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“Finding Satoshi”—How a Private Investigator Solved the Mystery of Bitcoin’s Creator | Bill Cohan & Tyler Maroney
01:16:27
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- [00:00]
Ryan Sean Adams
What if Hal planned this all along?
- [00:02]
David Hoffman
Okay.
- [00:03]
Ryan Sean Adams
And so he has a 12 word seed phrase in his cryogenically preserved brain, and at some point in time, the technology will catch up. And his whole plot was like, how do I hold value across decades, maybe centuries? That'll take humanity to restore my body.
- [00:19]
David Hoffman
He's actually a huge fan of wealth and money.
- [00:24]
Tyler Moroney
Exactly. It was all a trick. Ryan, I think you have a novel.
- [00:31]
Ryan Sean Adams
Bankless Nation Fair. Excited to introduce you to our next guest. Bill Cohen is a best selling author. He's a financial journalist. We also have Tyler Moroney, he's a private investigator. So we've got the journalist plus investigator combo on the show today. Gentlemen, I wanted to congratulate you on making what I think and David has agreed with me. We've talked about this in depth. The best bitcoin documentary that I've ever seen that's probably ever been produced. Well done.
- [01:00]
Bill Cohen
Thank you.
- [01:00]
Tyler Moroney
Wow, that means a lot. Thank you. Four years of work, it better be okay, right?
- [01:05]
Ryan Sean Adams
Yeah, no, you guys put in the work and it shows, let's say, and you got many of the themes that I think we value very much in the crypto community. You've expressed those. You told the story in marvelous detail. I want to kind of split this into two parts because at the end of this we're going to include a link in the show notes, of course, to the documentary Finding Satoshi. And so the call to action is really for bankless listeners to go, go watch this documentary. It'll get you fired up on crypto again. It'll help you remember why you came here in the first place and why you choose to go bankless. But I want to divide this conversation that we're about to have into two parts. So the first part is the no spoilers part. Okay, so full disclosure. This documentary does reveal who the creators of the documentary think Satoshi actually was. All right, so the first part of this, we're going to talk about this without revealing who satoshi was. And the second part, we'll. We'll pause and I'll say, okay, insert spoilers. And then we can talk about who Satoshi actually was, because David and I have some questions about who you point to as the creator of bitcoin. So this is part one, no spoilers. And I want to start with the question that I was wondering as I left the documentary, which is, do you guys think you. You did it? Do you think you actually found satoshi? Is. Is the person or people you named in this documentary the actual satoshi or Is there more work to be done?
- [02:33]
Tyler Moroney
So the answer to that question is yes, we believe we found the answer. Having said that, both Bill and I come out of a journalistic tradition, an investigative tradition of being open to more information, right? Like there is always insights to be gained, knowledge to be had. And one of the things we've loved about this process is how many people have been receptive to what we've done and how much actually people have been contacting us with either information to support what we've done or otherwise, you know, try to learn more based on what we've learned. Which means I think we've done a good job in terms of inspiring people to think about this topic. And one of the reasons why we feel very confident is that we did something I think in this film that nobody's ever done before, which is to get the relatives, the friends, the co workers of the Satoshi Nakamoto that we concluded created Bitcoin to come on the record on camera and talk to us. Meaning it wasn't simply an effort in using AI or doing some kind of linguistic analysis, which many people have done for, you know, the last 10 or 15 years or so. So in that sense, it's also the methodology that we use that gives us a lot of confidence in the conclusion.
- [03:46]
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- [03:47]
David Hoffman
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- [05:29]
David Hoffman
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- [05:30]
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- [06:30]
David Hoffman
Yeah, yeah. I think one of the reasons why Ryan and I think this is the best documentary to come out on the subject was just the level of thoroughness and commitment that the whole team put into just looking in every Nook and cranny for any possible hint and clue. So just. It just feel when you finish the documentary, you feel like. Like, oh, this was a complete story. The level of commitment was intense and many people have tried to answer the question, who is Satoshi? There have been many articles about it. There have been other movies about it. And so, you know, in 2026, here we are with another one. It happens to be the best one that I think. But you didn't need to do this. It was very optional. I want to ask what. What motivated this, like, level of commitment and rigor and thoroughness that you guys clearly put forth in this documentary? Like, why. Why take on this, like, monumental task in the first place?
