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[keyboard clacking]
[computer beeping]
[computer chimes]
[car horns honking]
-All right. I'm good. -[director] Sound, speed.
You're good. Sorry.
[PA] There's something about the lighting...
x-Okay. -[PA] ...that's making these--
so I am gonna do it, see what happens.
[director] Keep rolling, guys.
Well, Katie, thank you.
It's great to meet you finally in person.
Thank you, Bill.
So as someone who prosecuted...
people who are using Bitcoin for nefarious means,
have you ever wondered who-- who or what is Satoshi Nakamoto?
I have.
When I was at the United States Justice Department,
I was asked to go look into...
what was perceived by parts of the US government at the time
to be a technology that was really kind of nefarious.
There is a case file in the federal building
that is titled "FNU LNU".
"FNU" is "first name unknown". "LNU" is "last name unknown".
And in this case, there was not a John LNU.
There was not a FNU Smith.
It was FNU LNU, and that case file exists.
And that was the investigation into, "What is Bitcoin?"
So what is the Katie Haun thought process
about who or what Satoshi Nakamoto is?
Um, you know, Bill, if I know, I wouldn't be able to tell you.
Why?
[tense music playing]
Um, I'm not saying I know. I'm saying, if I did know...
You know, I don't wanna say too much here.
I'm not, you know, I think I'm conveying the impression
-that I know more than I do. -You are.
[Katie] And I don't wanna do that.
All I wanna say is--
Do you know more than you're letting on?
If I did, I wouldn't tell you.
[music fades]
[phone dialing]
[man on phone] Hey, Bill. How you doin'?
[Bill C] I'm hitting roadblocks, man.
Every time I bring up Satoshi Nakamoto--
"Do they know who Satoshi is?"
"Can they help me think through who Satoshi might be?"
They get all freaked out,
clam up, and basically shut down.
Let's spend a little more time on Satoshi
and who do you think is behind this thing.
Yeah, I'm not going on camera to talk about that.
-[laughs] -[Bill C] Okay.
[tense music playing]
I don't play the speculation game
of who is Nakamoto.
[Bill C] Who do you think it is, or was?
Um, doesn't matter.
What's-- You don't wanna answer who...
I don't want to...
With whatever authority I might have,
I don't want to, uh...
speculate.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Bill C] I'm Bill Cohan.
I'm a best-selling author, seven books and counting.
[reporter 1] New York Times best-selling author
and financial journalist...
[reporter 2] Bloomberg contributing editor...
CNBC contributor, author, and former M&A
investment banker, Bill Cohan.
And I've always been interested in film,
in documentaries.
And I thought doing a documentary film
about Satoshi Nakamoto would be a great idea.
But it got to a point where I needed somebody to help.
Someone who is experienced
in the truly dark arts of investigation.
[soft music playing]
Our PI firm is different because we focus on what we call
"investigations in the public interest,"
which means we try to make the world a better place.
I've investigated cases involving murder,
bank fraud, embezzlement, insider trading,
and we're very careful to take cases that fascinate us
and that we know are gonna be very difficult to crack.
We have ten employees in three offices,
LA, NY, and Amsterdam.
You are in the lion's den officially.
I'm glad to be here.
[Troy] Luke Brindle-Khym is
the best detective on the planet.
He is relentless,
and he will continue to work
even after a client tells him to stop.
David Burghauser is the head
of our cyber investigations practice.
We call him "Bird".
Bird is better than anyone I know
at finding information on the internet
that you don't want anyone to find.
Alexis Viera came to us from the Innocence Project.
Alexis is an incredible investigator
because her entire mindset
is that the official story is bullshit.
What the prosecutors told you, what the cops told you,
what the media reported is inaccurate.
So she understands that you have to take
what we're all told,
the zeitgeist essentially, and discard it and start anew.
[Bill C] We immediately put our heads together
about what we had uncovered so far about Satoshi.
One of the most important things we had to do at the beginning
was just work together to understand
the origins of Bitcoin.
Like where it came from going to 2008.
What was it about 2008 that was such a crucial moment.
[dinging]
[Brian] The worst financial crisis
in modern times.
Some of the biggest names
in American business are tonight gone,
along with a lot of money and a lot of jobs.
About 8.7 million Americans lost their jobs,
and some of the world's biggest banks collapsed.
This was the turmoil from which Bitcoin emerged.
[Gary] Right in the heart of the financial crisis,
Halloween night, not the day before,
not the day after,
but Halloween night, Satoshi Nakamoto,
whomever she, he, or they were,
posts their eight-page white paper.
[computer chimes]
[Jon] The white paper is this nine-page document
that describes a new kind of online payment system.
It would allow people to send and receive money privately
without going through a bank, government,
or any type of traditional financial institution.
It is a political manifesto.
It comes from the idea of, "Why do we have to do the things
the way that we always did them?"
And even, "Could we do them differently?"
And when the Bitcoin network launched a few months later,
almost no one noticed.
But when someone in Florida used Bitcoin to buy some pizza,
other people realized you could use this thing,
and they started diving in too.
Only they weren't buying pizzas.
[reporter] An online black market bazaar
called Silk Road, often referred to as
the eBay for drugs,
ultra clean cocaine,
clean and real LSD,
high grade MDMA, also known as Molly,
all with fast and free shipping,
paid in hard-to-track cybercurrency called Bitcoin.
[Tyler] The idea of a new currency,
one that couldn't be tracked, where users are anonymous,
had obvious mass appeal.
[Bill C] Illegal activity by unsavory characters,
who could use it without being monitored or traced
led to all sorts of crazy things happening.
[Sara] $530 million worth of cryptocurrency
in one of the biggest heists in history.
[reporter] 28-year-old secret Bitcoin billionaire...
And it didn't take very long before governments crack down
on the illegal activity
and tried to get control of Bitcoin.
[reporter] China has declared all cryptocurrency transactions
to be illegal and has threatened further action.
The White House is issuing the government's
first comprehensive framework on digital assets.
[Bill C] Satoshi creates one of the most groundbreaking
financial innovations in decades.
And he disappears.
Whoever Satoshi is,
that's not the name on their birth certificate.
[reporter] A gang of reporters descended on the home
of Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto after Newsweek Magazine claimed
the 64-year-old former engineer
was the mysterious founder of Bitcoin.
The main reason I'm here is to clear my name,
that I have nothing to do with Bitcoin.
I just believe that somebody
put that fictitious name in there.
[Bill G] It's interesting that, you know,
although there's some guesses that there's--
hasn't been much certainly about exactly who did this work.
I always say that Satoshi Nakamoto
is a Black woman. [laughs]
I just think that it's left to everyone's imagination.
[Kara] Another theory was that's the CIA created
cryptocurrency in order to track drug dealers and stuff.
And I was like, "I don't think our government's
competent enough to do something that smart."
And two years after Bitcoin was released,
Satoshi completely disappears.
No posts on any of the forums, no emails,
no transactions on the blockchain.
No digital footprint at all. Gone.
[Bill C] Satoshi Nakamoto is worth billions of dollars.
One of the wealthiest people in the world.
To not touch that wealth,
not move it around, not buy anything,
not let the world know what Satoshi had created.
That's not human nature.
I think the uncertainty around the origins
has certainly helped to create
an almost religious reverence.
Almost cult-like belief.
There's a clear, well-trodden path in religion
where the idea of a founding, almost god-like figure
no longer existing is actually strengthening for the religion.
We are all Satoshi.
[applause]
[Michael] Bitcoin is the first
common property of the human race
that is circulating in cyberspace.
And so I liken Satoshi to Prometheus.
It's like giving the world fire.
Satoshi is this, like, perfect messianic figure,
came in, built a system that worked
better than anybody expected,
and then disappeared mysteriously.
If you knew who the founder actually was,
that would then make Bitcoin centralized.
And everybody would say, "Oh, what does the founder say?
What does Satoshi say?"
[interviewer]
Not necessarily.
But I think there's a small risk.
I mean, you know, like in The Wizard of Oz,
when he said, "Don't look behind the curtain."
That was very suspicious.
When they saw the guy behind the curtain,
they began to think,
"Hmm, that looks like just a normal human being."
Who are you?
[Troy] Many of the other attempts
to identify Satoshi
were built largely
on circumstantial evidence or a guess.
So the mindset has to be, what are the head fakes?
What are the curveballs? In other words,
what are the leads out there that are false?
And then how do I find new ways to find that information
that others have not thought of?
And the clearest answer we've come up with
is that the blockchain,
which is this public database
of all the Bitcoins ever mined and traded,
on that blockchain are 1.1 million Bitcoins
that were mined and controlled and owned by Satoshi Nakamoto.
But none of them have ever been moved.
So we were thinking that the best way to crack this case
is to get Satoshi to move a coin.
The only person who could move
any of Satoshi's coins is someone who has access
to his private key, which is a password.
It's a 256-bit, nearly unhackable number.
Sounds like a very high bar...
A high bar, but I mean, from a forensic,
-like, empirical perspective... -[Bill C] Yeah. Well, of course.
