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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]