Original subtitles

Every day, you know, you have nonstop Bitcoin.

Who cares about Bitcoin?

I could care less what Bitcoin trades for,

how it trades, why it trades, who trades it.

If you're stupid enough to buy,

you'll pay the price for it one day.

Bitcoin is a fucking scam.

Bitcoin seems like a scam.

-Magical internet money. -It has no intrinsic value.

Bitcoin is worthless.

-What makes it valuable? -Totally BS.

Bitcoin is a dead end.

Bitcoin's dead again!

It's a combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme,

and an economic disaster.

Whatever it's doing, it's not money.

Whatever Bitcoin is, it is not money.

Bitcoin is simply gonna implode before you know it.

Today, we're having a funeral for Bitcoin.

Despite all the doomsday prophecies,

just 15 years after launch, Bitcoin had become

the 10th most valuable asset in the world,

outperforming Wall Street by a massive margin.

One of the biggest unanswered questions

surrounding Bitcoin is who invented it.

When you ask about the creator,

who created this, we have no idea.

There's these things called nerds.

And in 2008,

one of them made up Bitcoin out of thin air,

using the fake name Satoshi Nakamoto.

Satoshi Nakamoto.

-Satoshi-- -Nakamoto.

Which, I think, are the Japanese words

for Monopoly money.

Satoshi Nakamoto,

the inventor of said Monopoly money,

was now presumably one of the richest people on Earth.

We are all Satoshi!

This anonymous character had developed quite a following.

And if all these pundits kept being wrong,

and Bitcoin kept going up,

then Satoshi could be worth

more than a trillion dollars.

With a "T."

And that's because Satoshi controlled

a shit-ton of Bitcoin.

Enough to break the system.

But, many years ago, Satoshi had disappeared

without spending any of it.

What would happen

if Satoshi just reemerged one day

to cash in?

They'd be like king of the world.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Who do you think he really is?

Simply put, Satoshi's identity

has remained the greatest mystery

of the Internet Age.

No one knows who they are, even though a lot of people

have tried to figure this out.

- Tonight's plan? - To reveal the identity

of Satoshi Nakamoto,

creator of Bitcoin.

Is he no longer here? Is he amongst us?

♪♪

Well, someone probably knew.

Like maybe this guy...

It's too high risk for Satoshi to come back.

...who you'll get to know soon enough.

It's way too high risk.

What's risky about it?

Well, you get implicated as Satoshi.

And then, every country in the world

is gonna wanna go after you.

Or people are gonna go after you to steal it.

But, why does, like, a murderer

go back to the scene of the crime?

Satoshi's doing nothing to pick up his stash.

Yeah, just a million Bitcoin.

And that's why he went to such great lengths

to conceal his identity.

He thought of everything.

Well, not everything.

- Cash. - That should be 1,000.

How often do you pay with it?

Such nice guns!

You probably use your card for just about everything.

Denied, denied... approved.

But the cool thing about cash,

you hand over your money,

you get a thing,

and no bank, credit card company, government agency,

data broker, social media advertiser

gets to know about your hobbies.

But, it seemed like we were maybe on our way

to getting rid of cash entirely.

As the world transitions into a cashless society...

"We've gone cashless."

No one wants to carry around cash anymore. That's already-- Cash is gone.

In fact, there are quite a few things about the dollar

that were just outdated because these dudes

didn't have iPhones.

But, if you were to start from scratch,

how would you make cash for the digital age?

It was 2017

when I really started paying attention to Bitcoin.

And as a filmmaker

who was concerned with online surveillance...

Everything moved into ones and zeros,

and ones and zeros can be tracked and traced.

...the idea that Bitcoin

was supposed to protect your privacy was pretty appealing.

It was trying to be money for the internet.

♪♪

And it had a few features

that the current financial system just didn't.

Fight!

No single person or group controlled it,

it was basically impossible to shut down,

it was scarce.

Anyone with an internet connection could access it.

You are personally responsible for it.

And it was super secure

unless you made a mistake.

And it was distributed through something called

"Bitcoin mining,"

which I tried.

Even if you don't usually pay attention to Bitcoin...

...you might have still heard about it.

Miners using powerful computers

to guess a random string of numbers

and win a Bitcoin reward.

It's how new Bitcoins enter the system.

This fancy computing rig,

it's like a ticket to the Bitcoin lottery.

You said 1,600 Watts?

It takes a lot of electricity.

And if your mining rig is the first in the entire world

to find the computational equivalent

of a golden ticket...

- I got it, Mr. Salt! - Here it is!

...you win some freshly minted Bitcoin.

That means that some people are gonna lose a lot of money.

-Probably. -Oh yeah.

And every 10 minutes, you get another shot.

It was the modern gold rush

from the comfort of your living room.

But, my miner wasn't so lucky.

So, instead of winning a down payment for a house,

I just ended up with a large electricity bill.

Eh, fuck.

And the occasional power outage.

I don't think this is gonna work.

Meaning I'd have to go get my Bitcoin on an exchange,

kinda like how you buy stocks.

And like stocks,

people kinda hope that this digital asset

is gonna make them rich.

Which, let's be honest, was the real draw.

It was fueled by an online culture

that was invested in seeing Bitcoin win.

You're supposed to buy the dip. Buy Bitcoin.

Designed to pull people away from a financial system

that seemed like it was stacked against the average person.

If you win all three rats,

-and they come in one-two-three, you win everything. -Oh, my God.

But, you have to win some rats.

And Bitcoin provided this glimmer of hope

that you might get out of the rat race.

Look at them go! Oh, man, you're gonna have a car.

Asking you to put your faith in math

instead of the government.

-I don't know what I said, ah! -We finally beat Medicare.

So, maybe that's why in 2021,

an entire country adopted Bitcoin.

Because the current financial system

was also stacked against them.

This is El Salvador, a Latin American nation

plagued with a history of gang violence,

corruption, and civil war.

For more than 20 years, they had resorted

to using the US dollar as their official currency,

adding to why the president's announcement

sent shock waves around the world.

Where are the Bitcoiners?

He planned to tie the country's future to Bitcoin.

For starters, they bought a bunch of it using...

105 million taxpayer dollars.

Then, the country began accepting Bitcoin

as legal tender.

Suddenly, Bitcoin could be used alongside the dollar

to pay for things like breakfast, real estate,

or even taxes.

At least, that was the idea.

We announced that El Salvador was making Bitcoin legal tender.

We had some protests, did you see those?

They started with misinformation to the people,

telling them Bitcoin was bad,

and, you know, you shouldn't use that currency

because it's invisible. You cannot see it!

Yeah, exactly.

They are all full of bullshit.

The president was betting

that other countries would want in on the game,

would reject the hegemony of the US dollar.

Who was behind this effort?

So, we talked with my friend Samson. Where is he?

Samson?

So, this is going to make El Salvador

the financial center of the world.

This is the beginning of, uh, nation-state Bitcoin FOMO.

Do you guys like that?

The guy on stage with the president

clearly had something to do with it.

So, I reached out.

- Hello, we're going on a helicopter. - That's right. Hello.

Samson worked for a company that was trying to expand

Bitcoin's reach around the globe.

He considered himself a kind of

diplomatic ambassador for Bitcoin.

And the president was treating him like one.

Samson was busy

trying to convince Mexico's third richest man,

known as Uncle Richi,

to use his power plant to mine Bitcoin.

Because, you know,

who wants to just be third richest?

Like myself, investors also had questions

when it came to Satoshi, Bitcoin's anonymous creator.

It was the elephant in the helicopter, so to speak.

-They're gone. -They're gone.

Yep.

Just before the launch of Bitcoin,

there was a digital currency backed by actual gold,

which was reportedly processing $2 billion

in transactions every year.

E-gold is a currency

that's currently pretty popularized

with a lot of online users.

They promised that e-gold would be here this year,

next year, 1,000 years from now.

But, it seems the US government

didn't give a shit what their website said.

They arrested its creator and shut it down.

The takeaway?

If you're going to create a digital currency

that will compete with the US dollar,

you might wanna be really careful

about letting people know who you are.

And because Satoshi disappeared and never cashed out,

I figured maybe their identity should stay a secret.

After all,

it's not like they had some master plan for Bitcoin

to replace the US dollar and render them

the richest person on Earth. Right?

Satoshi understood the game theory of it all.

If Bitcoin was successful,

they'd go after him.

I don't think he would've created this gift for the world

just to keep it as a threat over the future.

He was more thinking for the good of humanity.

Money is very broken.

It's just a house of cards built on top of more houses of cards

on more houses of cards.

It's all gonna come crashing down.

And when it does, that's when hyperbitcoinization kicks in.

Hyperbitcoinization is just,

you can earn Bitcoin, spend Bitcoin,

save in Bitcoin, and the dollar is irrelevant.

There are a handful of countries

that had printed their way into hyperinflation,

where money becomes worth less than the paper it's printed on.

But, that could never happen to the US dollar.

Could it?

Lehman Brothers is going bankrupt.

Customers are freaked out,

waiting to see how low the Dow will go.

Back in 2008, the world came really close

to figuring out that our entire economic system

was held together with chewing gum and duct tape.

The President's plan would allow the Treasury

to buy up to $700 billion worth of bad loans.

Trust in financial institutions was hard to find.

I know Americans are concerned about the adjustments.

The only business that seemed to be booming

involved taking pictures of depressed stockbrokers.

It was during this fiasco that a mysterious programmer,

calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto,

conceived of Bitcoin,

an electronic cash system.

And it was all set in motion on January 3, 2009...

when the first Bitcoin block was born.

It's called the Genesis Block.

And a new block is formed about every 10 minutes,

adding to the record of all the Bitcoin transactions.

It's called a blockchain.

It's like an indestructible mathematical safe,

one that keeps track of who owns what.

And if you want to unlock your Bitcoin,

it'll require your secret key,

which is basically just a fancy password.

Bitcoin now has hundreds of thousands of blocks.