...it seems like it would be hard to argue
with that evidence.
Now, first, we have to find Satoshi.
We've been looking at
prior attempts to identify Satoshi,
and tons of journalists have worked on this.
The New Yorker, Wired,
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal.
And people have come up with some
really interesting candidates.
And some of them are, you know,
can be dismissed with a pretty broad brush.
The writer Neal Stephenson,
the mathematician John Nash.
There's some flamboyant characters out there
who claim to be Satoshi.
Craig Wright, for instance,
claims for years that he's Satoshi,
filed lawsuits to try to make it so.
Who invented Bitcoin?
Not this guy.
The evidence was overwhelming.
So who's behind the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto?
Others have suggested that Elon Musk or Steve Jobs
might be Satoshi.
Steve Jobs did not try to create Apple.
He was trying to create this little company
that would make computers as, like, a hobby thing.
Mark Zuckerberg wanted to get laid.
Jack Dorsey was gonna quit his job
and go work as a shoe salesman.
These were not geniuses, they were fucking lucky.
And they're public figures,
and Satoshi isn't a public figure.
Whoever this person is, is the opposite of Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is a publicity hound.
And whoever Nakamoto is,
they're obviously wired very differently.
But there are a number of candidates
who journalists and others have floated
with some real substantial evidence behind them.
They had to be an expert in economics,
an expert in currencies,
an expert in coding, an expert in cryptography.
So, Bill, we wanted to lay those candidates out for you
and explain to you what we know about them already.
The first one, his name is Adam Back.
[Adam] I spent much of my career
doing cryptography for internet security.
[Tyler] Back is a cryptographer.
He created what's called Hashcash.
An early technology that became
one of the building blocks of Bitcoin.
Adam and Satoshi emailed back and forth
before Bitcoin was released.
In fact, he was mentioned explicitly by Satoshi, by name,
not only in the white paper but in the end notes.
[Bill C] So he's in direct email contact with him?
[Tyler] Yeah. He was talking to Satoshi
before Bitcoin was released.
This is Nick Szabo.
[Nick] So I'm gonna talk today about some of the dreams
and ideas that I believe influenced Bitcoin.
[Alexis] His claim to fame is that he developed
a precursor for Bitcoin,
which he called Bit Gold.
He originally developed Bit Gold in the late 1990s.
[Tyler] He was one of these people who was building
and thinking about digital cash systems
more than a decade before Bitcoin appeared.
Hal Finney is one of the first people
to respond to Satoshi's posting of the white paper.
Hal is also the first recipient
of a transaction of a coin from Satoshi.
Okay. My name is Hal Finney.
For those of you who don't recognize me,
it's because I'm a remote employee.
And in fact, this is the first time I've attended
one of these presentations,
has to be the one that I give.
Hal had a long history of coding as an engineer.
And he created what's called RPOW,
which is another precursor to Bitcoin.
Hal seems to have more experience
and interest in digital payment systems
and electronic cash than almost anybody.
We found articles by Hal written 15, 20 years ago
about these topics, so he has this incredible fascination
with digital money.
The next is Len Sassaman.
I am Len Sassaman, otherwise known as "Rabbi".
[Tyler] Len was an academic.
He's American, and his academic advisor
was a guy named David Chaum,
who had created yet again another precursor to Bitcoin,
which is called DigiCash.
I mention that because it puts Len
in the kind of world of thinkers,
cryptographers, mathematicians, computer scientists,
who focus on digital cash and electronic payment systems.
Next is a guy named Paul Le Roux
who is now in prison for murder,
gun running, weapons trafficking,
money laundering, and more.
Everything is sweet, everything is sweet.
[Tyler] Paul Le Roux was a programmer
who created an encryption program
that I don't believe law enforcement
has been able to decrypt yet.
And of course, he had a real need
and desire for anonymity.
As a child, he created all these characters,
constantly reinventing himself.
He did this as an adult
when he became a real crime boss, an evil genius.
He had the nickname "The Fat Man".
And intriguingly,
he had a number of other passports, like fake identities.
And one of them was under the name Solotshi.
Which sounds to a lot of people like Satoshi.
I don't see a lot of evidence yet,
but real journalists have made the case
that Paul Le Roux is
a legitimate candidate for Satoshi.
Though the last candidate we have
is a guy named Wei Dai.
And we don't have a photograph
of Wei Dai that we know to be him.
In fact, it's not clear what he actually looks like.
There are some supposed pictures of Wei Dai on the internet,
but none of them have been confirmed.
He's very mysterious because he's discreet.
He says very little publicly.
And he created what is known as "B-Money",
which is a precursor to Bitcoin.
Just like Adam Back, Wei Dai is mentioned
in the very first end note of the Bitcoin white paper.
So when you first kind of wade out into the internet
to see what others have done to try to identify Satoshi,
there's some wild theories out there.
In 2009, Satoshi said his initials, NS,
were at the beginning of his Bitcoin address.
Some people thought this meant that Satoshi was Nick Szabo.
But in Japanese, the initials "NS"
would be considered the correct order for Satoshi.
Another example is once someone tweeted
that when using a mix of Japanese characters,
Satoshi Nakamoto looks like it spells
"Hal Finney."
And Elon Musk himself once tweeted
an acronym of Japanese companies
that seemed to spell Satoshi Nakamoto's name.
But there's no evidence that
it's anything but fascinating and fun.
We are approaching this case the way we do all cases.
We have empirical evidence and expert testimony.
Although you've spoken to lots of fantastic sources,
we're gonna try to talk to people
you haven't yet spoken to.
And so, mathematicians,
computer scientists, cryptographers.
Great. Let's get to it.
Okay.
So there's all the intel we've gathered
that we know to be true about Satoshi.
In August 2008,
a website of Bitcoin.org was created.
I mean, it was anonymously registered
through a company called Anonymous Speech LLC,
had an address in Japan.
[Tyler] And then on Halloween 2008,
the white paper was posted on what's called
the Metzdowd Mailing List.
Satoshi posted this white paper on a very obscure mailing list
that was designed only for computer scientists
who care about privacy and security.
[David] So this is all of the Metzdowd messages
from pretty much 2001 to 2016,
loaded them into a review platform.
You can do a search for Satoshi
and see when the first time Satoshi came up.
[Tyler] Most people originally believed that Satoshi was
a young Japanese male.
There are postings that are attributed to Satoshi
on the P2P Foundation website.
His profile states
he's a 37-year-old Japanese male.
No one really takes this seriously,
but it's the beginning of the pseudonym.
[Jon] One point against Satoshi actually being Japanese
because there aren't any language stumbles
that are common for a Japanese person.
As we got into the investigation,
one of our favorite places to look was
the Bitcoin white paper itself because it's full of clues.
For instance, Satoshi mostly writes in American English.
But there is one word, "favour,"
that he writes using the British spelling
of that word.
One of the things we're gonna do is analyze
whether any of our candidates used British phrases
or British spellings of English words
in their other writings.
Fast-forward to January 3rd, the code was released.
So Bird, let's begin the writing analysis.
Not just the English language writing, but also the code, C++.
On December 12th, 2010,
Satoshi posted what is considered to be
his last public message,
in which he said that there's more work to be done.
Now, this is relevant because
he essentially disappeared after this,
less than two years after he created it.
[Luke] So, we know that the Bitcoin code is in C++.
So, we found the inventor
-of that computer language. -Amazing.
[Luke] His name is Bjarne Stroustrup.
[gentle music playing]
[crew member] Yes, that our sound is good.
It is? Okay.
Some of the people that we've been identifying
as possible candidates for Satoshi,
on their resumes claim to be programmers in C but not C++.
Is it fair to say that if someone
is proficient at C but does--
is not proficient at C++,
then that person could not have coded Bitcoin?
[gentle music playing]
[Tyler] The most important thing Bjarne told us
was that the person who coded Bitcoin
was very good at coding,
but not at the highest level of C++.
That was really good to know because it suggested
that it's not somebody who's been coding in C++
for their entire career.
[interviewer]
Well, I'm sure lots of software companies
would offer him a job. Uh...
you know, he's obviously
a very capable software engineer.
[Tyler] Wei Dai is very much known
as a C++ programmer,
as well as Paul Le Roux and Adam Back.
Nick Szabo and Len Sassaman were not known to write in C++.
Hal, as far as we've been able to determine,
was not a C++ writer.
But it felt like a good first step
to get his confirmation
about the qualifications in C++.
The other thing that we've been digging down this hole
of the Metzdowd Mailing List. Remember, this is where
the white paper was first posted.
I mean, is there anything jumping out at you
at this point already?
One thing that's quite interesting
is that a bunch of the candidates
that we discussed last time were very active
in a group called the Cypherpunks.
[Tyler] They were a fascinating,
eclectic group in the 1990s,
who were coders,
who had a very kind of
libertarian-leaning philosophy, right?
This idea that we can use code,
we can use software to throw the shackles
of society off of us.
