Bitcoin Creator Revealed: They Say They Found Satoshi | Ep. 418 with Tyler Maroney and Tucker Tooley

0:00So today we are going to uncover the greatest mystery of the financial age. We did not believe that some computer created Bitcoin, that it was a person or people. An investigative journalist and a producer who bankrolled and drove a four-year hunt for a ghost worth billions. Isn't that dangerous? No one knows who the creator slash founder Bitcoin was. I can't think of another example in history where someone is sitting on a gigantic pile of money and Satoshi didn't move any of the money. Who the hell is Satoshi? We believe that Satoshi is the one.

0:47So today we are going to uncover the greatest mystery of the financial age. in my opinion one of the greatest mysteries of my lifetime who the heck is satoshi does satoshi exist is it a person is it people is it a country is it a government so i'm excited to hear who is satoshi well you have to watch the movie to get that answer um but we do come up with a definitive answer and um in in the film um we believe that satoshi is actually two people both of whom are no longer with us. One is Hal Finney and the other is Len Sassman. Okay. Obviously there's been a lot of names over the years thrown out.

1:30Walk me through the process in the beginning of when you said, this is something I'm going to dedicate years of my life to. Yeah. So, you know, it was middle of COVID and we had to shut down a movie, another movie that I was working on, you know a traditional movie and i got home and i was really kind of frankly bored and trying to figure out you know something to dive into and i'd always known about satoshi but peripherally and i started reading about it and it coincided with the time that if you remember the stock market went way down it was a total v-shape recovery we hit you know we hit the lows and then the fed started printing money um to bail everybody out and obviously it was an extraordinary circumstance.

2:14Everybody had to stay home. Productivity went down. So at that time, multiple bigger financial institutions and companies started talking about investing in Bitcoin, many of whom had previously actually started investing in Bitcoin, and some of whom, for instance, MicroStrategy, run by Michael Saylor, decided that buying Bitcoin for their treasury was a good idea because the notion was that Bitcoin was essentially digital gold. It was a store of value and holding Bitcoin in your treasury over the course of time would outpace inflation significantly. And if you look back at the history of Bitcoin, you can see that that is actually the case.

3:00So multiple people were interested in talking about it. And I just wondered, you know, isn't that dangerous? Like, don't, isn't it sort of, isn't there a risk there because no one knows who the creator slash founder slash, you know, originator of Bitcoin was. And I assumed that many of these companies had already done some diligence, figured it out quietly and understood that, oh, there's not a risk here and, and thus invested in it. So we set out to just have some conversations with some of these people. Bill Cohan, our partner who's not on the call here, decided to go sit down and interview with us some really prolific and powerful people in the finance world, all of whom were interested in or around the hoop on Bitcoin, and asked the question, do you know who Satoshi is?

3:51Have you done work there? And we were met with absolute resistance across the board. No one wanted to talk about it. And And, you know, whether for an investigator and I can let Tyler speak to this and Bill certainly has said it, you know, out loud for an investigator, that's a sign that there is something there that no one wants to talk about. And so that spurred us to continue and go on and pursue this story. So, Tyler, when did it become an obsession? It's a good question because it occurs to me to say that to be a good private detective, it's like obsession as a qualification for the job. like if you're not going to keep digging and digging and digging and find new people to talk to and new sources of information you're never really going to get the answer which is interesting too because like when tucker and i first spoke i said to him hey man this is fascinating i'm gonna i'm all in but i can't guarantee results right because you have to manage expectations um but it became an obsession pretty early on to be honest because i was to be on pretty shocked that no one knew.

4:55Banksy, for instance, is another example of somebody, an artist who had worked under a pseudonym. Nobody really knew who it was. I have some friends in the art world and they said, yeah, we know who this guy is. There was this sense that some people knew who he was who were insiders. When I realized that that wasn't the fact with Satoshi, that became really interesting to me. Nobody had any clue. There had been a lot of really smart work done by amateur sleuths. If you just went out into the web and found people's medium posts, people on Reddit, some journalists had taken a shot at it, but no one had the same answer.

5:33Everyone relied on different evidence. That's when Satoshi, the fascination with uncovering who this was, Tucker's willingness to like fund and be a big part of like a really global, truly global investigation where we talked to hundreds of people over the course of four years where that really set in as a reality. So you have a journalist and a private investigator chasing essentially a ghost. Was there a big lead that you thought was a sure thing, but ended up blowing up in your face because it was not? Well, there's a lot of people that we found along the way who had a similar profile to Satoshi.