But, in the Genesis Block, Satoshi hid a message.

"Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

Referencing a headline that had appeared in the London "Times"

that same morning.

It was a subtle declaration of war

against the world's financial powers,

which had just printed more than a trillion dollars

to satisfy the recklessness of the big banks.

In apparent opposition,

Satoshi designed Bitcoin with a limited supply.

No one could just print more of it.

Only 21 million total could ever be mined.

It was programmed so that the miners would receive

less and less over time.

Until 2140,

when the digital mine basically runs out,

with Satoshi writing,

"It's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint,

"if we can explain it properly.

I'm better with code than with words though."

You know, for Bitcoiners who actually might know

who Satoshi is, if they do,

do you think that they would keep that secret?

Well, I would keep the secret.

Adam Back would keep the secret.

Samson's boss is a cryptographer

named Adam Back which jumped out at me

because Adam Back

has a pretty important connection to Satoshi.

He was believed to be the first person

Satoshi ever reached out to.

People have pushed Adam to release the Satoshi emails

that Satoshi sent to him.

But, Adam is a very upstanding guy.

His line of thinking is that is a private conversation.

So, he's never released those emails.

I've seen them, and, you know,

they're real.

Adam's company is called Blockstream.

They were largely behind this effort in El Salvador.

And now, they were looking to help

more countries adopt Bitcoin.

Which brings Bitcoin closer

to becoming the new global standard.

Which, in turn, could make Satoshi

the richest person on Earth.

It might make you wonder

if Satoshi had any relationship to Blockstream,

assuming Satoshi was still alive.

So, I asked Samson if he could connect me with Adam Back.

-Adam, is your mic on? Can you hear me? -Just wait a minute...

Okay, should be good.

I had, you know, a brief interaction,

email interaction, with Satoshi in 2008.

And-And, like, what happened? We don't know.

I mean, is he alive or not? I don't know. Um...

Did he just choose a different pseudonym?

Is he-- he still active?

We don't know that either, I'd say.

Satoshi's wallet, there's this huge sort of chest

that hasn't been tapped.

It seems almost like a, you know, a Bible story,

where nobody really knows quite what happened

because it was so many years ago.

It's hard to be definitive, I guess is my point.

So, Adam, are you planning any trips

to El Salvador anytime soon?

I haven't really been traveling that much lately.

Usually in Malta, actually.

We should start with just an interview with you in Malta.

Um...

If that sounds... if that sounds good to you.

Okay.

♪♪

When Adam moved to Malta,

Bitcoin was just getting started.

It had no value yet.

So, perhaps it's just a coincidence

that Malta is considered a tax haven.

So, how'd you end up in Malta?

Um, so, in 2009,

I was working for a startup.

I was thinking as a remote worker,

I would try something adventurous,

find somewhere interesting to live.

The cryptography behind Bitcoin

is what makes it secure.

It's the "crypto" in cryptocurrency.

And cryptographers, they're like the math wizards

who are skilled at making digital locks.

And to create Bitcoin,

Satoshi referenced ideas from a few of them.

In particular, something that Adam Back had invented,

called Hashcash.

And he dreamed this up 12 years before the creation of Bitcoin.

Were you the first person that Satoshi reached out to?

I believe so, yeah.

He just sent an email, um,

saying that he's about to publish, um, a paper...

What would become Satoshi's famous white paper.

...and wants to know the correct way to cite Hashcash.

Did you ever release the emails that you had with Satoshi?

-No. -Was that to protect privacy

'cause they were private emails or what was the reason?

Yeah, kind of convention--

I mean, convention, so-called "netiquette,"

which was a popular term back then, was that

you would not post somebody's emails without permission.

Like, nobody knows how to reach this guy at this point,

so I can't ask, you know?

But, we can look into the group of people

Satoshi relied on for inspiration and support.

Namely, the cypherpunks.

Back in the day, there was a lot of hope

that this thing called the internet

was going to usher in an era of newfound freedom.

Imagine a world where every word ever written

could be viewed instantly in your home

via an information superhighway.

But, only a few predicted

the surveillance hellscape that lay ahead.

And they could be found on the Cypherpunk Mailing List.

Every cryptographer worth their salt was on it.

Cypherpunks are cryptography activists

who believe in personal privacy for everybody.

Which meant in a digital world,

you would need some way to secure your communications.

In the physical world, you had a good degree of privacy.

In the online realm, in principle,

you should enjoy the same rights.

I mean, why should you lose your rights just because

you're using a different communication mechanism?

But, the military, and three-letter agencies,

viewed cryptography as a tool of war.

And they didn't want unbreakable security

in the hands of the masses.

The unrestrained public discussion

of cryptographic research

threatened our national security.

The cypherpunks waged

a massive battle against the US government.

I was sitting around at university and thinking,

man, this is, this is so ridiculous.

So, Adam, being part punk...

...created an easily wearable bit of illicit code.

It was just a method of encryption.

Wear the shirt while crossing a border,

and it could be considered weapons trafficking.

A few people had tattoos with it on

to, like, you know, to make the argument that,

"Well, can I, can I leave the country now?

I've got this on my arm," kind of thing.

And if you've ever used a secure messaging app,

well, you have Adam and his cypherpunk buddies to thank

because they won.

Except one key thing evaded them.

Permissionless electronic cash for the internet.

Hey, this could actually change the world for the better.

They understood that in a future

where everything would be tracked and traced,

you needed untraceable digital cash.

The holy grail was to find a solution to this problem.

And we're not talking about

a digital representation of money

like when you use a bank or credit card.

We're talking entirely decentralized,

totally secure, fully autonomous currencies

spread across the globe that no one could control or shut down.

It all needed to work without putting trust in a bank,

a government, or some big corporation.

I want to tell you how PayPal stole my money

and my girlfriend.

Over the years, a few key cypherpunks

took stabs at trying to make this work.

It was deemed impossible.

But then, somehow, Satoshi showed up and figured it out.

You know, you talk to a lot of technical people,

and they will say of Bitcoin, "I could have done that."

I say it's actually much harder than it looks.

I'm just trying to imagine, like,

who would've been working around the clock

to introduce something like Bitcoin...?

So, it could be somebody that was on the cypherpunks list

that nobody knew the real name of.

Or it could be somebody younger.

I think the question,

"Who was Satoshi?" always kind of creeps in.

It's hard to avoid that question.

But, I've been told it was a secret

which was known, but that was closely guarded.

That there were people in Bitcoin

who knew who Satoshi is,

but that they wouldn't reveal it.

Um, and that maybe Satoshi was a group of people

that is, like, still active in Bitcoin today.

Rachel-Rose was a journalist for CoinDesk.

It's one of the most popular media outlets

covering the whole crypto space.

Since leaving CoinDesk,

she'd become a crypto-anarchist,

which is about using subversive technology...

...to dodge government control.

I was hoping you might have the time

to interview Amir while you're here.

He's, uh, one of the first five developers

to talk with Satoshi.

- Where is he in Switzerland? - He's downstairs.

- Oh, he's here? - Oh, he lives with you!

Who just happened to be her boyfriend.

Good to meet you.

Amir Taaki is a British-Iranian anarchist revolutionary

and one of the earliest programmers

who worked on Bitcoin after Satoshi handed it off.

In terms of the "Fuck the man,

burn down the system" roots of Bitcoin,

this guy is about as real as it gets.

Should I call it...

Drug Market Ultra

or Death Market Revive?

These days, the Bitcoiners,

they don't really talk about me anymore.

I'm no longer "in" with the Bitcoin crowd.

But, part of it is because,

uh, I went to fight in Syria.

And I was like-- I was out of crypto for two years.

There's a few photos of him with Kalashnikov,

and it's like, "Bitcoiner Fights ISIS in Syria."

It was more like three years,

because I was under house arrest for one year as well.

Oh wow. For what?

Investigation of terrorism.

How did you get involved with Bitcoin?

I remember when I first got into Bitcoin in 2010.

I started to, like, delve a bit deeper,

started to look at the code.

The code itself was very bad,

didn't seem like the guy who had wrote it

was a professional developer.

But, it wasn't nothing either.

Conceptually, it was, it was a leap.

It was interesting.

Was Satoshi communicating with you

in the early days at all?

Just on the forums.

Satoshi created the Bitcoin Talk forum,

where early enthusiasts could interact with Satoshi

who wrote 575 total posts.

Their posts usually had a kind of bland academic style.

Unless something got under Satoshi's skin.

Which Amir succeeded at.

When I posted about WikiLeaks...

WikiLeaks, an online collective

known for publishing state secrets,

had become the target of the state.

The US government pressured Visa, MasterCard,

PayPal to block all donations

and freeze their funds.

So, Amir suggested they start accepting donations in Bitcoin.

"PC World" picked up the story.

Satoshi was afraid this rapid adoption by WikiLeaks

would attract the wrong kind of attention

from three-letter agencies.

One of my favorite quotes,

"WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest,

and the swarm is headed towards us."

That's one theory for Satoshi's departure.

The very next day,

that's when Satoshi made their last post on the forum.

But, Satoshi quietly continued communication

with a select few people,

primarily with a guy named Gavin Andresen,

who had been an early contributor to Bitcoin.

I was kind of looking around

for an interesting open source software project

to contribute to and stumbled across Bitcoin,

and then got sucked in.

Satoshi, when he left,

he distributed control

amongst different people in the community.

Now, Gavin represented

a very different type of Bitcoiner than Amir.

He wanted to work with the state, not against it.

He's a normie. Like a boomer-normie.

But, normalizing Bitcoin appeared to be Satoshi's goal.

And Gavin looked like he was from an L.L.Bean catalog.

Every time I tried to make a change to Bitcoin,

he tried to reject it. I was like, dude, fuck off!

On the Bitcoin website,

Satoshi even replaced their own email with Gavin's,

seemingly rendering him the spokesperson.

So, I-I took over from the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto.

