The quest to discover the creator of bitcoin
It’s been more than 15 years since the digital currency bitcoin was launched, going from a fringe phenomenon in the dark corners of the internet to now an asset traded on Wall Street. But the identity of bitcoin’s creator, known only by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained a mystery wrapped in a cryptographic enigma.
Now, investigative filmmaker Cullen Hoback may have cracked the case. His last HBO series, “Into the Storm,” uncovered the origins of the QAnon conspiracy theory. In his new documentary, “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” Hoback sets out to answer the elusive question: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
To prevent any spoilers, we’ll be keeping Hoback’s conclusions secret. He spoke about the riddles swirling around bitcoin and its founder with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Cullen Hoback: I think the question has become more pressing than ever, in part because Satoshi may be on track to become the richest person on Earth, in part because bitcoin is being woven into the fabric of the financial system and in part because if Satoshi was still involved, if we could prove that maybe Satoshi hadn’t actually done kind of a mic drop and disappeared over a decade ago, but was maybe actively working behind the scenes to drive global adoption, well, that’s something people really should know.
Meghan McCarty Carino: This issue of Satoshi could be hugely wealthy, this kind of goes back to the fact that when creating bitcoin, Satoshi mined, I guess, what is believed to be like a million bitcoin. Is that kind of what’s, what’s believed to be in the wallet?
Hoback: Yeah. In 2013 a researcher exposed this bug that was in bitcoin’s code. It essentially doxed or revealed what appeared to be all of Satoshi’s wallets up until that point, where Satoshi had been mining, and that’s how we know that Satoshi mined close to a million bitcoin.
McCarty Carino: So why do you think this individual has gone dark and appears to not be interested in cashing in on that?
Hoback: I think that the motives have perhaps changed over time. You know, in the beginning, all of that mining was happening, really, to bootstrap the network, to make the network work. There wasn’t an idea in the beginning that bitcoin was inevitably going to become a hit and be worth as much as it became worth. You know, there were individuals who speculated, but there were no guarantees. And in fact, a lot of the early cryptographers who looked at bitcoin sort of pooh-poohed the idea, found problems in it. There were only a couple of key figures who really gravitated towards it and helped drive its adoption.
McCarty Carino: As part of this storytelling, you kind of trace the evolution of bitcoin. Overall, how would you describe kind of the trajectory from its inception to what it has become now?
Hoback: In the early days, bitcoin had no value at all. I mean, I think by December of 2010, it was maybe worth 20 cents a coin, and there wasn’t a guarantee that it was ever going to, to catch on. You know, in the film, we really chart this evolution and what happens when bitcoin really did start to gain notoriety and be used and all of the moments that kind of drove this adoption, right? Like in the early days, you know, the people who really could benefit from using something like bitcoin were those who were selling drugs, things like that, right? And as time went by, you know, corporations started looking, sort of eyeing it and as a byproduct of this, bitcoin actually started to fail because it wasn’t designed for such widespread adoption. In fact, this is something that one of those early cryptographers had pointed out. They just said, you know, bitcoin can’t scale. And this became central to a dispute within the bitcoin community that in some ways is still playing out today. But this problem of, can bitcoin actually solve what it set out to, which is being digital cash? Can it be cheap to transact with, or will it become something that actually looks a lot more like today, which is digital gold?
McCarty Carino: Bitcoin is sort of founded on this idea of decentralized finance. But how has that caused some issues for it along the way, in terms of, basically, the creator being a cipher and there being kind of no governing body to make decisions about it?
Hoback: Well, I think this is something that we chart in the film, this moment where it goes from being kind of helmed by an anonymous figure to being helmed by known individuals, to eventually being shepherded by a corporation. And I think the real question here is, was Satoshi actually pulling the strings in that transfer of power? Because you got to imagine, if you’re Satoshi and you’ve built something like bitcoin, would you be able to stay anonymous and completely disappear, or would you try to get involved in some way? You know, and I think as bitcoin gained in notoriety and use, it required real funding, real development and real people to forward those ambitions. And so one of the aspects of the mystery is OK, like, was Satoshi actually still involved, but maybe involved using their real name, just nobody knew it? Because ultimately, yes, bitcoin is superdecentralized. It requires consensus, it requires lots of different people to kind of — it’s very hard to make a major change to bitcoin because of the way that it’s built, but it also requires a lot of development, and it requires a lot of ingenuity to make sure that it actually works, that there are technological solutions, workarounds, let’s say, so that bitcoin can be used to buy a cup of coffee in a place like El Salvador.
McCarty Carino: Right. As bitcoin kind of blows up, it almost has this dynamic, big business operating without a CEO or something.
Hoback: Yeah, there’s definitely no CEO for bitcoin. And this is partially by design. You know, if there was someone that three-letter agencies could just call up and be like, “Hey, so what are we gonna do about this bitcoin thing?” that would have happened. It is, by design, something that can’t be shut down or stopped. And even if we were to know who Satoshi is, you wouldn’t change whether or not bitcoin will continue to operate because ultimately, even if they control a million or so bitcoin, they don’t actually control the network.
McCarty Carino: Well, I mean, after spending so much time immersed in this world, I’m curious what your read is on kind of what the future of bitcoin might be.
Hoback: This is something that we’re really charting in the film. We’re charting the global adoption story. You know, here’s this country that is El Salvador, which has now made bitcoin legal tender. Might this happen in other countries? Might the game theory of bitcoin be playing out now on the scale of nations? Maybe most people have don’t really know what a CBDC is — a central bank digital currency. What a CDBC is, is a response to bitcoin, and it’s possible for these two systems to exist in parallel, for bitcoin to be used as digital gold, but not as the primary way in which we transact. Instead, I think what we’re going to see rolled out in the near future is — and which they’re running test pilots for, which is talked about in the film — the digital dollar, a CBDC.
Hoback told us this film can be thought of as sort of a sequel to one of his previous projects, the 2012 documentary “Terms and Conditions May Apply.” That film exposed the emerging surveillance of our digital economy with so much of our personal data being collected online and then sold to the highest bidder. He says he thought of that film as something of a whodunit about the death of our privacy. The growth of the crypto sector profiled in his new project could be seen as the next chapter in responding to those concerns.
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