And one of the guys we really wanna talk to,
a guy named Phil Zimmermann.
He founded PGP, which created true email encryption.
So Hal Finney and Len Sassaman
are two candidates who previously worked
for PGP and Philip Zimmermann.
He was their boss.
If we can get to Zimmermann,
we've got two potential windows into--
To two bosses of two of our main suspects.
Phil Zimmermann is considered by many
to be the kind of OG Cypherpunk.
Can we get to Zimmermann?
Yes. Zimmermann has his own website.
-[Bill C] Okay. -And we've emailed him
and hope to hear back soon.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Tyler] While we waited for Phil to get back to us,
we decided to reach out to people in groups
Satoshi may have been associated with,
because in order to find Satoshi,
we had to understand Satoshi.
That meant learning his politics,
his beliefs, his worldview.
Good morning. Can I speak with Scott Stornetta, please?
Hi, can I speak with David Chaum?
Hi, this is Tyler Maroney.
I'm trying to reach Cynthia Dwork, please.
Then one day, I received the email I'd been waiting for.
Hey, Phil. It's Tyler Maroney calling.
I'm good. I'm good. How are you?
Okay, great. Well, listen, where are you?
Like, where should we meet?
Because I'll come to wherever you are.
Maybe I shouldn't be surprised,
but Phil Zimmermann lived off the beaten path.
And when he responded to my email,
he asked if we could communicate only using an encrypted app.
[film crew member] Speeding.
-Phil, thanks for joining us. -My pleasure.
I'd like to hear more about your background.
I've read that you had been engaged
in some political activism.
I was politically active in the 1980s,
in the Peace Movement,
the nuclear weapons freeze campaign.
[protesters] Five, six, seven, eight,
we don't want to radiate!
[Phil] That was the time of the arms race.
Reagan was in the White House.
Brezhnev was in the Kremlin.
There was a lot of talk about nuclear war.
I had a day job working 40 hours a week as a software engineer,
and then I worked another 40 hours a week on my activism.
[Jon] And when they were going to organize their protests
on bulletin board systems,
they wanted to be able to organize protests
in ways that the authorities could not find out
where they were going to have the protests or when.
If you have one of these, and you have one of these,
but you don't have one of these,
you're missing half the fun of owning a computer.
This is a modem.
And with it, you can turn your computer
into a window on the world.
[Phil] With the internet, I felt that it was becoming
increasingly easy for governments
to intercept and detect political dissent.
So we needed a way to restore the balance
that we had before all that.
At that time, the cutting edge of technology
for communication was email.
But there wasn't any way for the ordinary person
to communicate securely.
Governments could do it.
Ordinary people could not,
which led to me creating PGP.
PGP encrypts your email,
and it made it possible for the first time
to communicate over large distances
without any risk of interception.
It stands for "Pretty Good Privacy."
I thought about the possibility that the government
might come after me for doing it.
And if they did,
I wanted them to be put into the ridiculous position
of trying to suppress a piece of software
called Pretty Good Privacy.
[Jon] PGP in 1991
was the first program
outside of government control
because a guy just did it.
[Phil] We released it on the internet for free.
No one had ever done that before.
[phone rings]
[Phil] One day, my phone rang,
and it was US Customs.
So I answered a few questions.
I thought maybe they had encountered PGP
in their investigations,
and they wanted to understand what it was.
But then she said she'd like to come and interview me.
And I thought, "That doesn't sound
like they're just looking for a tutorial."
They felt that releasing it on the internet was
the same as exporting strong encryption.
Now, at that time, it was illegal
to export strong encryption
because the government felt that it was a weapon.
And exporting weapons requires a license
from the State Department.
So if you wanted to export Stinger missiles,
you have to get permission from the State Department
to do that.
And strong encryption was in the same category
as Stinger missiles.
The federal mandatory sentencing guidelines
for this violation of the Arms Export Control Act
carried a sentence of 41 months
to 51 months in a federal prison.
And still you released it?
Uh, yeah. I did know that it was illegal.
[laughs]
This was what we amusingly call the "Crypto Wars".
[Will] The most important essence
of what we did as strong cryptography
was potentially going to be not allowed.
And then we proved that all the source code
that they were trying to make illegal
was something you could simply print.
The regulation specifically exempted printed material.
[Will] Publishing that as a book,
that was its own team of paid engineers
just to build these 10,000 pages
of source code that you could actually print
and then scan and then turn into working source code
in another country.
[Fin] And the cryptographer, Adam Back,
developed a fantastic idea out of this
which was to start printing it on T-shirts.
And then you could wear a T-shirt
that was an ultra-illegal military weapon.
In fact, what people did was not just wear the T-shirts
but tattoo the code onto their bodies
and then be able to say, as people in Kung Fu movies do,
that their bodies are deadly weapons.
This was not just to share the code, to spread the code,
but also to demonstrate the absurdity
of trying to treat this as if it were a weapon and not a tool.
As we often said at the time, it's just math.
You can't outlaw multiplication.
[laughs]
And so, they finally dropped the case.
[Will] So when they stopped the investigation,
we were forming a company days later.
It was like, "Wait." "You mean all this is legal?"
I believe firmly that it is a basic human right
for human beings to be able
to talk to each other in private,
no matter where they are in the world.
And this idea that we had about using this new technology
to rethink societal structure,
that, "Why do we have to do things
the way we always did them?"
is in fact the underpinnings
that if you want to go to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency,
that you have to see that it came out of that idea.
[Will] The Cypherpunk ethos was what a lot of people
founded PGP upon in March 1996.
Basically, the WDRT is an ASCII version
of the disk encryption key.
[Jon] Hal and I worked together at PGP.
He was one of the people who wrote the core
cryptographic code that PGP did.
Very, very good at doing a lot of that.
And he also had a lot of other interests.
[Will] We worked for free in those early days.
I was in college. I didn't think I needed a job.
Hal, he had a family, he had children.
At some point, he went from,
"I develop video games for Mattel,"
to, "I believe so much in the Cypherpunk ideals
and anonymity and encryption and digital cash
that I would do that without a paycheck."
I mean, that's activism, not employment.
Len worked for us for several years
in the late '90s.
He was a QA engineer for a few years.
I don't think that was really
the most appropriate role for him.
It was just the job we had at the time.
We didn't have academic researcher roles.
And that's really what Len was, I think, good at.
And if you look at what Len did after,
it's paper after paper, after paper in cryptography.
Did you ask Phil who Satoshi was?
One thing Phil said to me was that, "You may not ask me
if I know the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto."
And when I said, "Why, Phil?"
He said, "Because this could be dangerous."
And when I asked him why this could be dangerous,
he said that people could get hurt.
And he was somewhat cryptic
as I suppose a cryptographer would be.
[Tyler] Is there anyone else who worked with you
who also was part of the formative team
who helped put together Bitcoin?
I-- You know, I'd rather not go into that
because it sort of offers opportunities
for artillery bracketing.
[laughs]
Can you explain artillery bracketing?
If you ask a question from this side,
and then you ask a question from this side,
and it kind of gets closer and closer to somebody
in the middle who prefers not to get hit.
[Tyler] Right.
Now, we have to kind of read into what that means.
Was he throwing me a curveball?
Was he hinting possibly the answer is yes?
One of the other things I did learn from Phil, by the way,
is that in addition to email encryption,
which was their primary product,
they were talking about other products
that they never pushed to market.
For instance, he told me
that they talked about digital cash,
which I have since learned is the kind of Holy Grail
of the Cypherpunk cryptography world.
So, tell Bill about the Extropians.
What the heck is that?
So, in addition to the Cypherpunks,
a number of our top candidates
were a member of a different fringe group
called the Extropians.
Wei Dai, Hal Finney, and Nick Szabo.
Now the Extropians were part
of a larger group called Transhumanist.
People from many different industries
who believed that the human race
has not reached our full potential.
And the way to do that is to use technology, AI,
nanotechnology, genetic engineering.
I feel like you should have led with the fact
that they freeze their bodies.
That to me was the most exciting thing.
-Excellent point. -Freeze their bodies?
Max More, the original Extropian,
now runs what's called Alcor,
which is a cryonic preservation system
where you can essentially pause the death process as he says
and preserve your body into the future
hundreds or thousands of years,
so that perhaps in the future
we have the technology to revive us.
Not just our bodies, but our minds.
And what's fascinating is that one of the primary topics
of conversation among this group was digital cash.
[Max] I was very interested in religions
when I was about ten to 13 or 14 or so.
Each of these religious histories and traditions
has some sense of transcendence, some sense of--
human condition isn't just what it is today.
In some sense, we can transcend it.
So letting go of the kind of religious and faith aspects
and instead looking at science and technology to question
some of the fundamental aspects of being human,
number one of which is why do we die?
Why do we age and die? Is that absolutely essential?
Can we do something about it?
And all those ideas kind of came together
in the concept of extropy,
being a sort of metaphorical opposite of entropy.
With entropy, everything falls apart and decays over time.