But, Satoshi became annoyed with Gavin's PR efforts

rather quickly, writing,

"I wish you wouldn't keep talking about me

"as a mysterious shadowy figure.

The press just turns that into a pirate currency angle."

Then, Gavin did something that mortified early Bitcoiners,

prompting Satoshi to permanently cut ties.

My last email to him was telling him that I had

agreed to go visit the folks at the CIA.

♪♪

Gavin Andresen announced

that he was visiting the CIA to present Bitcoin.

Everybody was absolutely shocked.

Like, dude, what are you doing?

And after that, Satoshi just disappeared.

Nobody heard from him again.

Which was good timing

because Bitcoin was about to find its first real-use case:

buying drugs.

Something special came in the mail

just today from Silk Road.

Imagine logging on to an Amazon-like marketplace,

only instead of household items and shoes,

you can buy heroin, meth,

and pretty much any other drug you can think of.

"Many thanks and much love."

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there are some, uh,

people interested in drugs, let's say,

who ended up being relatively wealthy.

While this sent Bitcoin's value skyrocketing,

its reputation was easy pickings.

It's untraceable, and that makes me think

that the real purpose of Bitcoin is to use it for drugs

or to buy weapons illegally.

Although anarchists like Amir were loving it,

the emerging generation of corporate Bitcoiners

wanted to improve its image, give Bitcoin a friendlier face.

Bitcoin Jesus himself joins us on the phone.

- Roger, great to have you back. - Hello, everyone.

Thank you for having me again.

Roger Ver put millions of dollars

into some of the first Bitcoin startups,

eventually rendering him a billionaire.

But, when Roger first heard about Bitcoin,

he had what's best described

as a near-religious experience.

Got so excited about Bitcoin and didn't sleep for a week

and literally had to be taken to the hospital,

and they gave me a sedative.

Anybody here that's sick of the government

inflating the money supply

to pay to kill people all around the world?

Stop using their money!

This was like a dream come true for me.

The-The thing I've been waiting almost my entire life

finally arrived, and so, of course,

I was gonna be busy promoting that.

Like a prophet, Roger spread Bitcoin

to anyone he met, earning him the title

of Bitcoin Jesus.

I think the world would just plain work better

and be better for everybody if there wasn't a ruling class

called the government. Uh...

But, I don't want chaos. I want order

and things to work smoothly and people to deal with each other

on a voluntary basis to make the world a more orderly,

prosperous place for everybody.

Nouriel Roubini is a famous economist,

best known for predicting the 2008 financial collapse,

earning him the nickname Dr. Doom.

I'm a pain for them

because I'm public enemy number one of crypto.

- Nouriel Roubini. - He can either be

the world's biggest crypto troll

or an idiot.

He's also known for throwing wild hot tub parties,

where he looks to have "10 girls to every one guy."

You know, I usually say that I'm not, uh, "Dr. Doom,"

I'm Dr. Realist.

Honestly, I believe that crypto, even blockchain,

is the biggest fad in financial history.

In crypto, somebody steals your private key,

your money is gone, your wealth is gone forever,

for good. It disappears.

This guy is out

of $225 million.

Seven and a half thousand bitcoins

on a hard drive that I'd thrown out.

If somebody steals my credit card

or gets my bank deposit,

literally, I make a phone call,

and I'm made 100% whole on that.

We have reasons why

we can monitor financial transactions.

Some government may abuse it,

but there is no civilized country in the world,

or government, is gonna allow crypto.

There will be a crackdown,

and it's all gonna disappear.

This is about undermining the Federal Reserve.

This is about dis-intermediating the nation-state.

Satoshi, whoever he or she was,

maybe was an idealist.

Maybe he really cared about protecting people

from excessive abuse of power and so on.

The ideological origins

of cryptocurrency, of Bitcoin, of Satoshi himself,

unequivocally anti nation-state

and pro human freedom.

But, they had a problem.

While Satoshi understood that Bitcoin

wasn't actually anonymous, just about everyone else...

They didn't realize it was traceable.

It wasn't until there was analysis done,

cryptographers looking into it started to see, actually,

there's links.

There's like a trail on the blockchain

that we can actually map.

So, if someone who stole

a bunch of Bitcoin tries to cash out,

you can see that their Bitcoin wallet

contains the stolen funds.

Which is how people doing illegal shit got caught.

Today, the FBI successfully seized

criminal proceeds from a Bitcoin wallet.

♪♪

So, Amir gathered some hackers together

in a sketchy squad

to try and solve Bitcoin's privacy problem.

They hired a young kid as their lead programmer.

His name was Peter Todd.

Peter Todd was living with us.

You know, that's how I got to know him.

We put Peter Todd as the chief scientist of our project

to put him in opposition to Gavin Andresen.

♪♪

You know, we're sitting in a freezing cold room

because it's an abandoned building with no heat.

And it's very unique.

But, equally though,

you get people who know what they're talking about.

You need to give people space to actually work on these issues.

Nine years later,

Peter was still trying to solve these issues.

There's a lot of people who would like to see cash go away

and like see your ability to transact anonymously disappear.

I mean, this, this is a very dangerous thing.

This needs to be treated as a human rights issue.

How'd you get into caving?

There was something called the Toronto Caving Group.

Didn't really pick the best place to live for good caves.

Here, you can actually see, uh,

stalactites and stalagmites sort of forming a column.

So, you know this thing hasn't moved for probably 30, 40 years.

It's unlikely it'll collapse on our heads,

but one day, it will.

Tell me about your endeavors

to try to make a digital currency yourself.

Well, you know,

in, like, the mid-2000s,

I was off getting a fine arts degree.

Started working halftime, like, 2007, full-time in 2008,

and I finally kinda finished it in sort of 2009,

and then went on to start doing physics.

So, have people suspected you of being Satoshi at any point?

Why do they, uh, think you're behind it?

It was back in 2001,

when Peter Todd, a self-taught coder,

first contacted Adam Back.

He was only 15 at the time,

and, like some sort of savant,

he already had a deep understanding of digital cash.

You almost learned how to code before you learned how to read.

Yep.

That's wild.

The logic of coding seemed pretty obvious to me.

Were you just interested in those issues in high school?

I happened to be a young libertarian,

and it was pretty obvious to me that

control of money is a very big problem

for freedom of speech.

We should find a way to have decentralized banking.

Over the years, Peter became

an increasingly controversial figure.

The war on cash is the thing that has to be stopped.

And, frankly, everyone in this audience,

if you don't use cash to go pay regularly,

I don't, I don't respect you as a Bitcoiner.

Like, that's just a fact.

If you're using credit every single day, fuck you.

Let's just say his takes weren't always appreciated.

One day, Bitcoin will go to zero.

You know, it will eventually fail,

like everything else.

Peter will always try to disagree with you.

He's the contrarian of contrarians.

You know, the people who really know...

know how this stuff works, I think realize

that anyone competent enough to go do Bitcoin

probably would be competent enough to not leave any traces.

I mean, Satoshi left a lot of digital history.

Yeah, but digital history doesn't mean much, you know?

Doesn't necessarily give you any insight into who they were.

♪♪

Remember, things that look like mistakes

can be intentionally misleading.

If I were Satoshi, I would have destroyed my ability

to go prove I was Satoshi.

Because then, you'd never be tempted.

But, uh, you're-you're not Satoshi?

Oh, no, I am Satoshi.

I'm Satoshi Nakamoto.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're all Satoshi. Yep.

It's a monkey, I guess.

- Yep. - Could be better.

How'd you guys meet?

Online first.

I got more actively interested in Bitcoin in 2013.

Had the feeling that I don't understand how this works.

There are people developing it,

maybe I can find out where they hang out.

So, still trying to understand how Bitcoin works,

Adam heads over to the forum

and, for the first time ever, makes some posts.

A lot of posts.

Trying to prove his relevance

and his apparent ignorance.

I was a guy who had a fine arts degree.

Yet, you know, I still understood the system better than he did.

So, to clear things up, Adam started a thread,

"Who is this annoying Adam Back guy?"

Of course, the Bitcoiners knew who he was.

I knew who you were. I knew you invented Hashcash.

And here you pop up, and you were clueless.

And they just thought he was, well, pretending.

Best evidence of him being Satoshi.

- Of not being Satoshi. - Being Satoshi.

-Uh-- -Only Satoshi would go to such great lengths

to go and make sure no one thought they were Satoshi.

By the way, everyone's Satoshi.

Yeah, except for me. I'm not Satoshi.

But the most suspicious thing

was the timing of his appearance on the forums.

The same day Adam registered,

a researcher discovered a bug in Bitcoin's code.

It enabled them to see how much Satoshi had mined.

About a million Bitcoin.

Adam seemed concerned, writing,

"Perhaps we're forced to protect him."

And he had a plan.

And I had a potential way to improve Bitcoin's privacy...

He wanted to make Bitcoin truly anonymous.

Which would also mean Satoshi could spend their stash

without anyone knowing.

So, I talked to developers

about how do-- how do you achieve this.

And Adam's coming-out party on the forums

positioned him so that within a year,

he could start Blockstream.

Because Bitcoin's problems,

they just couldn't be solved in a squad,

like what Peter and Amir had attempted a year earlier.

It required serious funding.

It's a big undertaking.

So, it'd need a company,

it needs to employ lots of people.

Blockstream could do what Satoshi couldn't.

Raise money, build a huge team,

and solve Bitcoin's technical problems.

You could say Blockstream is a kind of corporate Satoshi?

-Mm-hmm. -Like, how did he become the head of the company

that became the stewards of Bitcoin?

Uh, it's a good question.

He kind of, uh, shows up and very quickly

becomes integrated into the Bitcoin community.

Where he knew to pursue the right kind of talent.

So, Adam, when you started Blockstream,

did you try to get Peter on board?

-Well, kinda intentionally not. -Yeah.

We talked about saying it would actually be much better

- if I didn't work for Blockstream. Mm-hmm.