- [07:24]
Bill Cohen
Yeah, David, there's a good question. I think it was. It was serendipity as much as anything, really. I mean. I mean, you've been very kind about your compliments about the film, which really much appreciated. I think one of the reasons it works is because neither Tyler nor I had any agenda when we started this. And I don't think Franklin knew all that much about how, you know, bitcoin really worked. And so it was kind of a, you know, investigative journalistic mission, you know, trying to sponge up as much as. As we could along the way. And what you may not fully appreciate is that I probably worked on this for. And I was just minding my own business, working on a. Another book, when I got called by the producer and the director, would I be interested in being part of the film Is like the interviewer of. Of and, you know, trying to speak to as many people as. As I could who could help us understand, answer the question of who Satoshi was. And what you may not appreciate, because it's only hinted at sort of at the beginning, is that for like a year and a half I spent, you know, I was interviewing people all over the country, you know, during COVID you know, who are like the OG Bitcoin people or the OG Cryptocurrency currency folks, you know, the. The Michael Saylors of the worlds and the Joe Lubins, et cetera, who, you know, we thought initially, you know, because what else are you going to think, you know, would know or have some idea or would have a lead about who Satoshi might be or some thoughts or whatever. And it turned out, much to our surprise, that these people really either didn't want to talk about who Satoshi was, didn't really care who Satoshi was. Like, as. As Michael Saylor said, you know, Prometheus showed up with fire and gave it to us. Who do we care who Prometheus was or who. Who, who actually created fire? I mean, who. Who cares about who created the Internet or the combustion engine or the cotton gin? I mean, you know, it's here. We can use it. We can do what we want with it. We can invest in it, we can speculate in it. So Bill, you're a smart guy. What are you doing this for? Don't you have other, better things to do? I mean, I had a 90 minute interview with Sam Bankman fried at the height of his power and wealth. And you can see that none of that is in the film. So, so this went on for like a year and a half and we're kind of getting nowhere. And I'm thinking, we're thinking, okay, are we going to get nowhere in with this? Is this going to be. Oh, you know, have I just wasted a year and a half a useless exercise of futility? And then it occurred to us, we needed, we needed the guy to my left or your. My right, you know, on this field. We needed Tyler. We needed a private investigator who went, could. Had skills that could go beyond, you know, the skills in the dark arts and, and really sort of understanding, not in the nefarious dark arts, but just beyond what, you know, a typical investigative journalist, you know, could do to try to. Okay, here's all the people we've talked to, Tyler. We're not really getting anywhere with them. They're very nice. We're having nice interviews. I'm learning a lot. I mean, Michael Saylor is probably the most captivating person I've ever interviewed. I mean, he's just like mesmerizing. You know, you get done talking to him and you think, oh my God, I've got to take every last shekel that I have and go out and buy as much bitcoin as I possibly can immediately. And then you like, sleep on it and wake up the next morning and think, okay, maybe not. And so that's when we decided we needed to get Tyler involved and I think set the film in a totally new direction and made it possible for us to get this conclusion that we feel pretty comfortable with. But it's. I mean, I got this incredible education about bitcoin and I had a great time talking to all these fascinating people, but they didn't help. To be honest.
- [11:44]
Ryan Sean Adams
I think Tyler's skills come through on the private investigator side of things. When you, when you guys looked at kind of like the word analysis, the language analysis, you looked at the C programming of the original bitcoin client, how that was designed. You look at different time zone changes. There's all of this evidence that Tyler brings to bear. I want to ask you a question on the. On kind of the social element, Bill, which is like, so you did talk to a bunch of crypto OGs, and you said they all. They all clammed up. They didn't really want to talk about it or they didn't find it important. I'm wondering if, you know, the question as to. As to why, because these are all curious individuals, I would imagine. Like, do you think it's part of the satoshi myth that true believers want to propagate? That, like. Well, we just don't talk about satoshi because he. They some founder out there. And I don't know, it's this idea of, like, what is bitcoin? Is it a technology? Is it a political project? Is it. Is it a religion? Does it have a messiah? Is satoshi the messiah? Like, what's your reason as to why the OGs didn't seem to care, didn't want to talk about it?