With extropy, you put energy into the system
and you get more intelligent, more complexity
and things hopefully get better.
So all our patients are here in the patient care bay.
-[woman] Wow. -[Tyler] And all of the members
who have been preserved are here?
[Max] Yeah, all 201 of our patients.
You can touch the outside. It's just cold stainless steel.
But inside is -320 Fahrenheit.
So that temperature really,
nothing is happening biologically.
There's no metabolism. There's nothing happening.
There are certainly no memories.
It's not like in the Vanilla Sky movie,
where you can have lucid dreams. That's not gonna happen.
[Finn] The Extropians are a movement
that is not widely known now
because of their ideas,
the technologies that they endorsed,
the things that they believed in,
the things that they argued for,
have spread out into the technological landscape
that surrounds us now.
Concepts like
breakthroughs in artificial intelligence,
the interest in nanotechnology,
as a frontier of possible technological breakthroughs,
the fascination with new digital economic tools
that could create new systems of value,
the interest in biohacking and modifying your own body,
all of these different areas of fascination
and areas of investment were Extropian visions.
Three of the primary candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto,
who created Bitcoin,
Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, and Wei Dai
were very influenced by you.
Does that surprise you?
Uh...
Yes and no. I guess, you know, from the point of view
of not being a technical expert
to discuss those ideas, well, yes.
But no in the sense that, yeah, I was--
I was a large part, along with my colleagues,
in forming a community where these ideas could be discussed.
Back in 1988, we started our magazine, "Extropy."
People would read the reviews, and I get calls from,
you know, Kansas or somewhere else, and someone saying,
"Oh, my goodness. I didn't think anybody else
in the country thought like this."
And programmers, AI people, economists,
philosophers, biologists, and all these different people
coming together to discuss things
from different perspectives,
from AIs to the space colonization
to privacy cryptography stuff,
including in the area of money.
For the Extropian movement, cryonics matters
because it offers a way to resolve the problem
that we are on the verge of this extraordinary future.
But we might die before that future arrives.
One of the questions that this poses though
is how would you have access
to assets and wealth in the future?
So, if you do not trust
the existing current to retain its value,
if you do not trust existing financial systems
to retain their value,
you have to create an alternative.
Many of the candidates proposed
as Satoshi Nakamoto were Extropians,
which shows us that part
of what brought cryptocurrency into being,
part of what brought Bitcoin into being,
was the beliefs and the passions of the Extropian movement.
So, here we have the names of four people.
Adam Back, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo and Wei Dai.
All four of them conceived
of an early version of cryptocurrencies,
or they created a technology
that was crucial to the development of Bitcoin.
I'll start with Adam Back.
So, what he created was called Hashcash.
[Finn] He wanted to figure out how to deal
with the problem of spam email.
We mostly live behind filters now
that keep us from seeing the waves
of spam that are coming at us.
But on the other side of those,
like seawalls, are just tsunamis of spam
crashing against them over and over again.
Back had a really interesting way to try to solve this problem
that would also preserve people's privacy.
It involved a concept called Proof of Work.
Back thought, "What if you had to buy a stamp to send an email?
And what if to buy that stamp, your computer had to do
a tiny bit of work? Like solve a math problem."
[suspenseful music playing]
You and I emailing back and forth would never notice this.
But if I am trying to email a million people
as a spammer would need to, then suddenly
solving that million problems becomes onerous.
Adam Back developed a system
where the computer would have to prove
that it had like done a little bit of labor
to be able to send this message.
Proof of Work.
And it's similar to what we have,
you know, when you wanna log into a website
or you have those little riddles that you need to solve,
you know, click a picture of this specific item or...
It's a good point. It's another example of forcing us
to do something to prove who we are...
-Yep, that we're human. -Or to keep out the bad guys.
Keep out the bad guys, exactly.
[Tyler] So, Hal Finney invented what's called RPOW.
"Reusable Proof Of Work."
And in short, it was an advancement
on Adam Back's idea.
[Finn] Hal developed a more efficient Proof of Work system.
A computer performs the initial Proof of Work.
But instead of receiving a digital stamp,
it receives a digital token,
which it sends to the next computer.
Then without spending any extra energy to do more work itself,
that computer can reuse the token.
And then transact it with someone else.
"Reusable Proof Of Work,"
let's turn it into an acronym, "RPOW".
What Nick Szabo did with Bit Gold,
which is a third building block of Bitcoin, is he said,
"Let's think of digital tokens as a commodity like gold.
[Finn] If I have a bar of gold, it's highly unlikely
that I have it in my house.
Instead, it sits in a vault somewhere.
And then when I sell it to you,
I am going to sign it over to you.
I'm gonna add my signature to a ledger system
that will then declare that
that gold is now in your possession.
It is never moved from the shelf that it sits on.
Part of what Szabo began to realize
is you could build a digital infrastructure
for finance of a kind of centralized ledger
that stores this precious, valuable object.
And then you could use a system of cryptographic signatures
to transact its ownership between people
while it always stays in the same place.
[Tyler] Wei Dai took this idea of a centralized ledger
and decentralized it.
Wei Dai developed a brilliant concept
that he called "B-money".
Like Bit Gold, B-money was an electronic banking system,
but unlike Bit Gold,
B-money took the central ledger,
the thing that controlled the truth,
and dispersed its responsibility among everyone.
So instead of having one central place
that recorded all the transactions,
all the participants were collectively responsible
for maintaining this record of truth.
[Tyler] Satoshi took all of these ideas
and put them together into a single idea called Bitcoin.
It's a payment system that uses a decentralized ledger
to track digital tokens.
[Finn] But Satoshi added other important elements as well.
There are at least four key concepts to understand.
Limited supply, mining, blockchain, and wallets.
Satoshi knew governments have bad track records
of devaluing money by creating too much of it.
You simply flooded the system with money?
Yes, we did. That's another way to think about it.
[Finn] And Satoshi wanted to make sure
that this could never happen to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a finite currency.
It is designed so that the amount of Bitcoin
reaches a limit at which point
no more Bitcoin will ever be produced.
There's 21 million Bitcoin that'll ever exist.
That's what is gonna give it value.
That's its value proposition.
[Finn] Mining is the only way to get new Bitcoin.
It's a form of proof of work where all the miners
race to solve the special math problem and the first one
who solves the problem receives a specific amount of Bitcoin.
The problems come out every ten minutes,
and they get harder over time.
So even if the miners start solving the problems faster,
the time between each Bitcoin release
remains about the same.
Satoshi also drew from B-money and created
a decentralized ledger called the "blockchain".
And a blockchain is a digital record
to which things can be added
but never removed and never changed.
The blockchain publicly records all transactions.
So anyone can see each sale,
trade, purchase, all the way back to the Genesis Block,
the first Bitcoin transaction.
What you can't see is who made each transaction.
Anyone can set up a Bitcoin wallet,
an address that allows us to send and receive Bitcoin
without needing to connect it
with any real world identity in any way.
Wallets are identified only by strings
of random numbers and letters
which is why Bitcoin is attractive
to people who value privacy.
So, what do we do next?
[Tyler] So I think we need to try to figure out
like what kind of person was this?
What experience did he have?
What interest did he have?
What was his mindset when he created this?
I mean, so, what are the elements that combined
to make this person Satoshi Nakamoto?
We were starting to get a great sense
of why and how Bitcoin was created.
So let's add up where we are right now.
Satoshi doesn't want governments, banks,
or corporations involved in any personal business.
He believes in decentralizing authority
and giving power back to the people.
He believes in privacy,
especially when it comes to financial transactions.
And he's forward thinking.
He wants to invent technologies to make a better world.
And one thing I wanna do is I wanna call Kathleen Puckett.
Kathleen was a Behavioral Analyst at the FBI.
She was the FBI agent who cracked the Unabomber case.
[reporter 1] This is a composite drawing
of the man the FBI says has been mailing explosives
all over the country the past 16 years,
killing two people and injuring 23 others.
[reporter 1] The Unabomber says he will kill one more time
unless his 35,000-word manifesto is published
in The New York Times or The Washington Post.
[Kathleen] When the Times and the Post
both received copies of the manifesto,
they asked us, the FBI, for a guarantee
that it would stop him as he said from bombing.
There was huge controversy,
and everybody said there's no way
we're gonna negotiate with a terrorist.
And I said, "It doesn't really matter.
The most important reason to publish him
is because we haven't been able
to identify him in any other way."
Someone out there is gonna recognize this unique document
with the phrasings and the word usages
and the particular spellings that he had.
-And it worked? -Yeah.
The FBI has arrested a suspect in Montana
after he was fingered by relatives.
[reporter 3] The manifesto led David Kaczynski
to contact investigators.
So you have a lot of experience
investigating unknown actors?
Unknown subjects, yeah.
[Tyler] And also looking at complex documents.
What was your impression when you first read the white paper?
What really struck me when I first read this,
first of all, I didn't understand any of the algorithms
or any of the, you know, ins and outs.