'Cause it's better if Blockstream doesn't have everyone.

♪♪

While Peter Todd decided not to work at Blockstream,

his friend Greg Maxwell did.

We're building infrastructure

that Bitcoin needs going forward.

In fact, Greg founded the company with Adam.

People like Greg Maxwell,

they were considered the, the thought leaders.

Greg doesn't do interviews anymore, right?

Getting him to come out of his, uh, home is, uh...

...seemingly off the table, with Greg writing to me,

"I'm pretty exhausted from years of harassment

"driven by conspiracy theories.

I feel like I've given enough."

So, do you think they were working with Satoshi?

It was very mysterious. Uh, th-there is the question

of whether Adam Back is Satoshi.

There's been a lot of debate

over which of these cypherpunks is most likely to be Satoshi.

Hal Finney received the first Bitcoin transaction,

but he died of Lou Gehrig's disease in 2014.

Well, sort of.

His head is frozen.

So, if he's Satoshi,

you'd probably have to solve cryonics

to get the key that's stored in his head.

But, there were some problems with this theory.

Satoshi's code bears zero resemblance to Hal Finney's.

And Hal was photographed in a 10-mile race,

while Satoshi was actively emailing with someone.

In 2015, The New York Times pointed to Nick Szabo,

a reclusive cypherpunk who envisioned something

pretty similar to Bitcoin.

Would you ever be open to, to doing,

like, an interview on camera about all of that?

The key piece of evidence,

he changed the date of a blog entry,

presumably so it would seem like he came up

with this idea after Bitcoin.

Thing is, he'd actually announced months earlier

that he'd be doing reruns of his blog favorite entries,

making this piece of evidence look a lot less suspicious.

There's Wei Dai, who is a famous cryptographer.

He claims there are no real photos of him on the internet.

But, he did speculate that Satoshi

must have been someone with energy and time

that isn't obligated to publish papers under their real name.

There's Len Sassaman, David Chaum, Dorian Nakamoto...

The list goes on and on.

I am Satoshi!

Okay!

The biggest critic of crypto is Satoshi himself.

And while we could pick apart each of these theories,

the evidence pointing in Adam's direction

was a lot harder to poke holes in.

So, we're gonna focus on that.

Though for a long time, people hadn't really

considered him a suspect. And that's because

he wasn't just cited in the white paper.

He was the only person called out by name in the body of it.

But, was Satoshi simply hiding in plain sight?

I've never done it before, so...

- Okay. It's 99%. -It's just one-- Just this one hand, right?

You see, like Satoshi,

he writes in a typically measured style

with similar spelling choices.

Now, Adam also claims that he didn't really get involved

until four years after the launch of Bitcoin.

In 2013, I felt like, you know,

the embarrassing late guy,

given that I should've known better at the beginning, right?

And, uh...

Thing is,

back in 2011,

you can see he was on a mailing list,

openly defending Bitcoin,

and sharing complex insights into Bitcoin's expansion.

Weirder still, in 2012,

he began making revisions to Bitcoin's Wikipedia page,

eventually restoring the section about Satoshi...

Just, like, tried to right a slight historical wrong there.

...even adding possible suspects.

Just leaving out his own name.

How much is Satoshi worth these days?

I don't know. Um, I mean, even the number of coins

that he might have is a bit speculative.

If they had a million coins,

whoever Satoshi is would technically have

a huge amount of influence if it becomes the,

- the new global currency, right? - Right.

That would mean that whoever Satoshi is

might be one of the most powerful people in the world.

♪♪

Even the slightest suggestion

that Satoshi had access to their coins

had the power to tumble markets.

Market fear has begun to overtake rationality.

But selling a million coins all at once?

If these coins were dumped...

That could kill Bitcoin.

And as the stakes grew,

it kinda mattered if Satoshi still had access.

If you were Satoshi, where would you store

your private key to the, uh, trove?

I don't know. That's a lot of bitcoins, isn't it?

What do you think Satoshi might've done with that key?

I don't know. I mean,

some people speculate that he might've deleted them.

But, of course, we don't know-- we wouldn't know, right?

But, we could've known.

You see, there's a way

to verifiably destroy your bitcoins.

It's called burning the coins,

and it's done in a public way for all to see...

...on the blockchain.

♪♪

You could burn all the coins

because that would remove the small uncertainty that exists.

But, Satoshi didn't do this.

Meaning they very well might still have access.

If they kept that stuff, there'd be a lot of temptation

to spend some of it.

So, Satoshi had to weigh the temptation

of becoming the richest person on Earth

against the possibility

that it would derail their invention.

Do you think it'll ever be known who Satoshi is?

I don't think so, no.

I mean, just-just because all of the people

that have been identified

have various reasons, believable reasons,

why it's probably not them.

And you know what the list is, right?

-It's been circulated a million times. -Right. Right.

Wei Dai is on the list.

Um, Nick Szabo is on the list. Hal Finney.

You're on the list. And then,

maybe mysterious... mysterious other person.

-Right. -Um...

Well, I thought you might think I'm Satoshi,

and I don't want that to be on the record, really.

-I mean, you're on the list of suspects, right? -Yeah, yeah,

but, uh, you know,

I was interested for you, personally, to understand

that really-really, I'm not, you know? Yeah.

It seemed to me that, at a minimum,

Adam was more involved than he was letting on.

Meanwhile, Blockstream's Bitcoin ambassador

was trying to make Bitcoin the new global standard.

This is a pivotal time with Bitcoin,

and we have to push the advantage we have now.

I have an in in Korea, but if you wanna do Vietnam...

Wow... Yeah!

-Fist bump... I'm down. -Are you down? Okay!

Alright, I'm down, too.

Samson's young new ally just happened to be

one of YouTube's biggest beauty influencers.

Now, she was advising on more than just makeup.

With Bitcoin, you can buy it in smaller units.

There's 100 million satoshis in one bitcoin.

Nothing ever infinitely goes up,

but Bitcoin will.

I feel like California should become its own country

and adopt Bitcoin. In my humble opinion.

It's like, what, the fourth largest GDP right, in the world?

Yeah.

They were headed to a political function

for Andrew Yang...

I'm Andrew Yang,

and I'm running for president as a Democrat in 2020.

...who kinda brought the idea of universal basic income

into the mainstream.

-So, we gotta talk to Andrew about UBI. Your UBI! -Yeah.

Yes, the universal Bitcoin income.

Not universal basic income. We don't want basic shit.

-We want Bitcoin. -Yeah, we're not basic.

Thank you. Okay, here we are.

So, these two, they're what's known as

Bitcoin maximalists, or Maxi for short.

I'm a proud Bitcoin Maxi now.

I'm toxic as fuck.

Does their profile pic

have lasers coming out of their eyes?

Usually means they're a Maxi.

It was a system of monetary belief.

Welcome to the new religion.

Faith that Bitcoin could fix all the problems in the world.

Bitcoin fixes everything!

And that the US dollar was on its way out.

Okay, here's a $10 bill.

- This is garbage. - This is garbage.

Which could be pretty fucking annoying.

But, ultimately, their goal was to orange pill the world.

We're gonna try and orange pill him.

Oh my gosh! Hey, Michelle!

We have a real life Asian-American supermodel and activist.

Their tactics could be pretty shameless.

-Andrew, nice to meet you. -Oh, nice to meet you, too.

This guy's changing the world. I want you to meet him.

I think he's really important for you to talk to.

Oh, no, I'm super pumped about this. See this magic?

You see this magic in real time? You wanna say a couple words?

Bitcoin is the most important crypto out there.

Holy cow!

- Let's talk, uh, more deeply. - Yeah!

What's your info? What's the best way to be in touch?

Many of these utopian movements start by a bunch of idealists.

But then, they're captured by a bunch of greedy people,

they become a cult,

and the people and the system becomes like a religion.

They become fanatic.

And then, all these utopias, in due time,

they just disappear in the dustbin of history.

And that's what's gonna happen with crypto.

♪♪

Samson thought he could use his own right hand.

Someone with connections.

Enter the Prince of Serbia.

2020, that's when it really clicked.

There are synergies between Bitcoin and monarchies.

I'm a Maxi now.

That's my great-grandfather.

This is my great- great-grandfather.

I see. When do you get your painting in here?

Who knows?

He has the perfect skill set

to contact, uh, diplomats, presidents.

There's a lot of big family network

to-to-to work through. That opens a lot of doors.

Not that long ago,

Montenegro and Serbia used to be part of the same country.

And Prince Philip's family still had a lot of influence.

Prime Minister Spaji.

In terms of where he's at with Bitcoin,

could be the start of a good relationship with him

to get things moving in this country.

I'm a big fan of Bitcoin, obviously,

and of the technology that Bitcoin brought.

Politically, it's, it's a difficult sell.

You have to think about all kinds of risks.

I think the government shouldn't invest in Bitcoin.

If you're risk-averse, you think the government

should not hold it. That's fine.

But, in the event that fiat currencies collapse,

everyone will rush into Bitcoin. So, what we're trying to do

is get parallel systems in place.

Dollars, Bitcoin, pesos, Bitcoin, yen, Bitcoin.

We don't have our own currency.

We're using euros without being able to print euros.

And that's not fair. You know, that's not cool.

Maybe something to consider

is adopting Bitcoin as simply money.

You don't need to tax anybody.

- You can just mine Bitcoin... - Yes.

...and that will fund everything.

The electricity is relatively cheap.

It's usually the smaller countries

that are more agile and willing to embrace change

'cause they're looking for some advantage.

I think it's a good idea.

You can really be a beacon in Europe right now.

Concretely, how do we do this?

We had a really good talk about Bitcoin adoption

and what they can do. And they also, like Costa Rica,

have a lot of hydropower,

so we're making progress everywhere.

How did something with such anarchistic roots

end up being mined by countries?

It all started in 1849.

There was gold in California.

In the beginning,

if you wanted to do Bitcoin mining,

your home computer was good enough.

