I wonder if among the inventors of Bitcoin is someone who is thinking about China. Bitcoin is supposed to have been invented by someone named "Nakamoto Satoshi", but the name appears to contain a pun on "Chinese currency".
This name, which is Japanese, is widely reported to be a pseudonym. Like most Japanese names, it can be rendered into kanji in a number of different ways. What interests me is that among the written forms of Nakamoto is 中元, which can mean 'Chinese yuán' or 'Chinese currency' (among other things). Satoshi means approximately 'sage' or 'enlightened one' and is associated with dozens of different written forms — the full name Nakamoto Satoshi could be read to mean "the wise one of Chinese currency."
I do not recall having seen this observation made publicly before now. But it occurred to me after receiving this link to a Quartz article about China's affinity for virtual currency.
Bitcoin is an implementation of "b-money", the work of the cryptographer Wei Dai. As of this writing, the Japanese Wikipedia site "Bitcoin (ビットコイン)" renders the whole name Nakamoto Satoshi as 中本哲史; on Chinese sites it is generally 中本聪, apparently 'China [is] basically clever'. Both of these renderings conceal the decoding that I am proposing.
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