But what fascinates me is that in the abstract of this article,
the first sentence, he uses the phrase
"online payments to be sent from one party to another
without it going through a financial institution."
So I thought, okay, this is somebody who wants to be free
of the constriction of established rules.
"What is needed is an electronic payment system
based on cryptographic proof instead of trust."
And I thought, okay.
This is a guy who trusts numbers
and not people and systems,
which is probably pretty wise.
Well, I thought it was interesting in the footnote,
the eighth reference is a work called
"An introduction to probability theory and its applications."
And it's from 1957.
This could have been a text
that he referenced early in his education
at which point you would say,
maybe he would be a lot older than,
you know, we think he is.
On the other hand, he may just be
a very independent thinker who researches
and finds things out that don't mean
as much to other people, but he can connect them.
Do you think it's possible it was one person and not a group?
The reason I think that this is one person, it's simple.
He says, "We propose a solution."
Now, I know scientist say that a lot anyway
because they're members of a team.
I don't think this is a team.
I think this is one person.
The Unabomber always said "we".
[Tyler] It's unlikely that this was created by a group.
And when I asked her to elaborate
a little bit on that, she said...
If there's more than two people involved
in some sort of endeavor,
especially something that blew up like Bitcoin did,
there's no way that they could keep that private.
Second thing she told me was that this was likely male.
Presumably, she was talking about the field of cryptography,
which is overwhelmingly male.
Tell me what you feel
were Satoshi's motives in writing this?
It's-- I thought that this
might have started as an intellectual exercise for him.
I think that he probably
is more in the computational field
and not in investments per say.
Investments is very people-related,
interactive process.
And computers, I mean, you know,
you can sit at a computer totally by yourself,
and that's probably where he's comfortable.
So, a mathematician, not a hedge fund manager?
[Kathleen] I believe that he has really
no need for social affirmation or recognition.
Not a desire to gain money or... publicity?
[Kathleen] If he were interested in money,
I think this would have had much more
emphasis of enthusiasm.
There's no enthusiasm in this.
He's not championing a better way to be.
He's not championing a better way to think
or how to make money.
He's just very practically saying,
"If you wanna not rely on trust
or anybody else, here's how you do it."
[Tyler] According to Kathleen,
Satoshi was someone who was modest,
didn't need attention,
and had no enthusiasm for money.
All right. So taking into account what
Kathleen Puckett told us,
Bird, what do you think this means
for some of our candidates?
Yeah, I think we could probably remove Paul Le Roux.
Paul Le Roux is gone. Assuming Kathleen
is only ten percent right,
this is not a candidate for Satoshi.
I never considered him the most likely candidate,
but now, I'm sure he's not it.
Now that we're actually starting to get a sense for who
Satoshi might have been as a person,
we need to dive as deeply as we can into the one place
where Satoshi is most present, online activity.
[Alexis] Do you remember we were reading that
New York Times article with Alyssa Blackburn?
[tense music playing]
[Tyler] She's a Data Scientist at Baylor.
She has a specialization in early Bitcoin mining.
[Alexis] She did a study where
she is looking at all of the blockchain data
from the first two years of Bitcoin,
so that's from like 2009 to 2011.
She was able to determine that it all basically boils down
to about 64 major players
who were mining Bitcoin in that early block of time.
She might be a good person to speak to.
She is not really a Satoshi hunter.
She has no skin in this game.
[Tyler] Even though she spends her days
swimming around in ones and zeroes,
what she's trying to understand is human behavior.
So Alyssa, in your original paper,
you did some analysis of Satoshi's activity.
Can you explain the methodology around the activity of Satoshi?
Due to our address linking
and then subsequent downstream analysis,
we just got a lot of metadata about Satoshi.
His mining activity,
his post to Bitcointalk, his emails.
All of that in aggregate
can give you an idea of somebody's,
like, circadian digital rhythms
and essentially make like a time clock.
And we see
the clear pattern of somebody being online,
working a lot, taking a break.
It's 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., and then coming back online.
There's a very clear and regular time
when there's essentially no activity from Satoshi.
So none of those are disqualifiers
for North American or South American time zones.
What it does suggests
is you'd have to be a real biological odd ball
if you're working in South Korea,
if you're working in Japan, if you're working in Australia.
So it suggests that Satoshi was working in the Americas.
There are a lot of early other Bitcoiners
that you can do a similar analysis for.
So what we took was timestamps from, importantly,
I think, the metzdowd LISTSERV,
we had an idea that whoever Satoshi was,
Satoshi would have been part of the metzdowd server
before the publishing of the original white paper.
So we have Len Sassaman,
Hal Finney, Adam Back,
Nick Szabo, and Wei Dai.
The big take away from me was how much
you can disqualify a lot of these people.
A lot of these people don't look like Satoshi to me.
Adam Back, I believe, was in Europe for a portion of this,
so Adam Back is going online around 9:00 a.m.
And offline around 11:00 or midnight England Time.
So this is one of the times when Satoshi
is just completely offline.
Nick Szabo really kind of gets started around 7:00 p.m.
Pacific Time. Still posting a lot around 11:00.
Has way more kind of late nights.
And like Adam Back, has large periods of activity
when Satoshi is pretty much offline.
Wei Dai is especially interesting.
He's a huge night owl.
Wei Dai is posting late into the night
kind of around midnight,
1:00 in the morning.
That's not to say Wei Dai is not also
posting during the day,
but to see people active
in the time that Satoshi was inactive
is inconsistent with kind of the time profile
that we have of Satoshi.
So, based on this evidence alone,
three of these men, to me,
it's inconceivable that they're Satoshi.
And those are?
Adam Back, Nick Szabo, and Wei Dai.
So we can exclude those based on your analysis?
I would disqualify them based on this analysis.
[Bird] So essentially, without knowing
who these folks are in real life,
she's saying that their online activity
is closest to Satoshi's.
She could exclude...
Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, and Adam Back
-as candidates for Satoshi. -[Bill] I could see it.
[Tyler] And I'll tell you why this is
incredibly convincing to me
because Alyssa has no skin in this game.
She's not a cryptographer.
[Bill] Does she even know who these people are?
[Tyler] She knows who they are, but she doesn't know them.
She didn't know them.
I had told her, "Here are candidates on Satoshi.
Would you please compare them to Satoshi's activity?"
And she told me...
If you were to ask me
qualitatively which of these people
look the most like Satoshi,
my answer would be Hal Finney and Len Sassaman.
Their time profiles look more similar
to Satoshi than the other three.
[Tyler] This is not the definitive
data analysis of this entire project.
It's one done by a neutral observer.
And then no data set is gonna be perfect ever.
[Tyler] Right. That's a good point.
It was exciting to have Alyssa whittle down our candidate pool,
but I had my doubts about Len Sassaman.
One thing that did concern me was that he had a propensity
for publicly bashing Bitcoin.
If Len were Satoshi,
why would he bash his own creation?
None of this rules him out
but it doesn't seem consistent
with some of Satoshi's other writings and behaviors.
So, we wanna lay out the most persuasive evidence
we have so far that points at Hal Finney.
The first is that Hal created RPOW,
one of the precursors to Bitcoin.
[Will] When you look at the RPOW code, you open this code,
and you can recognize Hal instantaneously.
I mean, just the shape of the headers
to what he puts in the--
I mean, it's-- When you spend 15 years,
and Hal is your employee writing code frequently,
and you open his code all the time,
and you see this on a daily basis,
you just say, "Oh, okay, that's Hal's code."
When you look at all the things
credited in the Bitcoin white paper,
B-money, Bit Gold, et cetera, et cetera,
you know what's not credited?
RPOW.
Hal Finney's RPOW, which is like
as close to Bitcoin as anything could possibly be.
Why would that be?
[Tyler] Hal was the first person
to receive coins directly from Satoshi.
So it puts him at the very beginning.
Like he's there at the big bang, essentially.
The other thing is, is that Hal,
having worked at PGP, witnessed what Phil Zimmermann
went through when the government came after him
for releasing the code.
Sitting here years later, looking back on it,
maybe at the time Satoshi might have
been worried about governments coming after him
because he saw governments coming after me.
And then he certainly didn't want to be treated like Phil.
[Tyler] Um, in addition, he had the experience and the interest,
like going back to the 1990s,
he was writing about protecting privacy using digital cash.
Tyler and I realized early on
that there was an obvious inconsistency
with the theory of Hal Finney being Satoshi.
He's not an academic writer. He's known as a coder.
The white paper was obviously an academic, written paper.
The white paper, it's written in a certain way
that is someone who writes white papers.
And that's not Hal.
I said to Will Price,
"I'm gonna make the case against Hal Finney."
Again, Will Price is his boss.
He's the one who gave him assignments to code.
And Will said something to the effect of...
"Good luck."
[Tyler] And one of my first points was
Hal did not code in C++,
and Will laughed in my face.
I mean, to an engineer of Hal's caliber,
a different language is like-- is chicken versus steak.
It has no meaning,
and he can change languages in hours.