Which is how Satoshi racked up

what appears to be over a million Bitcoin.

But, once Bitcoin had value...

Within a short time,

all had caught the fever that only gold would quench.

...people created specialized mining rigs

to increase their chances of winning.

Which made the job move faster.

The more people who compete, the harder it gets.

As the gold became more difficult to find...

Mining industrialized, becoming an arms race.

It was buckets, after buckets, after buckets.

Looking for the cheapest energy, the fastest miners,

in search of the next golden ticket.

Bitcoin mines generated about $70,000 a day.

And if you can't keep up, it stops being profitable.

As the gold gave out, people moved away.

Until most of the players left in the game

are basically billionaires who own their own power plants,

or countries who own the power grid.

It's the grand unveiling.

I think there's a couple hundred in here.

It's a 40-foot container.

Requiring about 0.5% of all the energy.

And it requires increasing amounts of energy consumption

as more miners compete.

And while you might think that's pretty terrible...

...compounding a climate catastrophe,

if you've ever heard of petrodollars,

that's because Nixon ditched the gold standard

and intertwined the US dollar with the oil trade.

The effect of this action, in other words,

will be to stabilize the dollar.

Which helped solidify the dollar's status

as the global reserve currency,

but kinda kept us dependent on oil.

So, maybe it's just the nature of money

that it's based on things that people value.

Which is to say, a currency derived from electricity

might pose a real threat to the dollar

if it gained in popularity.

Assuming it actually worked.

♪♪

You see, Bitcoin's original design had a fatal flaw.

Well, computer giant Dell announcing today

- it will accept Bitcoin. - Sacramento Kings to accept Bitcoin.

Overstock is now accepting Bitcoin.

If too many people started using Bitcoin,

it would stop working.

And that's because those blocks

that make up Bitcoin's record keeping system,

they just can't hold very much information.

They're small. And you have to wait

10 minutes before another block forms.

So, when Bitcoin got popular,

your transaction would be stuck

in line for hours, sometimes days.

And since money needs to work immediately,

this was a disaster.

Transaction times are incredibly high.

There's a lot of people questioning long-term sustainability.

Stripe is getting out of the Bitcoin business.

So Gavin, who was still kind of

steering the Bitcoin ship, announced...

We'll definitely need to increase

the maximum block size.

In other words, make each block bigger.

More room for all the transactions.

But, not everyone agreed.

This is obviously a bad idea.

Oh, this is all bullshit.

These guys are bringing about the doom of Bitcoin.

A disagreement which resulted in a massive nerd fight,

known as the Blocksize War.

So, why were they being so apocalyptic

about just adding more space to each Bitcoin block?

The nerds had some good reasons.

For instance, if you could change something

as fundamental as the block size,

could you also change the total supply

from 21 million to 100?

People might lose their faith in what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin.

Although, to make a change like this,

you have to get pretty much everyone on board.

Otherwise, the community will split.

So, instead of changing Bitcoin,

the Small Blockers had a complex technical solution,

but it would take years. Meanwhile,

the Big Blockers wanted Bitcoin to work now,

not in some theoretical future.

- Governments move slowly. - We need to move quickly

and make this cash for the entire world

before the politicians even know what happened

and they have time to react via bigger blocks.

The fight became vicious, with each side

accusing the other of trying to destroy Bitcoin.

I'm not exaggerating, this is a life and death matter.

More babies are dying in countries around the world

because they have less economic freedom.

He's not Bitcoin Jesus.

He's Bitcoin Judas.

He's the one that's trying to kill Bitcoin.

With Bitcoin essentially divided

between the church of small blocks

and the church and big blocks,

you might be wondering

where did Satoshi fall in all of this?

I think Satoshi handed the keys off to Gavin

because he viewed Gavin as a responsible steward

of the future of the project.

But, that doesn't mean you're the leader.

That just means you're the guy who answers questions.

Well, it seemed Satoshi

was about to make their views known.

After years of silence,

Satoshi sends an email out to the mailing list

to share their concerns.

It's from the same address Satoshi used back in 2008.

The one to distribute the white paper.

His words were clear, harsh...

and firmly against Roger, Gavin,

and the big corporations.

There's a debate around whether or not

that was, like, legitimate.

But, whoever had access to Satoshi's email

was somewhat aligned with Blockstream,

with their angle on the scaling debate.

While some question the email's authenticity,

it placed Satoshi squarely on Blockstream's side.

And then, as if sent from digital heaven,

Satoshi appeared in the flesh.

He was apparently an Australian fellow...

named Craig Wright.

So, you're gonna show me that Satoshi Nakamoto is you?

♪♪

Yes.

I do think Craig is Satoshi.

I met with him in London.

Uh, he fits the kind of person

that I was interacting with way back in 2010,

and he provided some cryptographic proof.

Miraculously, this Satoshi

was on Gavin and Roger's side.

At first, it seemed wonderful because, oh,

Satoshi's back, and he's a Big Blocker.

Raise the block size.

Very quickly, people figured out

this is obviously bullshit.

It seems like he'd fake the evidence

by backdating his cryptographic proof.

Craig Wright is incredibly convincing.

For me, he's proved it

beyond a reasonable doubt.

But, if you dig deep enough, long enough,

the inconsistencies will emerge.

Yeah, I-I have to be careful about talking about that topic

because he, uh, sued me at some point.

- Who did? - Craig.

- He sued-- - For what?

For libel. He sued a lot of people.

Well, that's something to look forward to.

To me, Craig Wright was the death blow in the war.

"Death blow" is a strong word, but something close to that.

Thanks, Craig.

We got lucky.

The Blocksize War went the right way.

The Blocksize War was over,

and the Small Blockers had won.

- The victor writes history. - Yeah.

They established themselves as

the ideological authority on Bitcoin.

But, had Satoshi simply regained control?

It took the Small Blockers almost a decade

to make their plan work.

None of that Starbucks bullshit!

You could buy coffee with Bitcoin,

which is why countries were now able to adopt it.

But, it required the support of companies like Blockstream.

Cheers. You're not supposed to cheers coffee.

And these companies would take a small cut

out of every transaction. Meaning it ain't...

Permissionless electronic cash for the internet.

Which fueled theories that they had ulterior motives.

It's been delayed by at least a decade, if not more,

because of this, uh, block size limit that was imposed,

and probably covert government agents helping it along.

- Yeah, so I guess we'll just go-- - Peter Todd.

Sorry, what was that?

I said Peter Todd, for one.

Wait. Roger thought Peter Todd was working for the government?

What-What indication did you have

that he was,

perhaps, collaborating with the government?

The things he was advocating that should happen with Bitcoin

were counterproductive to Bitcoin being usable

as cash and usable as money.

Prior to 2013,

pretty much all of Peter Todd's history

appears to be wiped from the internet.

I finally found his personal website.

2001...

Where, in high school,

when he was communicating with the cypherpunks,

he joked that in the event

he becomes an evil dictator who takes over the world,

he was screwed up from childhood.

His father was an economist,

and his mother taught him about encryption.

And while Peter Todd might have worked for...

A company manufacturing gyroscopes

for drones in the military.

...being in the CIA obviously wasn't on his resume.

Or whatever the fuck Canada's intelligence agency's called.

But, Roger brought up something suspicious.

Later, somebody leaked this email exchange from him,

and that guy openly claimed

that he was working for the US government.

Anybody who looks on Google

and searches, "Peter Todd leaked emails" will see...

Back in 2013, there was this email thread

that had been leaked between Peter Todd

and a guy who called himself John Dillon.

And in the emails,

Peter Todd was conspiring with this other guy

who was affiliated with state actors.

With John Dillon claiming,

"My day job involves intelligence,

and I'm in a relatively high position."

Maybe Amir just wasn't aware of this at the time.

If it looks like something's coming into existence

that could replace the US dollar as the world's reserve currency,

the US government and its three-letter agencies

absolutely, without any doubt, will do whatever they can,

including secretly and covertly disrupting projects

like Bitcoin.

If the government wanted to undermine Bitcoin,

or try to get close to Satoshi, how might they do it?

A guy that openly said that he was working for a three-letter agency

literally paid Peter Todd

to implement what's called replace-by-fee.

John Dillon offered a strangely small $500 reward

for anyone who could design replace-by-fee.

It was essentially a bidding service.

If you pay more, you can send your Bitcoin faster.

Replace-by-fee was an attempt

to fix one of Bitcoin's design problems.

Something that Satoshi had speculated on

just before disappearing from the forums.

And Satoshi knew it would be a fair amount of work.

So, why would Peter Todd do it for 500 bucks?

On the forums, John Dillon publicly prodded Peter Todd to,

"Write some code for once."

And so, in 2013,

about three years after Satoshi's disappearance,

Peter Todd solves this design problem.

I played that little part,

creating this replace-by-fee patch.

Which the Big Blockers thought was a terrible idea

because it could result in some really high fees

just to send some Bitcoin.

Peter Todd, whether he's a government agent,

he's absolutely a super smart guy.

He's gotta be the smartest guy in the room.

He always wants to make sure he can prove

that he's the smartest guy in the room.

So, is anyone in this audience

working for government right now?

Because if you are, I guess I'm one of the people

handling negotiation with government.

Even the email exchange

made Peter Todd look pretty damn smart.

But after the leak,

John Dillon disappeared for good.

As far as I know, Peter Todd never denied any of that.

I think that's pretty much accepted as fact at this point.

I found myself wondering

if maybe he did work for the government in some way.

So, how close were you with Blockstream back in the day?

- Me? - Yeah.

Uh, mostly, I went to their office,

uh, drink all their Red Bull.

I'd go and eat all their snacks.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they'd never pay me,

but I might as well get paid in all other possible ways.

So, he was just strategically close to Adam.

Well, Adam seems to respect you a lot.

Meh, I mean I guess I have reasonable ideas.

It's not that hard. Adam respects plenty of people.

-I think he thinks of you like a son. -A son.

