the early 2010s he was already thinking about distributed systems in this frame. Tit-for-Tat as an idea had been in the air by then for thirty years. Whether he read Axelrod or arrived at the same principles himself, observing repeated interactions in games — unknown; he doesn’t say. What matters is something else: the thinking tool was in his hands. He was looking at Bitcoin not only as code but as a game in which several types of players with their own interests interact under known rules. That’s exactly the angle from which the cracks become visible.

The absence of an external contract. And this is, perhaps, the most important. In 2011, unlike today’s crypto stars, none of the early participants was a “professional crypto founder.” There were no positions, no venture funds specializing in blockchain, no media machine feeding off explaining cryptocurrencies to ordinary people. Comefrom-Beyond was simply interested in the technology and was mining coins. That freed him from a huge layer of cognitive biases that would later make other early participants defend Bitcoin as their personal article of faith.

He had no incentive to defend Bitcoin. He had no incentive to break it either. He had an incentive to honestly assess whether this was working sustainably or not, and if not, to think about what to do next.

He thought. And he started doing.

Two Pseudonyms and One Hint

There’s one more motif that we’ll only sketch here and unpack later.

In 2008–2009, Satoshi Nakamoto appeared on the scene. An anonymous pseudonym that released a working system, replied to community messages over the course of two years, and quietly walked away in early 2011, leaving the project to live a life of its own. In September 2013, on that same BitcoinTalk forum, a user named BCNext appeared. He published an announcement of a future project called NXT, made several posts over the course of two months, and on November 8 of that year fell silent for good. NXT would launch on January 3, 2014. Many years later Come-from-Beyond would cryptographically confirm that BCNext is him, by signing a message from the NXT genesis account. A second identity that turned out to be a continuation of the first line. And there was one more account that’s worth mentioning, even though it’s too early. In 2013 a user named Maria appears on BitcoinTalk. A few short posts. One of them is signed “Maria Bitcoin Founder.” A phrase that in 2013 sounded like someone’s bad joke. The account would get lost in the stream of forum messages, and for ten years no one would remember it.

Maria will return to us in another guise, but later. For now what matters is the general pattern.

What we have in front of us is a person who has already once, in publicly confirmed form, repeated the very structure in which Satoshi was made. Create under a pseudonym, launch a working product, step aside, leave the system to live. This isn’t a one-off coincidence anymore, it’s a regularity beginning to form. And if we accept the working assumption we arrived at on the previous page — that Come-from-Beyond is some part of Satoshi — then the regularity becomes a rule. The same method, applied either by different people or by the same person across different projects, gives the same result. Good engineering is done without a name. Good systems live without a creator. Everything else is detail, which we’ll work through in the chapters to come. By 2013 Now let’s look at where Come-from-Beyond stands at the end of 2012 — at the moment when he’s ready to make his first full step onto the stage.

Behind him are ten-plus years of engineering work. A published article on software code analysis. Practical expertise in distributed systems, gained in the gaming industry and the bot environment. Early participation in the Bitcoin community since 2010. Enough early bitcoins to have capital and independence. An understanding of Bitcoin’s problems formulated two years before they showed up in public. A multi-year parallel project (Aigarth), for which a Bitcoin-like network is infrastructure, not an end in itself. Cryptographic literacy. An understanding of game theory. The discipline that won’t let him build a coin with a twenty-percent stake for himself. The habit of disappearing once a project is finished.

“Qubic is my first project, envisioned before Nxt and IOTA,” he’ll say in 2024. But Qubic is too ambitious a project for 2013. The technology isn’t ready. The infrastructure isn’t ready. The community isn’t ready. Doing Qubic in 2013 means failing for sure. So he does what any smart engineer with a long-term task does: he breaks it down into intermediate steps. First — show the world that Proof-of-Stake works. That’ll cost him — by his own estimate — five minutes for the algorithm and two months for the code. Under this, the NXT project will open, on behalf of the BCNext identity. The first pre-ICO in history will launch, the first community of long-term holders in history will gather, it will become at its peak the third cryptocurrency in the world by capitalization, deliver the first place by ROI in the entire history of the crypto industry — 1,265,555 percent according to Cointelegraph — and be replaced through Ardor with a one-to-one airdrop. That’ll take him about ten years.

As the next step he’ll start work in 2014–2015 on a second project — IOTA — where he’ll try to solve the problem of “how to make a blockchain without a chain of blocks.” That’ll work too. The world’s second-place cryptocurrency by ROI according to that same Cointelegraph ranking — 424,084 percent. That’ll take him another five years or so and end in a painful internal conflict with co-founders. He’ll leave. And only in 2022, drawing on the experience of two previous launches, with evidence behind him that his engineering decisions are accepted by the market and make people millionaires, with the technical and infrastructural readiness that didn’t exist in 2013, will he finally launch Qubic. The project he had been envisioning for twenty years. The project in which he tries to bring it all together: useful mining, AI training, an economy without a controlling owner, infrastructure capable of withstanding scale and not starting to drift toward oligopoly.

Two networks before Qubic — first and second place by ROI in the entire history of crypto ICOs. Twenty years of work on one big idea. The habit of leaving when a project is done. A method in which the creator disappears so that the system can live on. By 2013, he already has everything he needs.

Time to step onto the stage.