Just like the tweet he sent out
in December of 2008, where he says, "Learning Haskell."
Some obscure language no one knows.
Right? That's the kind of thing Hal did.
He would just learn a new one. All right?
He was already having to work
on Windows with C++ for his work task.
Hold it, hold it, hold it.
You told me before that he didn't code in C++.
He was not known as a C++ coder. That's exactly right.
-That was our assumption. -And now--
And now you're telling me that he did code in C++?
Well, now I'm telling you that his boss,
the person to whom he would turn in
his code once he had written it,
confirmed to me that he did write in C++.
And one of Will's points seemed to be
that he intentionally used C++,
a language that he was not known publicly to code in,
because it provided additional cover.
At the very beginning of our investigation,
we talked about
the best evidence we could possibly collect here.
And one of those ideas was to see
if there's a way to find Satoshi
and have Satoshi move or transfer
or spend a block or a Bitcoin.
We can't do that.
My name is Hal Finney.
I'm making this recording for a few reasons.
Mostly because I want people in the future
to be able to hear my voice
and maybe something of my story.
Um...
I was diagnosed six months ago with ALS.
And as a result,
I will be losing the ability to speak.
[Jon] When he was declining,
he was extraordinarily upbeat about the whole thing.
At least to those of us
who were his friends and colleagues.
And even the last time
when I visited him at his house
and talked about it, he said,
"I get to watch all of the movies
that I never had time for before.
I get to think about things that I never had time
to think about before."
Hal recorded, as he was losing, his voice,
4000 things over the course of three weeks,
so that the computer voice that he had
when he was unable to speak
was derived from his real voice.
[Tyler] A couple of months before Hal died,
the family was swatted.
Those years are very traumatic.
And at the very end of it,
where all he could do was be a body,
feel pain, and say yes or no,
was when we started getting threats,
and people trying to extort Bitcoin from us.
Somebody called 911 in a hoax,
pretending that a horrific crime
was going on in the Finney household.
And they gave the address to the police,
and the SWAT team descended on them.
And Hal was taking a bath at the time,
and he was not able to walk.
They had to bring Hal and his wife
out onto the lawn in front of their house.
It was horrific. And then after that was all over,
the guy who had done this called us again, and he said,
"I'm gonna keep doing things to you
until your husband dies."
And about three years later, they found him.
[Max] We're here at Alcor
because Hal Finney was a long time member of Alcor.
And back in 2014, we cryopreserved him
after he ended a long struggle with ALS.
He actually did it the right way.
He relocated here from his home
in California to a local hospice,
and we were right at the bedside
so we could begin the procedure
immediately after legal death was declared,
which is the right way to do it.
About half our members, myself included,
have chosen just to cryopreserve the brain.
We'll do a surgical separation
a few vertebrae down to get the top of the spine.
We're gonna take the cephalon, the brain plus the skull,
put it upside down in this ring, secure it in there
until the brain is actually dehydrated
and taken on our cryoprotective solution
to protect the brain cells.
Hal Finney got a very good cryopreservation.
So I think there's a very good chance
we will actually bring him back with his brain intact.
[Tyler] Since our primary candidate is Hal Finney,
and we know that Hal Finney is no longer with us anymore,
our goal is to collect other evidence around Hal.
And one of the ways we want to do that
is to get all of the former PGP
colleagues who already spoke to us
into one room and to interview them again.
It would allow them to not just to talk to us,
but to talk to each other.
I think that's a great idea.
[dramatic music playing]
[Tyler] I was excited for this meeting
because these people have never
spoken publicly as a group,
and I was hoping that once they were together,
they'd be comfortable enough
to reveal things that they wouldn't one-on-one.
So I'll begin with a thank you
because I'm gonna end with a thank you,
but I want to make sure you understand that
I really appreciate you all being here.
Can you talk about Hal Finney a little bit,
about just what you remember about him
and anecdotes about him?
He was very, very kind, very, very smart.
He always seemed to me very practical.
He was sort of altruistic,
you know, the work he did on PGP and work he did in crypto
and privacy in general.
I mean, he was a man who had a mission,
and it was important for him to have a mission.
And he wanted to change the world,
and he wanted a legacy.
It's really important for us to understand
that Hal was the quiet, behind-the-scenes person,
behind an awful lot of what we have today.
[Tyler] Mm-hmm.
Will, can you talk about Hal's role at PGP?
Hal's role was senior fellow cryptographer.
And he would often just choose
what he wanted to do based on what was happening in the world.
Hal did do things on the side.
You know, you go back to 2004 with RPOW,
and world of RPOW,
and Hal said that was the most fun he's ever had.
And starting around 2008,
there was a sense that we've kind of run out of things,
and the company's having problems.
"Why don't you just keep working on RPOW?"
And, you know, I think that's exactly what happened.
[Tyler] And by RPOW, you mean
essentially a precursor to Bitcoin,
-a version of electronic cash. -[Will] Right.
And you knew Hal was working on this
-in the 2007, 2008 period? -[Olivia] Yeah.
Did he ever tell you that he was working on Bitcoin?
[Olivia] No word like Bitcoin.
It was more the philosophy,
what he was trying to achieve, at least for me.
In our world, every project
before it's released has a code name.
So you would talk about things not with its release name,
but what it was doing or some other easy handle on it.
So we didn't say Bitcoin.
There's a two-month gap
from 10/31/08 until early January,
where Hal has no commits.
Now, we knew what his task was.
He sends weekly updates, and he's--
you know, he said things like,
you know, "I'm still working on my Windows
fingerprint technology."
So he's working on C++ on Windows,
which is what Bitcoin is written for and in.
What was going on in those two months?
The last two months before the release
of the Bitcoin source code,
Hal made no commit to the source code at work.
What was he working on? I think it was Bitcoin.
And so you have Hal,
who clearly has the knowledge from that very small set
of digital cash crypto experts in the world,
who could probably fit at a table
not much larger than this one,
and then you reduce them to the people
with decades of experience
writing that kind of secure code.
You might be at a dinner table with just Hal.
[Jon] When he was confined to a wheelchair,
Phil and I said we should just go visit him.
And so we did a road trip.
I asked him, "Are you Satoshi?"
And his answer was,
"Why would I deny being Satoshi if I were
because I have a fatal disease?
And, you know, there's no reason in the world for me to deny it
because I'm not gonna around in two or three years, so...
But no, I'm not."
At the time, I interpreted that as a non-denial
and interpreted it as a yes.
But it's reasonable that Hal would have denied this to you.
-Correct? -Sure. Sure.
In fact, it would have been consistent
with his personality to deny it.
I don't know why you would go through the effort
of making everything anonymous,
creating a pseudonym, going through all this effort,
and then you just start randomly telling people, right?
I mean, it's--
You're going to be consistent about that or not.
[Tyler] One of my big takeaways from this meeting
is these people miss Hal.
They respect Hal.
They believe his story finally needs to be told.
What are you feeling seeing this?
Good memories.
And also sadness about Hal.
And I wore mascara. I mean, really.
I never do that. [laughs]
[Tyler] They want the truth out there.
And yeah, maybe Satoshi can never actually
move a Bitcoin,
but three eyewitnesses, experts in the field,
friends of Hal's confirming his identity,
seem like good corroborating evidence.
Hal was given time off
between the end of October 2008 and January of 2009.
Now, that brackets the release of the Bitcoin white paper
and the release of the Bitcoin code.
That's pretty powerful.
[Tyler] It felt like we were closer than anyone
had gotten to solving this mystery.
Until I opened my email and saw an article with the headline,
"Hal Finney Was Not Satoshi Nakamoto."
It was written by someone named Jameson Lopp,
who claimed he had irrefutable proof
that Hal Finney was not Satoshi Nakamoto.
I'm here because I have a lot of weird hobbies.
And Bitcoin provides a lot
of interesting facets for research.
And like probably many of you in the audience,
I find the myth of Satoshi to be a fascinating aspect.
[Tyler] I'd never heard of Jameson.
So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole.
One of the things I learned was that
he had been swatted like hell.
[dramatic music playing]
This is Jameson Lopp, and you're watching
Bitcoin Card Talk.
Yippee ki yay, motherfucker.
[Tyler] Having been swatted like Hal Finney,
he had erased his past.
He was living off the grid.
He agreed to meet with me
on the condition that it be somewhere
in the northeast of the United States,
but that I could not come to his home
and that I could not go to anywhere
where he could be tracked.
-[man] Raise up. -[woman] Yeah, raise up there.
[Tyler] It brought home what Phil Zimmermann said to me
many, many months ago,
which is that what you're doing could be dangerous.
Charlie mark.
Bravo mark.
-Audio's good? -[man] Great.
Okay.
You wrote a post recently, and it was entitled,
"Hal Finney Was Not Satoshi Nakamoto."
Can you tell me about why you came to that conclusion?
Researching a lot of Hal's and Satoshi's early activity,
I discovered several different conflicts
that showed that they were both doing things
at the exact same time when Hal could not have been
at a computer on the internet.