- [12:51]
Bill Cohen
Yeah, I mean, I. I think it's a com. I'm just speculating here because, you know, I. I would ask them why they wouldn't want to talk about it, him or whatever it was, and then they wouldn't want to answer that. So I think it was a combination. If I. If I may, of they were either, you know, heavily invested, and I'm not attributing this to Michael Saylor, but obviously he's the most heavily invested and continues to be heavily invested. Either they were heavily invested and therefore anything. And what if we found out that Satoshi was, like, a criminal or a bad guy or like a notoriously bad guy, you know, a sadist or a, you know, some. Or an ax murderer or something, Then the value of their investment would. I think. I mean, if it came out that Satoshi was an ax murderer, I think, you know, bitcoin would be pretty, I would think, discredited, and the value of their huge investment might go down the tubes. And I think that's part of it. And I think the other part of it is like, hey, it doesn't matter, Bill. We're like, you know, 12 years. Because we started in 2020. We're 12 years beyond the white paper. You know, why are you bothering with this? I mean, yes, people have tried to figure this out, but you're better than this, and you don't need to do this. And it doesn't really Matter, you know, do we know who was the founder of AI? Do we know who the founder of the Internet was? Do we know who the, you know, the founder of, you know, credit default swaps was? No, we have credit default swaps. Use them, you know. You know, they're there to be used, not to figure out who created them. So I don't think we ever got a good answer, but that's the best I could figure.
- [14:42]
Ryan Sean Adams
I mean, there's something about the mystery of not knowing, which it allows you to fill in the blank and propagate your own person in the space. And that person doesn't have the flaws and imperfections of a regular human living at, you know, 2008, 2009 on planet Earth. And so you can kind of insert whatever myth you want in there. Tyler, from your perspective, how hard was this case to crack versus others that you tried in your private investigator career?
- [15:13]
Tyler Moroney
Incredibly hard. I mean, and I think that goes to your earlier question, too, about the why we worked so hard is because it was not only a question that hundreds, maybe thousands of other people had tried to answer before us, but also that the subject matter is complex. I mean, even bitcoin alone, I mean, you two will appreciate this. There's a number of interviews where I would ask people, can you just like, you know, getting to know them in the interviews, can you just define bitcoin for me? And people would do it two or three times, and they'd have to stop themselves and do it again. And some of these people are investors in bitcoin who understand it very clearly because they realize it. It depends on who your audience is. And so we would have people say things like, well, it's a decentralized cryptocurrency that lives on a blockchain. And already you've lost people with that kind of definition, right? If you're not kind of in the know. And so I would ask them to kind of do it again and again. And I bring that up because the complexity of what the invention of bitcoin is is complex. But then one of the things that I was able to do, I mean, my primary work, as you know, having seen the film, is going back in history, right? So Bill is kind of looking at the present day in the last five or 10 years. And I'm doing a kind of history project, and I spent a lot of my time with cryptographers, these computer scientists, the world out of which satoshi comes. And one of the things I learned that was fascinating is how open to the question of who is Satoshi. And where does bitcoin come from? They were. People in that world did not shut me down. And this was shocking in some senses, because these are people who often live under pseudonyms or have lived under pseudonyms, who very much feel that privacy is a basic human right, as John Callis, who's in our film, says. And so I kind of expected a lot of, you know, slammed doors in my face. But what I, in fact, received was a real intellectual curiosity about this, because these are people who are their engineers, their academics. You know, they're kind of toiling away, you know, in the. In the background. These are not people with brand names who I kind of think really appreciated the question of who satoshi is. And it took me years and years and years to get people to trust me and to trust us, not because they distrusted me, but because part of the investigative process as it is, the journalistic process, as Bill can explain, is getting people to really feel that they can trust you and they can open up to you because you've done your homework. And so in that sense is to answer your question about the difficulty, there were some people who are in the film who I met with maybe eight or ten times before they agreed to go on camera.