Yeah. I mean, I first talked to him

when I was, like, a teenager.

It's probably part of it.

♪♪

They've got a lot of conspiracies about you.

Well, they should.

Don't you know I, like, worked for the CIA, NSA,

and also KGB at the same time?

Well, they like to point at that email dump that happened.

Oh, yeah, yeah, the John Dillon bullshit.

- Did you release that? - I have no idea who that guy is.

- Really? - I mean, you know, people go

and email you all the time,

like, telling you all kinds of bullshit.

Looked like you were trying to solve a lot of problems

-with him at the time, and, uh-- -No, I mean--

And there was, like, concerns

that, I guess that John Dillon guy

was like under-- was like, an agent or something and then--

The guy explicitly claimed he was, uh,

you know, working for the US government intelligence.

But, you know, is that true or not?

Who the fuck knows? Like,

the problem with all this stuff

is people play all kinds of crazy games.

Could be a 4chan troll.

Like, that's just the reality of it.

You just don't know.

In that email chain,

there was one thing that the John Dillon guy said,

where he was like,

"If the US government wanted to fuck up Bitcoin,

- here's the strategy that they might take." - Well, yeah...

If you wanted to go screw with Bitcoin,

one of the things you do is try to convince the coding community

to go splinter up into, like, five different efforts.

Which is what happened after the Blocksize War.

Because if you couldn't change Bitcoin,

why not just make your own coin?

♪ Pump it up, you've got to pump it up ♪

♪ Don't you know, pump it up ♪

♪ You've got to pump it up ♪

Soon, dozens, then hundreds,

then thousands of alternate coins revved up,

each coin proclaiming to offer

something different from Bitcoin.

You could even bank while you wank.

It's unbelievable how much this has taken off.

The crypto industry exploded.

Bitconne...ct!

Like the stock market,

you could bet that these alt coins

would boom in value, and many did,

with some coins 10-X-ing or 100-X-ing in value.

Wall Street now had competition.

You heard it here first! Bitcoin is going to zero!

Virtually unregulated competition.

Dogecoin to the moon!

Which couldn't last.

And now, the mark-- Oh! Ow! It went to zero!

By the end of the year, the bubble burst louder

than the stock market did in the early 2000s.

Bitcoin's value cut in half from its all-time high,

with the crypto casino

just making the whole industry seem stupid.

It sucks. I mean, I've lost

over $100,000 right now.

Yo! The motherfucking coins are dipping!

Why is the price falling so low?

I've never cried so much

in my grown-ass adult life.

It hurts. Um...

Yeah.

These shitcoins, they were outright scams

and frauds. If there were real shitcoins,

you could use them as manure to fertilize food.

I would rather buy shit, literally shit,

that's worth something, is a good fertilizer,

than buying shitcoins.

So, how could Bitcoin separate itself from the pack?

♪ Hallelujah ♪

The answer was Bitcoin maximalism.

Bitcoin is perfect. It's perfect money.

♪ Hallelujah ♪

It was salvation from the shitcoins.

A gift from on high.

Bitcoin is what they call the Immaculate Conception.

The cure to all the world's problems.

This idea that Bitcoin was born perfect, you know?

It just, like, emerged from the mind of Satoshi,

almost like a gift that was received from God,

and just, like, perfectly articulated into the white paper,

and then into the code.

That's a complete myth.

So Bitcoin's greatest "virtue"

became that it was already perfect,

reinforcing that it could never fundamentally change.

Which created an opening for its greatest competition.

Ethereum, a coin which was

Bitcoin's opposite in almost every way,

including having a very prominent founder.

-Why the hat? -Oh, yeah...

For mosquitoes?

So, Bitcoin is a blockchain

that's designed for one application.

The hat makes you even more... conspicious.

Ethereum basically will let people do

whatever thing that they want to do on top of it.

Like NFTs,

which are basically just... whatever fucking shit

stored on a blockchain.

-We're part of the same community. We're both apes. -I know. Yes, love it.

Some people paid ungodly amounts for these.

The Ethereum team even made their announcements

through... rap.

♪ Yo, not just a pre-compiler change of op-codes ♪

♪ We're here to sustain the scale of our full nodes ♪

♪ Proof-of-stake is hard, but what I do know ♪

♪ Is when we learn to shard we'll change the whole game though ♪

I mean, that was super embarrassing, right?

Yeah.

Proof of cringe or something.

That was pretty bad.

Naturally, Bitcoin maximalists hate Ethereum.

But then, what do you do with Ethereum? You make more shitcoins.

It went from 10,000 coins to 20,000 coins

in actually not that long of a period of time.

The Scambrian explosion.

But, the so-called Scambrian explosion

had a serious side effect.

China now had the excuse it needed

to ban all crypto currencies,

so that they could launch their own.

China's currency is going digital,

known as e-Chinese yuan.

It was basically a government-backed shitcoin.

Their digital currency was inflationary,

their government had total control of your wallet,

and it took Bitcoin's privacy problems

and turned them into a feature.

The People's Bank of China is gonna be able

to peer inside of every single transaction.

So, they're building everything to be monitored.

So, there were protests in Hong Kong.

And what people had to do

was buy their subway tickets with cash.

- They couldn't use their card. - Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Because then you can be traced

that you went to the protests.

So, it's a very dangerous thing.

It's what's known as a CBDC,

or central bank digital currency.

With Bitcoin, it still takes some digging

to figure out who owns what.

And if you're careful, or you're Satoshi

and never spend your coins, you can stay hidden.

But, with CBDCs, your identity is known to the government

and your wallet controlled.

In other words, Satoshi's invention

had given rise to the very thing it aimed to prevent.

What would happen if other countries followed suit?

But, the Maxis were convinced that Bitcoin would win the day,

putting their faith on display

by pilgrimaging to a massive yearly conference.

And it's ridiculous.

I'll die on this hill, but they can't stop this idea.

That bright orange future that is Bitcoin...

We are the vanguard of a new monetary system.

Yo! Yo! Yo! Bitcoin!

I am more bullish than ever on Bitcoin.

It's like you're in some sort of cult.

You're gonna make me look bad.

I have Senator Indira Kempis

to give an update on Mexico.

67 million people are not included

in our financial system.

As the president of Madeira, I believe in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin, within Prospera,

operates as legal tender.

I'll make a small announcement.

I have a new Bitcoin company called Jan3.

I decided to leave Blockstream

and focus more on nation-state Bitcoin adoption.

So, were they feeling the pressure?

I guess Bitcoin doesn't adopt itself, right?

Well, I want it to go faster.

So, uh, your company name, 3Jan?

-Jan3. -So, explain why 3Jan?

January 3, 2009.

That was the start of Bitcoin, was it?

-Well, that's the Genesis Block, right? -Okay!

Every year, it's Jan 3 is the anniversary

-of the Genesis Block. -Alright, yeah, you're good on the anniversaries.

Samson was telling me there was another anniversary recently

-that I did not know of. -Yeah, uh, Adam's birthday on April 5th.

-That's not my birthday. -Inside joke.

-Is it? Very well. -It's an inside joke.

April 5th

was Satoshi's supposed birthday.

- She wants to take a photo with her artwork. - Okay.

-It has no sleeve, right? -No.

-It's a cloak? Alright. -It's a cloak.

You guys are having fun now.

So, he thinks that you're Satoshi.

I hope he doesn't.

I tried to explain to him specifically that I'm not.

I said that you can make a case for Adam,

and you can make a strong case,

but it doesn't mean that I'm convinced.

No, Satoshi was a team.

♪♪

Just kidding. Just kidding.

Even with the breakup, I was a little surprised

he was trolling Adam this hard about being Satoshi.

Yeah, yeah, as long as the troll is on your side.

Oh, boy.

The US had more or less fought wars

to maintain the status of the dollar

as the global reserve currency.

-Let's order a coffee. -Okay.

How might they react

if more countries adopted Bitcoin?

I'm not gonna lie.

You're probably gonna get some heat

because the powers that be don't want this to happen.

All currencies will turn to one.

Bitcoin.

Things change very quickly.

Tucker, I just wanna say hi. You're doing an excellent job.

That's my card.

I'm the crazy prince that's talking about Bitcoin.

But, you know how it is. They-- First, they laugh at you.

Stealth mode.

That's not stealth. That's a Canada hoodie.

What Bitcoin does to societies,

what it does to people's relationship with money,

to the state, to each other, it literally changes everything.

But, what path would it take?

♪♪

Today, Bitcoin takes yet another turn lower.

This is a Bitcoin emergency.

Complete free fall. Anything can happen.

There's a crisis. You've got reporters calling you right now.

What are you telling them?

Well, I mean, people look at the short term,

and the news cycle is, like, day by day.

But, Bitcoin has been around for, like, over a decade.

Yeah.

That's pretty cool.

Unfortunately for him,

amidst this crash,

Luna was a shitcoin that really hit the fan.

- He had it. - Yes.

Looking like a Ponzi scheme...

You're looking at a similar scale

to the Madoff Ponzi.

...after million-dollar Ponzi scheme...

Celsius is being accused of functioning

like a Ponzi scheme.

...this was their founder.

Who would be crazy enough to give their coins,

their crypto, to somebody who's not a bank?

But the people who trusted this guy with their crypto,

they lost billions.

This is bullshit! I gave you my goddamn money!

I want it back! What the fuck is going on?!

Cryptocurrencies of all kinds

are still cascading with no real bottom in sight.

Is lightning serious?

Uh, I guess we're-we're getting the hell outta here.

But, this storm wasn't over.

FTX shocked investors

by declaring bankruptcy this week.

It spent millions making sure its name was seen and known.

Sam Bankman-Fried, known as SBF,

was the young, disheveled CEO of a massive US-based

crypto exchange called FTX.

FTX? It's a safe and easy way to get into crypto.

Eh, I don't think so.

He defrauded customers and stole billions.

This is worse than Theranos.