Can you walk me through, kind of step by step,
your analysis and conclusions of that?
Well, some years ago, another early Bitcoin developer,
Mike Hearn, released a bunch of emails
that were back and forth over a several week period
in which Mike was basically asking
Satoshi questions about Bitcoin.
And when you look at the timestamp analysis,
there were several back and forth emails
that actually happened while Hal Finney
was provably running a race.
At one point, Satoshi says,
"Hey, Mike, you send me an address,
I'll send you some Bitcoin."
And this transaction is on the blockchain.
So the timeline basically breaks down like this.
You know, 8:00 a.m. Hal starts running.
Sometime, 8:25, 8:55,
this Bitcoin transaction
gets broadcast out on the network.
9:14, Satoshi replies.
And then four minutes later,
Hal actually crosses the finish line.
And your conclusion from all that analysis?
From the very simple fact that it's not possible
to be in two places at the same time,
it's highly unlikely that Satoshi
and Hal were the same person.
[Tyler] I had a hard time squaring what Jameson Lopp
told me with what the PGP folks had told me,
because both theories are powerful in their own right.
Have you thought of explanations beyond the conclusion
Hal Finney was not Satoshi Nakamoto
based on your research?
[Jameson] One possible explanation
is that Satoshi was a group of people.
Whether Hal was like "in on it,"
I will, I think, never really be able to prove.
But Occam's razor, it's difficult to keep secrets
amongst multiple people, you know,
unless they're all dead.
[Tyler] At first, I thought Jameson
was blowing up my theory.
But then I realized he gave me the answer
because Hal Finney was not the only candidate
who was no longer with us.
But I needed more information, and I knew exactly where to go.
[dramatic music playing]
[Tyler] Meredith Patterson is a coder who had done a lot
of work around computer security,
linguistics, civil rights.
[Meredith] Do you mind if I smoke while we shoot or...
[Tyler] Up to you.
But the real reason I wanted to talk to her
is that she is the widow of Len Sassaman.
Thank you for letting us invade your home, Meredith.
-[Meredith laughs] -[Tyler] Really appreciate this.
You're welcome.
[Tyler] Len had been one of our main candidates,
but we didn't have as much information on him
as we did on some of the others.
What we did know is that he was a cypherpunk
and a coder, and he was an academic.
As a PhD student, he focused on anonymity,
and he spent a lot of his time
writing research papers.
[Will] When you look through
the white papers of Len Sassaman,
he was really great
at writing white papers.
He would have really cared
about checking every reference as they did.
The precision and the correctness
of every part of that white paper.
He is the kind of person
who would really have gone through that,
gotten it right.
[Tyler] Len also lived in Europe
during the time Satoshi was active.
And even though he was American,
his writing often contained British spellings and phrases,
just like Satoshi's.
His PhD advisor was David Chaum,
the inventor of DigiCash
and the godfather of digital currency.
Could we just talk about Len as a person a little bit?
-Do you mind? -Sure.
We met at CodeCon, which is the conference
that he and Bram Cohen ran in San Francisco.
[Len] So I was living on his couch at the time,
and I'm like, "Okay, well, Bram's throwing a conference,
and I don't think he's thrown a conference before.
So I should probably help him out,
even though I haven't thrown
a conference before either."
He just seemed really excited about everything
that he was interested in.
That was one of the first things we both recognized
we had in common.
[Tyler] Len, like Hal,
suffered from horrible
and debilitating health conditions.
[Meredith] He was already dealing with Crohn's disease,
severe calcium depletion, uh, in his spine,
and he was using a cane by the time he was 30.
He got the results
from an electromyogram that he had done.
What is that? I don't know what that is.
It's a test where they insert needles into your skin, uh,
so that they can test the electrical signals
in your nerves.
This can tell you things about the condition
of the myelin sheath, uh,
that's basically the insulation for nerves.
Like, demyelination is a symptom of multiple sclerosis,
which his mom has.
I was actually visiting my parents when he died.
Then on July 3rd, 2011,
almost six months after Satoshi's last public post,
Len Sassaman took his own life.
[somber music playing]
[Meredith] We were an amazing goddamn team.
[Tyler laughs]
I wanna go back to 2005.
Um, that year, Hal Finney presented RPOW at CodeCon.
Do you remember that presentation?
I remember that presentation
-extraordinarily well, yes. -Tell me about it.
I had read a couple of articles about Hashcash,
which was basically the forerunner of RPOW.
But it was fascinating to see that transformed
into a system for actually using it as money.
Was there a general feeling in the room
that this was innovative
-when Hal was talking about it? -Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely.
-Yeah. -And he and Len were friends?
-Yes. Yes. -And had worked together?
-Can you tell me about them? -Yeah.
They had worked together at PGP.
Um, do you know if Len and Hal were in touch in 2008?
Oh, definitely.
Yeah, no, they were certainly
still interacting online.
Can you tell me what you thought
when you first heard about Bitcoin?
I went and read the white paper, like, immediately.
And I was like, "Oh,
well, this is a neat way to get around the central operator."
What did you make of the fact
that it was written using a pseudonym?
Oh, I mean, that didn't surprise me in the slightest.
-Why not? -Whoever was behind it
had definitely been, like,
you know, reading the cypherpunks' mailing list.
They were familiar with the kinds of problems
that the cypherpunks were interested in solving.
Is it possible Len suggested to Hal
that he release Bitcoin using a pseudonym?
Oh, I mean,
Len was big on people releasing things under pseudonyms,
like, you know, just full stop.
-Why? -[Meredith] There's this concept
called k-anonymity.
You can sum it up as the bigger the crowd,
the easier it is to hide in.
So the more people that use pseudonyms,
the more difficult it is to identify
any one particular pseudonym user.
And if people use multiple pseudonyms,
so much the better.
You are telling me that one of Len's specialties
was stylometric anonymization. Can you tell me about that?
Stylometry is what people are doing when, you know,
they're trying to figure out
who really wrote Shakespeare's plays.
They're analyzing the text
typically using various statistical tools,
having to do with word frequency,
word pair frequency, syntax tells.
Stylometric anonymization would be small stylistic changes
that blur those fingerprints.
And what do you make of this theory
that Len's talents could've complimented Hal's
in the creation of Bitcoin?
I think it's plausible.
Is it possible that Len would've helped Hal and not told you?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
[laughs]
Why?
I mean...
he was a private guy.
Like, we didn't tell each other about everything we did.
And that wasn't out of distrust
or anything like that.
It was more just, you know,
we're both relatively private people.
[Tyler] Several people have tried to identify Satoshi
by analyzing what he wrote,
but none of those studies have been conclusive.
And I think I know why now,
because we've learned that Satoshi knew
how to hide his tracks in what he wrote,
erasing any clues that could be used to identify him.
Meredith had not given me any proof,
but she gave me some great ideas and enough to go on
that I knew who I needed to talk to next.
[dramatic music playing]
Bram Cohen was the computer programmer
who co-founded CodeCon,
the conference where Hal Finney
first gave his RPOW presentation.
Bram also invented BitTorrent. He had known both Hal and Len.
And a few years earlier, he had posted some fascinating tweets
I wanted to ask him about.
-We're rolling? We're good? -Okay.
Can you tell me about Len? You were very close to Len.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was my best friend.
You know, we were roommates for a long time.
He was a very enthusiastic, cypherpunk-type person
who was much more of a political ranter than I am.
He really liked posting
pseudonymous political screeds on cypherpunks.
But he was so secretive that I never actually found out
what his pseudonym was.
You talk about Hal and Len as the creators of Bitcoin?
Can you tell me why you feel that?
Hal and Len, they knew each other,
and they both had this pattern
of posting pseudonymously to cypherpunks
and being kind of secretive about it.
And just in terms of MO,
what they like doing exactly matched,
you know, what we know about Satoshi Nakamoto
because Satoshi, first and foremost, was a cypherpunk.
And Hal and Len had the skills
-and the experience? -Yeah, well, especially Hal.
Len would be more of a fit for the kind of, you know,
human language text associated with it.
Thank you very much.
As I left Bram,
it felt like the pieces were falling into place.
It was time to bring in Bill.
[phone dialing]
[Bill C over phone] Hey, Tyler. What's up?
[Tyler] Hi, Bill. Listen, I think I've figured out
who Satoshi is. I wanna present it all to you.
I wanna get your opinion.
-Can you come into the office? -[Bill C] All right.
I'll clear out some time, and I'll come by.
For the entire investigation, we've been pursuing Satoshi
as if he were one person.
But all of our empirical evidence
and all of the eyewitness testimony
is leading to the conclusion
that it was two people collaborating.
And I'll show you how.
Satoshi, first and foremost, was a cypherpunk.
[Meredith] Satoshi cared about the kinds of problems
the cypherpunks were interested in solving.
The cypherpunk ethos was what PGP was founded upon.
[Bill C] They had to be an expert in currencies,
an expert in coding, an expert in cryptography.
Most programmers could not have done something this complex.