- [17:56]
Ryan Sean Adams
Wow.
- [17:56]
Tyler Moroney
And that felt. That felt good in the sense that they said, finally, okay, I'm. I feel comfortable talking.
- [18:02]
Ryan Sean Adams
So you really had to earn their trust. Was this because, you know, they had been scammed or they felt misrepresented, or is there just a sense of secrecy in kind of the crypto bitcoin community? Like, why is their natural instinct not to trust?
- [18:17]
Tyler Moroney
It's a good question. I'll give you one example. So Bram Cohen is in our film. You know, Bram Cohen is the inventor of BitTorrent. You know, comes out of the cipher punk world in the 1990s, now runs his own cryptocurrency called Chia. And Bram and I had lunch for about four hours, during which time I made very clear not to say to him, hey, can I interview on you on camera? I really wanted to get to know him because I thought he had a lot to contribute to, not just who Satoshi was, but contributing to the kind of history of, like, what. Who were the cypherpunks and what is. What were some of the earlier, you know, precursors to bitcoin? And who were the people who were interested in electronic payment systems and, you know, and financial systems that were removed from third parties? Like, big, big questions, like, real complexity. And at the end of the conversation, Bram said, To me, it seems like you've really done your homework. I'll talk to you. And that felt good, because it's not that I was trying to prove myself to him, but I was trying to show him that I had read the white paper, not just the bitcoin white papers, but many other white papers, and I'd interviewed other people. Is that my questions to him were legitimately, intellectually curious questions, not just yes or no questions to try to get him to give me a soundbite?
- [19:38]
David Hoffman
One of the things that you said in the. In the documentary, Tyler, that stuck out to me was the. Your PI from your private investigator firm. You do things in the public interest. You may. You do investigations in the public interest. What's the connection to the question of who Satoshi is and public interest? Like, why is he answering that question, do you think? In. In the public interest?
- [19:58]
Tyler Moroney
Yeah. I love that question. So I think, you know, the public interest is. You know, it's. It seems like a kind of obvious concept that we can all agree on, but I think it's. Obviously, the definition will vary depending on who you ask. I mean, even if you just look at the question of. Of, you know, resource scarceness, of income inequality, right? Like, let's assume that bitcoin is created by one person, and all that person owns, the value of roughly 1.1 million bitcoins, right? So they're worth anywhere between 80 billion and 150 billion, kind of whatever it is. Like, for that reason alone, I think it's an interesting question about who controls that much, right? Like, Elon Musk is interesting to us because he's rich. He's also, you know, done many other things. But if he didn't have the money that he has, right? If there wasn't that question of value, of wealth, creation, of prosperity, he loses his platform in many senses. So I think that if we just. If we look at concepts like bitcoin through the lens of simply the financial system, and Bill has reported on this and knows it much better than I do. Like, you know, part of the job of reporting on finance is figuring out where is capital coming from, right? Who's got it, who doesn't have it, who's borrowing it, who's profiting from it. And Satoshi Nakamoto is right in the center of that conversation now, because even during the course of our reporting, the value of bitcoin skyrocketed and then kind of went down again. But beyond that, it was embraced more and more by the very institutions that Satoshi originally sought to evade. Right? Like the US Government is a, is a fan of bitcoin today. That wasn't true when we started our investigation. Right? Like, they're like big Wall street financial institutions are, are investing in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the way that they were not even at the beginning. So even during the course of our investigation, the question of, like, if we're asking questions about prosperity and income and debt and value, like, Satoshi Nakamoto is in that conversation all day long. And, and I can answer that question in many different ways, but that's one answer to a question about why is it in the public interest?
- [22:11]
Bill Cohen
Plus, you know, bitcoin has become, you know, the promise of bitcoin was as, in part was to be used as a currency then that was very hard to track, right? But, but basically there was a hope that it would be used as a currency. I think, by and large that hope has not really been realized. It's pretty hard to use as a currency. Although some people, when I say that, says, oh, no, I'll show you how easy it is and I'll set you up an account and I'll do this and blah, blah.