This is worse than Madoff.

And although he donated to a lot of politicians

and charities...

If I can do anything to help other people,

help the world, that's just as good.

...he didn't manage to bribe his way out of being arrested.

The fraud they committed was worse than the Enron mess,

according to the guy who cleaned up the Enron mess.

They used QuickBooks.

Multi-billion-dollar company using QuickBooks.

The regulators, when they see something losing...

...$60 billion of retail money,

then, of course, they're gonna have something to say.

Yeah, alright, let's get out.

The Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen,

began acting on an executive order

that Biden had signed to rein in the crypto industry.

There are risks to financial stability,

and we need a framework.

But, what would this mean for Bitcoin?

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

It's actually more realistic than you think.

- Hello, Melina. - Good to see you again.

Samson returned to El Salvador,

where the President was facing increased

international pressure for having adopted Bitcoin.

The attacks are increasing.

This rating agency just downgraded

El Salvador's long-term debt.

They're trying to put the pressure on.

But, President doesn't give a fuck.

The International Monetary Fund

has urged El Salvador to reverse course on Bitcoin.

In response, Bukele tweeted,

"Okay, boomers. You have zero jurisdiction.

We are not your colony, your backyard, or your front yard."

The IMF has some political control

over the countries they assist.

And that's where Bitcoin comes in.

The first time I saw him, he was saying,

"We're ready to die on this hill. All of us!

We're ready to die on this hill."

Hope they were ready because the powers that be

had a plan of their own.

Okay, yeah, this is the news. So...

uh, MasterCard, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and others launch

a 12-week experimental digital dollar pilot

with the New York Fed. Did you see that?

I didn't see that. So what, it's a CBDC?

Oh, interesting.

-Your plot is coming true. -Can I give you this?

Things are heating up.

Can I give you some fiat?

Under the cover of the FTX scandal,

the United States announced

it would explore remaking the US Dollar as a CBDC.

You know, that thing that was condemned by Western media

and US politicians over human rights issues.

The Chinese CBDC is a surveillance tool.

But now, the West was preparing to get on board.

The Fed even had their own white paper.

As our white paper on this topic notes,

a US CBDC could also potentially help maintain

the dollar's international standing.

A digital dollar...

...that could replace cash entirely.

And they weren't alone.

♪♪

60% of central banks around the world

are currently experimenting with CBDCs.

The CBDCs, it's really or authoritarianism

from even Western governments.

On CBDCs, I have pushed that project.

By 2030,

Britcoin, a central bank digital currency,

will be up and running.

Why would a country adopt Bitcoin

when a government could just

issue their own digital currency

and have complete control?

Digital public money could help drive out

bogus digital private money.

The technology is tough to compete with,

so if you can't beat 'em, you have to join 'em.

It is potentially the biggest change to money

since, I don't know,

currency consolidation after the Civil War.

Once we have CBDCs,

they're gonna essentially crowd out

any alternative payment system.

So, the future of payment transaction

is one bank, run by the government

with some cooperation of the private sector,

financial institutions.

So, banks might still manage things like giving out loans.

But someday, our bank accounts

could be directly with the Fed?

They can surveil all your transactions,

and they have complete data monopoly.

Well, I think it's a bit of a crossroads.

It could become extremely dystopian.

♪♪

There is a way that you could do a CBDC

that is not... bad for people.

-But, the problem is they don't want that. -No, of course not.

They don't want the privacy.

Faster Bitcoin adoption means

the better off the world will be when the shit hits the fan.

And the shit is hitting the fan.

Fallout continues to grow from the collapse

of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

First Republic Bank,

second largest bank failure in US history.

Following the pandemic, the Fed printed a lot of money.

$13 trillion. It triggered inflation

not seen in over 40 years.

Suddenly, banks had risky balance sheets.

There were bank runs,

and four massive banks were wiped out overnight.

Similar to what happened in 2009,

the government stepped in to prevent

a total financial meltdown.

I can reassure the members of the committee

that our banking system is sound.

Amid this crisis,

regulators seized an opportunity.

New York State Department of Financial Services

took possession of a New York chartered bank,

known as Signature, last night.

This was strange

because Signature Bank wasn't actually insolvent.

Meanwhile, First Republic, another bank that failed, was.

But instead of shutting them down,

they got a full bail-out.

The difference, Signature was the only major bank

servicing the crypto industry.

The regulators are sending a, uh, a clear signal.

Stay, stay away from digital.

But, the next signal would come in the form

of a familiar face.

So, Roger Ver, Bitcoin Jesus

was just arrested in Spain.

Roger had allegedly evaded

$48 million in Bitcoin taxes.

You can have your own private bank account, right?

It's called a Bitcoin account, and it's impossible

for the government to seize your account.

But, it seems they could extradite him,

even though he'd renounced his US citizenship.

You know, what you're really asking

is what's the endpoint to the crackdowns.

This is an example of regulators

who cannot actually do what they want to do,

- which was just go ban Bitcoin. - Right.

Instead, they apply pressure in this sort of alternative way

to go do something they're not really allowed to do.

They fired all the missiles now, right?

They-They've sued the biggest exchanges.

They've made all the allegations.

But, the big banks and the government weren't done yet.

Crypto, Bitcoin, etc.

If I was the government, I'd close it down.

We've got a way to do this!

So, Senator Warren introduced a bipartisan bill

that would essentially make it illegal

to use Bitcoin like digital cash.

Asked if they would support this,

the banks seemed delighted.

-Let's go on down the line. -Absolutely.

- Absolutely. - Absolutely.

Absolutely.

-Absolutely, Senator. -Okay, I like absolutely!

But Wall Street had a plan.

Let's get it inside the regulated system

as much as, as we can.

Bitcoin would be traded on the stock market,

but you wouldn't actually own it.

The banks and hedge funds, they would hold it for you.

This is the day where it goes from malarkey

to actually an investable asset.

Bitcoin would now be a part of retirement funds and pensions.

Put Bitcoin in their 401s.

Solidifying its role as digital gold.

♪♪

It seemed so long as Bitcoin

didn't compete with the US dollar,

so long as governments could monitor every transaction...

Let's do a central bank digital currency.

Are you there?

Yes, I think it's time.

...so long as Bitcoin didn't function like digital cash,

it would be allowed.

Because the Small Blocker solution

kind of required government permission.

Those people who are like, "We need Bitcoin

"to become, like, well-established,

become accepted by the banks,"

they didn't realize that they were, like, cutting this deal

which would compromise some Bitcoin's values.

In fact, Maxis seemed more concerned

with Bitcoin hitting a million dollars

than being usable as cash.

To get to one million, we should be going up,

on average, 10k a day.

And if Bitcoin hits a million dollars,

then Satoshi becomes a trillionaire.

And there has been rumors

that maybe Satoshi will weigh in.

With the stakes so high,

and with Bitcoin being woven into

the fabric of the financial system,

affecting everyone,

perhaps the question of Satoshi's identity

was more pressing than ever.

Peter's never taken you on one of his...

-caving adventures before, Adam? -No.

Civilization's ruins, eh?

- Yeah. - End days.

When you look out on all this, uh, abandoned shit,

what does it make you think of?

Maybe, um, a more decentralized future?

Geopolitically.

There's something to be said for not breaking what--

There's something to be said for exploring this great place.

- Okay. - Without dying.

So, there's a lot of things that point to you,

Adam, being Satoshi,

and I had been spending some time trying to disprove that.

You know, like the Wikipedia edits?

It was because I was like, why are you deleting this?

Bitcoin is a big deal. It's like a clever invention, right?

You added suspects for Satoshi.

- Really? - Yeah.

Well, don't-don't just agree with him. Ask for a proof.

That doesn't seem like something very advisable to do.

There's, like, old emails with you

commenting on Bitcoin in pretty detailed terms.

- I mean-- - It doesn't mean that you're Satoshi.

-It just means that you were... -Yeah. Well, I think--

...you were engaged before you say you were engaged.

Anyway, like, you're missing the biggest piece of evidence

that he's Satoshi of all.

Which is that he gets on the Bitcoin Talk

in, what, 2012 or so? 2013?

-'13. Mm. -Yeah, '13.

And, like, he's clueless!

Doesn't know anything about Bitcoin!

This wasn't the first time

Peter had pointed to this evidence.

Best evidence of him being Satoshi.

- Of not being Satoshi. - Being Satoshi.

So, was his goal to out Adam as Satoshi?

It's hard to know, right? These agencies are sneaky.

Months earlier, I began looking into Peter Todd,

trying to understand his motives.

In particular, I'd focused on the leaked email exchange

between Peter Todd and John Dillon,

the supposed government agent who had offered Peter

that ridiculous $500 reward to create replace-by-fee.

John Dillon's email had supposedly been hacked,

and their emails were leaked.

I wanna talk through the stuff

we were going over the other night.

So, I called up an editor on my team

to talk through some of these clues.

This is an encrypted email chain,

and this is all you do with the hack

is release something that makes Peter Todd look pretty good?

Uh, that, to me, that's part of what started to really...

smell like maybe it was the same person.

Going through the archives,

I discovered I wasn't alone.

Gavin Andresen and some of the folks at Blockstream,

they also suspected they were the same person.

-I mean, why did you create the John Dillon handle? -I didn't.

Come on!

Nope. Not me.

- He was playing bad cop. - You're playing good cop.

So, my theory about John Dillon

is that Peter just enjoys perverse game theory.

I don't enjoy perverse game theory that much.

Although it was certainly interesting

to get contacted by the guy.

-Okay. -I certainly enjoyed it enough to respond to him.

Mm-hmm.

- Okay. - The only person who believes Peter is Peter.

Yeah, that's how it should be.

If Peter Todd wasn't communicating

with a government agent, and he just made this shit up,

then why concoct such an elaborate scheme?

So, I went through everything I could find on Peter Todd,

going back to his earliest messages

on the Bitcoin Talk forum.

