A documentary released on Wednesday claims that Satoshi Nakamoto is not a pseudonym for a single individual, but rather a joint pseudonym created by two cryptography experts: Hal Finney and Len Sassaman, before their respective deaths.Bitcoin
Directed by Tucker Hall and Matthew Miller, the documentary “Who Is Nakamoto?” chronicles a four-year investigation by American business writer William D. Cohan and private detective Taylor Maroni into one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the 21st century.
The video features over a dozen interviews with some of the world's wealthiest individuals and computer scientists who, sometimes unintentionally, helped uncover the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.
An investigation into Satoshi Nakamoto's identity could subject relevant individuals to unnecessary legal or personal scrutiny—for example, Peter Todd, a long-time developer of Bitcoin Core.For example—howeverthe ending of "Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto?" did not cause significant alarm, as all suspects are now deceased.
In some ways, the documentary makes a breakthrough, including an interview with Fran Finney, the widow of the late cryptographer. In the film, she acknowledges that her husband may have played a role in the creation of Bitcoin. Cohen toldDecrypted“I think that’s very, very powerful.”
Sasamoto’s widow, Meredith L. Patterson, also appears in this documentary, evaluating whether her husband could have been Satoshi Nakamoto. But before that, other suspects had already been identified: Adam Back, Nick Szabo, David Chaum, Paul Le Roux, and Wei Dai.
In many ways, the film is a love letter to the digital underground, the very soil in which Satoshi Nakamoto thrived—especially the cypherpunks who championed privacy. Phil Zimmermann is one of the most compelling figures in the film, this privacy pioneer who created Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) in the early 1990s, providing the public with “military-grade” email encryption.
Sassaman died by suicide in 2011, shortly after Nakamoto’s final public statement; Finney passed away in 2014 due to complications from ALS. Both had contributed to the development of PGP encryption. The documentary suggests that Finney wrote the Bitcoin code, while Sassaman authored the accompanying documentation, including the nine-page foundational Bitcoin whitepaper.
Before Kohen and Maroni locked onto the suspect,Searching for Satoshithe directors spent considerable time depicting the various cultures from which Bitcoin might have emerged—such as a group of technologically optimistic transhumanists—and the Bitcoin pioneers whose ideas Satoshi blended, including Adam Back’s Hashcash.
The co-founder and CEO of Bitcoin infrastructure company Blockstream, Back, who proposed the concept of proof of work, was recently identified as Satoshi Nakamoto.The New York TimesThe investigation relied primarily on linguistic analysis. After the article was published, Backdeniedthat he is Satoshi Nakamoto, as he has done multiple times before.
Cohen said, "If you have $100 billion in wealth, you can't possibly live such a frugal life." He was referring to the estimated 1.1 million bitcoins held by Satoshi Nakamoto. "We simply reached different conclusions through analysis and deductive reasoning."
The video's investigators brought in former FBI agent Katherine Packer, who helped solve the case of the Unabomber, Theodore John Kaczynski, to assess the motivations of the author of the Bitcoin whitepaper. Her analysis was: the creator of Bitcoin does not seem to care about money.
After speaking with Alyssa Blackburn, Back and several other Satoshi Nakamoto suspects were eliminated. Blackburn, a data scientist formerly affiliated with Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, provided data to Cohan and Maroney that enabled them to compare the online activity of the suspects with that of Satoshi Nakamoto. The results showed that Finney and Sassaman matched the profile of Satoshi Nakamoto.
This film also presents a factMarkedJameson Lopp, Chief Technology Officer at security firm Casa, offers a possible counterpoint: while the avid runner Finney was participating in a race in Santa Barbara, California, Satoshi Nakamoto was still exchanging emails with a developer.
This discrepancy ultimately confirmed the investigators' theory that Finney was responsible for writing the code, while Saamann was responsible for writing the sentences. However, Cohen and Maroni said they conducted numerous interviews in the field of cryptography but gained little insight.
Cohen said that in 2021, during the peak of Sam Bankman-Fried’s power as the founder and former CEO of FTX, he conducted a 90-minute interview with him, but the footage was ultimately not edited into the show. This notorious cryptocurrency magnate was later sentenced to 25 years in prison for orchestrating a billions-of-dollars fraud scheme.
The documentary features interviews with other figures in the financial world, including Michael Saylor from Strategy and Bill Gates from Microsoft. Cohen notes that these individuals appear to be downplaying the importance of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity, effectively hindering investigators’ efforts.
Cohen said, "We spent a year and a half interviewing these people. They were all fascinating, and their stories deserve to be made into separate documentaries, but we never made progress."