6:14And by that, I mean like someone who had had a lot of experience, like understanding monetary policy, who was a really good coder, especially in C++, which is the language that Bitcoin was coded in, that had come out of the kind of cypherpunk world, by which I mean like these computer scientists in the 1990s who decided to use code as a way of being an activist and who cared about a new version of digital cash. In the 90s, there was no word cryptocurrency. That's a word that came out of the Satoshi world. And the reason I say that is that if you look at the investigations of other people, including the New York Times did one recently concluding that it was Adam Back, one of their conclusions, which we disagree with, is if you just look at all of those boxes that I just mentioned, that Adam Back is an example of somebody who fits into that profile.

7:08But the truth is there are dozens of people who fit into that profile. So we found a lot of people along the way who we got really excited by as possible Satoshi candidates. But when we dug deeper, we were easily able to kind of disqualify them. Do you think part of the major obsession with this is that it's not just a person who created something or people that created something. It said this person or people have a tremendous amount of money in a wallet that no one has ever touched. Yeah, I mean, I'll let Tucker add to this, but that's a huge part of why the mystery is fascinating. I mean, our colleague Bill Cohen said many times, including in the film, that it's essentially not human nature.

7:55If you have access to hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, and you don't even like, you know, buy a cup of coffee with it. Like it's a shocking. I can't think of another example in history where someone is sitting on, you know, a gigantic pile of money. I mean, there's all these other stories you may know about where like people realize that they had lost the keys to their own cryptocurrency accounts. And like one guy, for instance, like threw out a hard drive and then he hired a bunch people to like dig through garbage piles, like in giant, like waste management plants to see if he could find the hard drive, because like he knew that if he could just get that password, that key, that he would then have access to the money that he had invested in our mind years before.

8:41And Satoshi didn't move any of the money and not even a little bit, right? Not even money that was left to a family member or a friend or invested or donated or given to a good cause or bought a fleet of private jets. And I think that in and of itself made it, you know, in addition to the anonymity, a fascinating, you know, investigation. Could you imagine hypothetically, what if they lost the keys? What if they lost the passwords? It's funny you ask that because we talk to a lot lot of people in the, like in the, in the world who are in the film, people like John Callis and, and Will Price and Phil Zimmerman, who are these very well-known, uh, uh, coders.

9:26Uh, and, and they said to me, oh, we, we lose our passwords all the time. Um, in fact, not only that, but they told us that like, that people like, you know, back in the day when you didn't have like a password manager or like a smartphone, like your password was like on a post-it note, like stuck to your computer. And people in this world told us that it happens a lot. And in fact, when Bitcoin was started in 2008 and 2009, it wasn't worth anything. In fact, it took two years for Bitcoin to have the value of a dollar. So before that, it wasn't like if you lost your password, you're not losing$100 million.

10:05You're losing$0. And the reason that's important to keep in mind is a lot of people said to us, like, yeah, is it possible? So he just lost his password. And we would kind of laugh and they would say, oh, yeah, it's very possible. This happens all the time. I'd be sad. I'd be quite sad. I know you got Michael Saylor, Gary Gensler, Kara Swisher on camera. Was there somebody who you really wanted to go, but they were just like, no, I will not show up on this movie? What do you think, Tucker? There were several people that were resistant at first. I think we got the majority of people we wanted to interview.

10:40it took a while i mean the biggest one um was meredith uh sassman um len's widow len sassman's widow and that took quite a while and then fran finney um who actually was um obviously hal finney's um widow as well but uh it took us a year two years to persuade her to do it and ultimately what we had to do was finish the movie, show it to her. Um, and she embraced it and loved it. And that was the turning point for us to be able to get her on camera. So we had to open the movie back up and put her interview in. She, and rightly so was very skeptical. Um, because in the past, you know, a lot of people have speculated how was Satoshi and she was actually, when Hal was alive, the family was swatted at her home.

11:33And it was a very negative thing for them and for Hal. And there've been, over the years, many attempts to try to contact Fran and assertions that she had Bitcoin that she was hiding by malicious people. So she was very skeptical. And I think when she saw the movie and realized that it was really a human story, a story about honoring not just Hal and Len, but the entire group of people because in many ways bitcoin was an is an open sourced project and it took years and years decades of of you know advancement and and um intelligence around blockchain and uh work hard work by these by these coders different coders and the cypherpunks to get to a place where bitcoin was even possible uh so obviously pre-ai and and and and pre all of that literally hardworking people um trying to advance the technology and and so in many ways bitcoin is response is is here because of all of those people um we think again that the two that were the most influential um and directly um responsible uh you know for bitcoin were hal finney and lens hasman walk me through the moment when you were editing and you both in the team realize like we found it i think that was a and you know pal can speak to this as well i think it wasn't and there wasn't a like the light bulb moment was actually we didn't find it right so two years into shooting the movie all roads um all investigative roads led to hal finning and we were in the process of finishing up the movie basically asserting that hal was solely responsible for bitcoin and jameson lopp who's in the movie um had it give a talk i don't remember where that talk was tyler do you it was somewhere in europe i think yeah yeah so so he gave a speech and and noted that it would have been impossible for hal to be satoshi because at the time um satoshi was actually communicating and and transacting there was a trans an actual bitcoin transaction that happened from the Satoshi wallet, Hal Finney was running a race in Santa Barbara.