Now, Peter likes to suggest

that he didn't really get involved with Bitcoin until...

2014. That's when I sort of "quit the day job," if you will.

But, he had registered all the way back

in December of 2010.

The first thing he wrote

was just asking for an invite to something.

But the next post, a few days later,

was super technical.

And then, he doesn't post again until 2012.

But, it's that super technical post

that made me rethink just about everything.

I was so taken aback, I called my editor immediately.

Uh, so, I'm kind of embarrassed I missed this.

So, his first post is on December 7, 2010.

But then, three days later, uh, he makes another post.

"Of course, to be specific,

"the inputs and outputs can't match exactly

if the second transaction has a transaction fee."

Seems like he's responding to something.

Yeah.

Oh, responding to Satoshi?

He's replying to Satoshi, yeah.

Yeah, like an hour and a half later.

But, read it closely.

Is he responding, David?

Or is he continuing a thought?

♪♪

So, Satoshi is proposing this, like, future scheme

that hasn't been invented yet.

And Peter Todd

just kinda continues that thought

an hour and a half later.

Someone who had just created this account,

and never posted about Bitcoin before,

was finishing Satoshi's sentences?

With a deep fucking knowledge of how,

wait for it, replace-by-fee works.

That thing that Peter Todd

would one day invent a character for.

It gets weirder though, David.

So, you know, we've thought that, like,

Satoshi dropped off of the Bitcoin Talk forums

because of WikiLeaks, right?

But, when would Satoshi

drop off the Bitcoin Talk forum?

Three days after Peter Todd

- replies or adds on to this post. - That's right.

You'll never see another post from Satoshi ever again.

Three days after joining the forum,

Peter Todd finishes Satoshi's sentence,

and then disappears.

Alongside Satoshi.

♪♪

Here's what I think might have happened.

He created this new account.

Then, a couple days later, you know,

writes the Satoshi post, logs out...

logs back in, but doesn't log back in

with the correct account.

And he posts as Peter Todd instead of Satoshi.

And then, makes a couple more posts as Satoshi

'cause he doesn't want it to look like

it's directly related to this.

And Peter Todd just evaporates for two fucking years.

That's, that's insane.

It's insane.

It was just so suspicious,

I wanted Peter to explain how this was possible.

Satoshi's last post was, like,

one week after I signed up for Bitcoin Talk.

But...

Right. And then, you disappeared.

Yeah, then I disappeared.

And Satoshi disappeared at the same time.

Yeah.

I really should've paid more attention to Bitcoin early on,

but, you know, I had other stuff to do.

Y-You corrected Satoshi, but it kind of looks more like

you were continuing a thought of Satoshi.

Well, Satoshi made a little brain fart on, like,

how exactly transactions work,

and I corrected him on that very boring thing.

Why didn't you delete the 2010 post?

Why would I?

Well,

I mean, 'cause it, it just makes you look like

you had these deep insights into Bitcoin at the time and--

Well, yeah. I'm Satoshi Nakamoto.

I mean,

it's sort of the last thing you'd expect Satoshi to say.

Ah, but that's it.

That's like the meta level, right?

Because I know you would expect Satoshi Nakamoto

to delete the post. You just said,

"Why didn't Satoshi Nakamoto delete the post?"

-The post that was corrected? -Yeah, yeah, the correction post.

Right? But then, I did the next level of meta

and then didn't delete the post to go throw off people like you.

Peter sure remembered this post

he'd made 13 years ago awfully well.

Yeah...

I don't know. You're-You're feeding him, like,

-footage that's just gonna be-- -Yeah. Oh, it's gonna be great.

Peter Todd's strategy,

his game theory to throw people off the trail...

- Oh, no, I am Satoshi. - I'm Satoshi Nakamoto.

...was so effective,

I hadn't really considered him a suspect.

In fact, just about no one had considered him.

So, you don't think it's Peter? You-- No way?

Peter's ruled out way, way early on.

And even insinuating this

would get you laughed off the forums.

Peter Todd was just a little kid back then.

So, was it possible that

Peter Todd could be Satoshi?

When you start to, like, run through all the,

all the scenarios,

it checks a lot of boxes.

Satoshi wrote messages

like they were on an academic calendar,

with more time in the summer.

I was off getting a fine arts degree.

Then, there was the British or Canadian writing style.

There was something called the Toronto Caving Group.

In 2001, when the dude is 15 or 16,

he is literally already trying to figure out

how to turn Hashcash into a currency.

After all, I did try to invent Bitcoin.

And I'm not bitter that Satoshi got there first.

You know, when I first saw the Bitcoin code,

I was like, this is not a professional programmer.

Which Peter Todd wasn't.

Experienced C++ coders basically confirmed

that it could've been written by either of you.

- So, do you think I can write in C++? - Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Mm. That doesn't sound like you've done your research.

Yeah.

But, that old resume he tried to scrub from the internet

showed that he'd coded a system in C++ from scratch.

Why bother lying about this?

So, he's done a bit of, bit of research. That's good.

And if you were like, 22 when you created Bitcoin,

imagine what it would do to your psyche.

He's the contrarian of contrarians.

I-I think people often, often miss this nuance.

He always wants to make sure he can prove

that he's the smartest guy in the room.

Well, I think if it was a team,

it wouldn't have been more than two people.

Didn't need even two people. One could have written it.

But, who could Satoshi trust with Bitcoin's future?

Adam Back would keep the secret.

Maybe the first guy that emailed back in 2008.

Or it could be somebody younger.

The guy who, you know,

has sort of considered you like a son.

Remind me again, what's your source

for the "considered you like a son" thing?

That was with you last time.

- What? - No.

I think he thinks of you like a son.

A son. Yeah.

No, sorry. No, no offense,

I'm much closer to Greg Maxwell than you.

Much closer.

Greg Maxwell, who co-founds Blockstream with Adam Back.

This loose coupling isn't inherent.

You can sort of pick your degree of looseness.

Keeping Peter at arm's length...

We talked about saying it would actually be much better

if I didn't work for Blockstream.

...in order to solve Bitcoin's technical problems,

which they couldn't do anonymously.

You need to give people space to actually work on these issues.

But, they would need cover...

Whoever had access to Satoshi's email

was somewhat aligned with Blockstream.

...to push back against Gavin.

We'll definitely need to increase

the maximum block size.

That doesn't mean you're the leader.

That just means you're the guy who answers questions.

And here's the big one.

What if the real reason for using the name Satoshi,

for the anonymity,

was so that people could take Bitcoin seriously?

So they could believe that it must have been created

by one of these famous cryptographers,

and not some kid still in school?

- So, here's what I think happened. - Hm?

- Possibly. Okay? - Possibly.

I think that John Dillon...

...was created so that you would have an excuse

to make replace-by-fee.

A concept which you had envisioned years earlier,

but you needed some kind of cover in order to make.

And you also needed some cover for that 2010 post.

2010 post? Please.

Yeah, because I was Satoshi?

I mean, yeah.

You know, you're very concerned about all the privacy stuff.

So, you reach out to your old buddy Adam Back.

You say, we need to do something about this,

but we need to pay the devs.

But you can't join Blockstream

because it would look too, uh, suspicious.

- So, you don't. - I will admit, you're pretty creative.

You come up with some crazy theories.

It's ludicrous,

but it's the sort of theory someone who spends their time

as a documentary journalist would come up with.

So yeah, yeah. I'll say, of course I'm Satoshi,

and I'm Craig Wright.

And yes, I was definitely covering

that little bit about, you know, fees

to go pretend to be Satoshi.

Or not Satoshi, one or the other.

Well, why make up the whole John Dillon thing?

- Well, like I said, I'm not John Dillon. - Okay.

Sorry. I'm not John Dillon. I don't know who that is.

I'll warn you. This is gonna be very funny

when you put this into the documentary

and a bunch of Bitcoiners watch it.

- I think-- - Well, I don't think they would be very happy

with this conclusion because you're pretty controversial

within the community at this point.

No, I-I suspect a lot of them will be very happy

if you go this route.

'Cause it's gonna be like yet another example

of journalists really missing the point,

in a way that's very funny.

What is the point?

The point is just to make Bitcoin the global currency.

And people like you being distracted by nonsense

can potentially do good on that.

And it seemed this plan was coming to life.

With Wall Street's involvement

bringing Bitcoin to new heights...

El Salvador found itself in the black.

Suddenly, presidents were taking Samson's calls.

And Argentina's newly elected president

shut down its central bank and allowed people

to use Bitcoin however they wanted.

Bitcoin was advancing as a currency,

even if America throttled its use as digital cash.

Maybe it wasn't the design that made Bitcoin so unstoppable.

Maybe it was human nature.

Or just plain old greed.

Even Dr. Doom

launched his own blockchain-based token.

Craig Wright was proven to be a fraud in court,

but it required Adam to finally release

his emails with Satoshi.

He had been telling the truth.

And as more of Satoshi's conversations came to light,

so did the genius,

the struggles, and the immaturity.

But, what about the stash?

Well, you know my-- I-I mean, I don't know for sure,

but, like, my suspicion is

Satoshi did, in fact, go destroy all of Satoshi's ability

to prove who they were.

But, they hadn't burned the coins.

Or in a way, had they?

A few months after confronting Peter,

I came across this old chat log,

that someone probably shouldn't have recorded,

where Peter says,

"I'm probably the world-leading expert

"on how to sacrifice your Bitcoins.

"And I've done exactly one such sacrifice,

and I did it by hand."

♪♪

It was hard not to read this as an admission.

Like Peter wanted his inner circle

to trust that he had, in fact, sacrificed the Bitcoins,

and destroyed all access.

But, this wasn't proof.

It's Bitcoin. Don't trust, verify.

And sometimes, you can't verify.

Mm-hmm.

And if Peter Todd and his friends at Blockstream

were, in fact, behind Bitcoin,

would he remain an idealist?

Or was he still holding on

to the keys to the world's fortune?

Just in case.

♪♪