- [22:42]
David Hoffman
Okay, well, we do 13 steps and then I'll show you how easy it is. Right?
- [22:46]
Bill Cohen
I'll show you how easy it is. It's not as easy as using a credit card or cash. Right. It still isn't easy as that. So what it is clearly is a way to speculate, and people are allowed to speculate. That's probably one of the things that makes our economy so vibrant in many ways is that, you know, we don't frown on that, we encourage that. And so, you know, but when people speculate, things can get like, really out of control and they can go way up. Like the price of Tesla stock, even though it doesn't seem to make any sense. And sometimes bitcoin has that feel and so sort of in the public interest to, you know, inform people as much as we possibly can about, you know, the origins of this and what it was meant to do and who's behind it, etc. Etc. So, you know, that's sort of an addendum answer to the public interest question that you asked. You know, I feel like one of my duties as a former Wall Street M and a banker turned financial journalist is to sort of open up the black box that is financial transactions. It is financial jargon and put it in language that people can understand and discuss it in a way that people can understand a little Bit better. I know it's never all that easy and there's a lot of jargon, but basically financial transactions, the financial system is based on confidence that we have in it. And so it's really important as a public interest matter to make sure that people, you know, maintain their confidence with good reason and because if they don't, then the system is gonna, you know, collapse from its. It's like, it's really just like whipped cream in a way, is, you know, it's really. There's, there's substance, yes, but without the confidence as you can, you know, see in the 2008 financial crisis, which obviously gave birth to the white paper, there's, it's not a coincidence that the white paper emerged, you know, three or four weeks after the worst of the financial crisis appeared. And you know, as we saw, you know, again with say, you know, the Silicon Valley bank disappearing in, you know, less than 24 hours because people lost confidence in, in the bank and they took their money out. So confidence is a very big, important part of this. And, and the backbone of confidence is, is this a good thing in the public interest? And I think that's another part of what we are trying to do here.
- [25:40]
Ryan Sean Adams
Can we talk about that confidence a bit more and the confidence in a different type of system or the lack of confidence in an old system? So, I mean, you mentioned this Bitcoin as maybe a social movement was really born out of the 2008 financial crisis. Chancellor on the brink of a second bailout. This show, even that you're, you're on today is called Bankless, which kind of shows you where we think the, the banks, you know, don't need to fit in, in the stack. And really the, the original bitcoin white paper was, was a bankless white paper. Let's talk about the ideology a little bit. And in your travels, you talk to many original cypherpunks. And I want to get at the roots of this ideology because it's kind of a, we say this word all of the time in, in crypto decentralization, kind of like a groundswell movement of the, of the bottom up of the individual versus the institutional powers that be. What did you guys think of the site, the cypherpunks, you know, people you met, like Phil Zimmerman, for instance, who was the originator of PGP and willing to battle the US Government, perhaps even go to jail for his right to encryption. What did you make of this ideology? I'm not sure if this is the first time you really encountered it. But I'm guessing it's the first time you really went in depth in it. How would you describe it? What, what parts did you like, resonate with? And what parts were like, oh man, that's kind of, that's kind of weird. That's out there. That, that could never work. I'm curious, you know, maybe start with Tyler, because you had so many of these firsthand accounts and you talked to Phil Zimmerman in person. What about cypherpunks is interesting?