13:49So we put the brakes on and we were, you know, a lot of money into this movie, two years into this movie, and we had to rethink everything. And we'd always speculated that Satoshi was either a lone wolf or a very small group of people. And by very small, two, maybe three, but more likely two. And And you'll see commentary in the movie that, you know, if any secret can't be kept unless it's two people or less. And so, you know, when we when we went back down the path of investigation and Tyler and Bill really looked closely at all the interviews and we kind of reviewed everything and where we were.

14:35Lentz Hassman really emerged as a candidate who not only knew Hal Finney, worked with Hal Finney, but had a totally separate set of skills than Hal was a really prolific coder. He was a technical person. He was really, really good at what he did, but he did not like the limelight. He was not someone who wanted to seek attention. The biggest breakthrough in a lot of ways was when we got people who were friends and former colleagues of Hal Finney to tell us that they felt that Hal was Satoshi. And the reason that was amazing is that, you know, one of the investigative techniques we used was to interview lots of people, people who had worked with, who had been, you know, former employees of, friends of, family members of, all of the kind of top suspects that we have in the film.

15:27And everyone said, oh, everyone thinks, you know, it's Adam Beck or people think it's Nick Szabo. It could be Wei Dai. But no one actually really believed or had any kind of evidence that it was anyone other than Hal Finney and Len Sassman. And that was a remarkable moment in the investigation when it was actually John Callis who said to me on the record, hey, listen, we've always believed that Hal was Satoshi. And the reason that's important to keep in mind is it's not like John Callis is like a nobody, right? This is like Sergey Brin telling us that the top coder who built Google is the person who created Bitcoin, right?

16:10And then Sergey Brin puts me in touch with everybody else who was a senior executive at Google. And they tell me the same thing, right? Like these are the senior founders of this company called PGP, which was this email encryption program in the 90s and early 2000s, where Hal Finney and Lance Hassan both worked. And to have these credible, brilliant people on the record tell me first over a phone call, then in a meeting at a coffee shop, and then on camera felt like emotional and real and powerful. So I'm curious, Tucker, you didn't take the normal Hollywood distribution route. You released straight to the crypto community, which could come with a massive risk.

16:56Why did you do that? Well, we felt from the beginning, if you're making a movie about a technology that essentially disintermediates a middleman, that going direct to the consumer was the best way to release the movie. Really, we wanted to stay true to what Bitcoin, what the ethos of Bitcoin was. from the beginning, at least for the first window. And we'll, we'll go out more mainstream, you know, when that initial window of direct to consumer is over. But yeah, I mean, we just felt like this is the way to do it. It represents really what the technology represented. And, and I do think in general things are moving in that direction anyway.

17:36So, so it was a big swing for us and um yet to be seen how how how great it's going to be or or not but um you know we're happy we we went it went about it that way because again i think it just to the crypto community you know giving them something that is delivered directly to the audience as opposed to through a middleman was the right words has this been resonating with people because i think when you come out with something it's like people love something and they hate something but that both drives it forward and nowadays we know is social sometimes the more hate you get the further it the reach it goes right yeah yeah are you asking was there a lot of love and a lot of hate both i would say i would say tremendous love from let's i'll call them for lack of a better term bitcoin maxis and from from people who have been real thought leaders in the space from the beginning.

18:32I think everyone was enthusiastically receptive of the movie because it's not a gotcha movie, because it's not a tech movie, because it's a human story, which talks, it certainly educates people on what Bitcoin is, but it doesn't do it in a super technical way that sort of only, you know, an advanced person in that space can understand. It really speaks to everyone. And again, it's an emotional story. It's a story about human beings. And I think if you can't relate with the people in the movie, there's only so much, you know, emotion that can elicit. And we wanted this to be true. We wanted it to be an emotional story.