But Hal Finney was a brilliant programmer.
He was very, very good
at writing the core cryptographic code that PGP did.
[man] Len Sassaman was really great at writing white papers.
[Tyler] Len was also the co-founder, with Bram Cohen,
of the CodeCon conference,
where Hal Finney, in 2005,
presented his idea for RPOW.
Which is as close to Bitcoin as anything could possibly be.
[Tyler] Hal and Len both specialize
in stylometric anonymity,
and they were good at hiding their tracks in what they wrote.
[man] A lot of the Bitcoin code
is very similar to what Hal does in his normal C++.
But then he sticks in some things
to throw you off the trail.
[Meredith] Len was big on releasing things
under pseudonyms and if multiple pseudonyms,
-so much the better. -[Tyler] Do you know
if Len and Hal were in touch in 2008?
[Meredith] Definitely. They were still interacting online.
This is exactly the same timeframe
that Hal had no commits to PGP code.
What was he working on? I think it was Bitcoin.
[Tyler] Hal took care of the programming,
writing the code.
[Will] Len would be more of a fit
for the human language text associated with it.
Which explains how Hal could've been running a race,
while Len was acting as Satoshi.
And Alyssa told us through her charts.
[Olivia] Qualitatively, which of these people
look the most like Satoshi?
Hal Finney and Len Sassaman.
[Bill C] There's only one problem.
Len is publicly bashing
Bitcoin left and right.
[Tyler] I went to Bram asking, if Len helped create Bitcoin,
why would he have publicly bashed it? And he said...
You don't make all your pseudonyms
agree with each other about everything,
or everyone's gonna know who your pseudonyms are.
If you have, like, some identity that you're trying to hide,
then your normal public persona has very little to gain
by agreeing with a hidden identity,
particularly if it's some, you know,
controversial topic like Bitcoin.
[Tyler] And when I spoke to Kathleen Puckett
and Jameson Lopp, they told me...
If there's more than two people involved
in some sort of endeavor...
It's difficult to keep secrets amongst multiple people.
...there's no way that they could keep that private.
You know, unless they're all dead.
And the way for people with a big stash of Bitcoin
not to touch it is if they're both dead.
Which goes your point about it's not human nature
to not touch money that you have.
-A massive fortune. -It's in the billions.
-Billions. -Exactly.
So, if we take all of the circumstantial evidence,
all of the empirical evidence,
and all of the eyewitness testimony,
the conclusion is that Hal Finney and Len Sassaman
collaborated to create Bitcoin,
that the two of them were Satoshi Nakamoto.
[soft music playing]
[Tyler] For years, there was one person
whose participation we thought
would be vital to our investigation.
Fran Finney, the widow of Hal Finney.
Fran had repeatedly declined to participate,
but after we showed her our film,
she changed her mind and offered to speak with us on camera.
So, we brought her to a discreet location
not far from her home in Santa Barbara.
Thank you, Fran. I really appreciate your time.
It's a pleasure. Thank you.
[Tyler] In the three plus years we've been working on this,
whenever Hal Finney's name came up, people smiled.
[laughs]
-I still smile. -[Tyler] Yeah.
When I spoke with people who knew Hal well,
is that they would describe him
as operating at the highest level as a coder,
as a real expert in this field, as a genius.
-Yeah. -Were you aware of Hal's...
-Yes. -...talents?
I was. I was very much aware of his brilliance.
And for all of this brilliance, the ego didn't get in the way.
-No. No. -He didn't brag
about his accomplishments.
He was so humble.
He wanted to share credit for anything.
He was like that with our kids. He was like that with me.
He was like that with his coworkers.
Mm-hmm.
He liked to collaborate. He was a big collaborator.
For a few years, you declined to speak with me
and to participate in this film.
Then we showed you the film, what do you think of the movie?
I liked your movie.
The reason I declined to speak with you
was because I misunderstood where your movie was going.
I had been approached
by a number of different projects
with the projects' intent
to find out who Satoshi was.
Satoshi Nakamoto.
And I assumed this project was similar.
And most of those projects are just very exploitive
and centered on mystery
but not on the history of Bitcoin.
Not on anything except who is this mysterious person,
Satoshi Nakamoto.
And most of them weren't anything
I was interested in helping with,
and I assumed this film was gonna be similar.
But after I saw the film,
and what you have done with it so far,
I was really touched and impressed and blown away.
Did you ever ask Hal if he was Satoshi Nakamoto?
-Yes. -What did he say?
"No." He said, "No."
Why did you ask him?
Someone called us, and said,
"We think Hal is Satoshi Nakamoto."
So, that's when I asked him.
And Hal just laughed and said, "No."
Is it possible he helped build it
and didn't tell you?
Yes.
I think he did help build it.
You also brought forth the possibility
that I hadn't considered that Hal might've collaborated
in the writing of the code for Bitcoin.
And I mean, he did, he was excited to write that.
The white paper itself, I didn't think he wrote,
but he could've helped in making edits for it.
So, what you present in the film makes sense to me.
[Tyler] Fran had corroborated
what so many people had told us about Hal.
And it made me think back to an interview Hal did
with Forbes Magazine shortly before he died.
In the article, Hal denied being Satoshi.
But in the conclusions of the article,
Hal was asked if given his contributions
to open source cryptography,
he could perhaps be considered one of the creators of Bitcoin.
Looking back, I wonder if he was trying to tell us something.
When we interviewed Will Price,
he keyed in on this very same moment.
When he phrased it, the final way,
uh, which was whether he's one of the creators of Bitcoin,
Hal raised his eyes and eyebrows,
which in the article is identified
as his way of saying yes.
And, you know, he asked him if he was proud of that work...
and then he raised his eyes, and he smiled.
[laughs]
So, I think
for Hal...
it was always true to say that he didn't create Bitcoin.
He didn't create Bitcoin, it was a team.
But if you ask him, "Are you one of the creators of Bitcoin?"
Yes.
At this point, I think it's better
that people understand
that these people who are long passed,
did create it.
They had all of the best intentions,
and they...
didn't do it for the money.
The thing I always loved
is when there's an intellectual challenge,
then when you master it,
it gives you practical abilities.
And cryptography is an ideal field for that.
[Phil] You know, if anybody ever made a movie about Hal,
they would have to get Tom Hanks to play him.
He was an absolutely wonderful person.
[Max] I loved Hal. He was a great guy.
I was very fond him.
I met plenty of other people whose ideas
I like who are kind of obnoxious,
and I just didn't wanna be around them that much.
Hal was not that way at all.
I think everybody loved Hal.
[Jon] Hal's influence on the world
in a number of behind the scenes,
but extraordinarily important things
ought to be valued.
He is the person who is not
like what you see out there in the cryptocurrency world.
And that is why he deserves the accolades
because he is proof positive
that you don't have to be a horrible person
to make a big impact on the world.
Do you believe Hal changed the world?
Yes.
Yes, I do.
That's his big legacy.
He left his footprint,
and I'm so proud of him.
[Will] I wanna talk a bit today about anonymity privacy,
the whole bag.
Now look at the quote where Satoshi says,
"I'm probably not gonna be around much longer."
You know, it's very fatalistic,
and that was the year that Len committed suicide.
I think he had a lot to give to the world,
and, you know, I'm sad that that got cut short.
You know, selfishly, I also just-- I miss him.
I don't know if that's selfish. I understand.
I appreciate that.
One of the ways that Len's work lives on,
along with his contributions to cryptography and privacy,
his activism and his political fights,
he also lives on in the form of a text memorial
that is embedded in a Bitcoin transaction field
that will stay a part of the block chain forever.
I admire Hal and Len
almost more than anyone I've ever investigated
because their motives, I learned,
were so much more beautiful and pure
than the motives of most people who wanna hide behind something.
Usually, I'm looking for people who've done something wrong
and are hiding behind a mask.
But in this case, I was looking for somebody
or a few people who did something
really creative and innovative, and they did it behind the mask.
So they had very different motives for hiding.
[man] Threats to anonymity, threats to privacy,
threats to people's freedom of speech,
threats to people's freedom association,
these are things that you all ought
to be taking seriously.
These were guys who felt that...
the average person was losing power.
And that the way to regain some of that power
was not to launch an actual revolution,
but to launch a revolution with ones and zeros.
A number of years ago, Niall Ferguson, the historian,
wrote a very powerful book about the idea
that if you walk into a medieval European city,
you see typically a town square
and some kind of tower next to it,
say from a church or castle.
And power in European medieval times
would oscillate between the square, the crowd,
and the tower, the institution of the rulers.
And whenever you get, you know, a centralized authority
that's totally in charge, and people feel crushed,
they innovate around the edges through networks to fight back.
But then the networks take control, it becomes too chaotic.
And so the tower comes back in.
And I think what we've seen in the last few years
is an effort by central banks
to really take strong control over money.
And the square, the crowd,
essentially assembling and innovating
and providing an alternative.
What you're gonna end up with is a much more dynamic,
exciting financial system.
[inspirational music playing]