19:12And we wanted to be a story about people because at the end of the day, we did not believe that some computer created Bitcoin, that it was, you know, the CIA or the KGB. We knew from Tyler's great work that it was a person or people. And that was fascinating to me, like just an ordinary person who has problems just like everybody else, a family, you know, all the ups and downs that everybody has, coming up with something that's so profoundly important and has been in the financial community and has gone, you know, from zero to a trillion dollars in less time than any other company or asset has, you know, 10 years.

19:56What a profound and incredible invention creation. And that was created by people, not by anything else. How different do you think things would be if we had known who Satoshi was from the beginning? Do you think that part of the success of Bitcoin, then moving into obviously all these other cryptocurrencies, do you think it's because we didn't know? I do. I mean, I think some degree of it. Yes. I think that it, it, it cuts both ways when you have a founder, let's just take Elon Musk as an example, clearly a brilliant person way ahead of his time, you know, in terms of, um, seeing the future, seeing what can be possible.

20:39Um, but has his ups and downs as a person and everybody sort of goes to the founder and says, what does Elon think about this? What is Elon's opinion on this? And when you have the absence of that, and it's just the creation that's left over, the personal life of the personal sort of interests of the ups and downs of do not get intertwined with the creation, right? So Bitcoin is so profoundly important and elegant in terms of what it does and how it does it that I can see a scenario in which if the creator of Bitcoin was, I don't know, arrested for DUI or, you know, something, you know, that blemish somehow goes on to the creation a little bit.

21:36And I don't think that's right. And I think that without knowing who Satoshi was all this time, I believe that it's helped Bitcoin in many, many ways become something of its own volition, of its own creation, without worrying about the personal issues of the people who created it. On the flip side, look at the SpaceX IPO. um you know i think elon is a tremendous you know ceo leader inventor creator and you know that can that can also attract a lot of attention and and respect from from the markets and from people so again i think it cuts both ways but i um i i think it probably is better that um for the first you know, decade plus, no one really could know who Satoshi was.

22:35I think maybe that's partially how the community was created because it was never about a singular individual. If Satoshi, or I guess Satoshis in this case, were watching right now, what do you think they would be feeling? Do you want to go first, Kyle, or do you want me to? I'll give a quick answer just because I had this thought the other day, and this is going to sound crazy. But one of the things we learned about both Hal Finney and Len Sassman is that they built Bitcoin in their spare time, right? Hal had a job at PGP and Len was working on a PhD. So these guys were busy. Hal also had a family and children.

23:14And I mentioned that because one of the things we learned about both of them and their wonderful, brilliant personalities, that they were tinkerers, they were entrepreneurs, they were creators. And I like to think that both Howell and Len would have gone on to create many other things, right? And when they released Bitcoin, as Tucker said, as an open source code, that basically says, I'm done, world, you take it from here. See what you can make of it. They very much didn't want to control it. They wanted to take on a life of its own. And so I think they'd be fascinated with what it's become and also would have created many other entrepreneurial things.

23:50I couldn't have said it better than Tyler just did I I wholeheartedly agree with him I would add on only that both land lend in particular was very focused on the right to privacy and and how was as well they were both very humble people um didn't grandstand you know weren't out there you know saying hey look at me world look at what we did so the humility behind it i think they'd be proud of and and i think that the they would let the invention of bitcoin speak for itself um just like like tyler said but i think they would also reaffirm the importance um of the conditions that gave rise to bitcoin um the importance of being able to transact from one person to another person without someone in the middle, the importance of privacy, um, the importance of, you know, having something that is, um, completely decentralized that doesn't rely on money printing or, uh, you know, a government to, you know, stay in power and number one in power for its existence.

25:06It'll exist long after that and long after, you know, perhaps the dollar is the world, you know, currency. You know, so I think that there were the principles that gave rise to Bitcoin were really important. And I think they'd be very proud of that. And I think they would have gone on to do many more things, as Tyler said, in that space. We just had a guest on who was telling me that he was buying Bitcoin in 2011. I think it was like $2 or$20. It's kind of insane to think about what Bitcoin was just 15 years ago and what it is now. I mean, it's insane. Like you said, like the fastest probably market cap or growth of anything in history.

25:50At the same time, it was the greatest mystery in my lifetime, either was aliens or who is Satoshi. So I think aliens have already been figured out. Now you've... We should ask the aliens who they think Satoshi is. I was kind of thinking it was aliens, but I mean, it might have been. I don't know. Maybe Len or maybe they're part alien. You have Satoshi and aliens and so everything in my life has now been figured out. So I appreciate that. But finding Satoshi, Tyler and Tucker, what an amazing movie. Highly recommend it. Thank you for finding this so I don't have to wake up in the middle of the night thinking about who Satoshi is.

26:26So I appreciate that. Thanks a lot. Thank you for having us.