- [27:20]
Tyler Moroney
Well, Phil was fascinating, by the way. I could talk about that interview all day long because he is really the kind of godfather of the cypherpump movement in a way. But. And we can go into that in a second. But in some ways, I think, me personally, this is one of the biggest takeaways of the investigation I did, which is that bitcoin comes out of this long tradition of activism. Meaning, you know, many of these computer scientists going all the way back to the 1970s had felt like that, you know, the government institutions and financial institutions were, their power was increasing and that if we aren't careful, they're going to have access to all of our privacy information, all of our public identifiable information, and that we won't be able to do anything without being under some kind of surveillance. And the cypherpunks, there was actually a manifesto that I'm sure you all know about written by Eric Hughes in 1993 called the Cypherpunk Manifesto, which is very short, and it essentially said that, you know, privacy is a human right and that we need to use code. We need to use computer science to write code to protect ourselves from, these are my words, from authoritarianism, right? From governments that are trying to gain access over us and to control us and to grab all the power from us, and also from financial institutions and large corporations who don't have us in their best interest. Right? So the way to do this, the way to protect ourselves, is to use computer systems, to, to literally cut them out of the system. Right? So we don't need Goldman Sachs, we don't need the Fed, and we don't need Facebook, and we don't need the US Treasury. These are antiquated systems. Now we can have a larger conversation about whether that's right or not. But I think that is the political thinking out of which that comes. What's interesting is that even within this group of cypherpunks in the 1990s, there was a lot of disagreement about what that really meant. For instance, Phil Zimmerman told me, I don't Even remember if this is in the film or not. He said after we came out with pgp, which, as you all know, was this email encryption system in the early 1990s that was so powerful that even the. The intelligence services couldn't crack it, right? So, like, activists could talk to each other without anybody gaining access to their communications, is that he started winning, Zimmerman started winning all these awards from libertarian groups. And he would say, I'm. I'm not a libertarian. It, to him, it wasn't about a political position to him, it was just simply about the idea that he felt that nuclear weapons, and this is where it came from for him, where there were too many of them, that the US And Russia were building, and that he wanted to be part of a group of activists to try to prevent this from happening. And that the way to organize some of those protests was using encrypted email, because email was a brand new technology in the early 1990s. And so it comes out of all of this thinking of that, that if I want to talk to somebody else, no one in the world should know that I'm having that conversation. And it eventually shifted towards financial transactions, which led us ultimately to bitcoin. This idea that why should my bank give me permission to send money to somebody else?
- [30:40]
Bill Cohen
My own money.
- [30:41]
Tyler Moroney
My own money. Right. That I worked hard for. Right. And so I think a lot of people respond to that original idea. It hasn't really come true, as Bill was saying earlier. Right. In the sense that the. The original ideas of bitcoin have. Have really changed from what it's used today. I apologize that this is kind of a long monologue, but I think it's a really important point about the history of bitcoin that I think we can actually. We should regain some of this understanding.
- [31:08]
Bill Cohen
To me, there's like a great irony in this as well, because, you know, you read the 2008 white paper. You, you know, Tyler did all those incredible interviews with those, you know, cyberpunk types, and they're so passionate and so interesting. So it was supposed to be, you know, this decentralized new way to conduct financial transactions. And yes, there's plenty of that. And it was supposed to be, you know, for. For a way that you could do things without being monitored and, and Phil Zurman and privacy and all that. And yet, you know, and then, you know, we. We go through 2008 financial crisis which pretty much nearly brought the whole, you know, left ventricle of capitalism to. To its knees. And then, of course, they're bailed out by Congress and the Fed. And, you know, now they. These banks are literally stronger than ever, right? And of course, they are perhaps the biggest controllers of bitcoin and cryptocurrency and, you know, have bought into that, even though, you know, they kind of shun it. They know it's just like another asset for them to control. And, you know, I mean, the Wall street, big Wall street banks are just coming off the most profitable quarter they've ever had in their history. JPMorgan Chase made $16 billion of net income in the first quarter of 2026. That's the most money any financial institution has ever made in any single quarter. So, you know, what was supposed to try to humble these institutions, what should have humbled these institutions? This financial crisis, this way of conducting financial transactions outside of their purview, you know, not sure it's really worked. It's a lot of fun to, you know, look at what bitcoin does on a daily basis. A lot of fun to talk about whether it's a trillion dollar asset class. But, you know, I don't think it's really changed the world the way that white paper thought it might.
- [33:22]
Ryan Sean Adams
This is. This is a question of the difference between like, you know, satoshi and what he had intended and where maybe crypto and bitcoin is today. I guess, you know, I was enticed by something both of you are saying and, you know, maybe something that you said very directly, Tyler, which is like, the cypherpunks are interesting. Here's what they believe. I'm not sure if they're right or not. And I'm wondering, like, as the creators of this documentary, what you think of the cypherpunk movement. So they would say strong individual freedom, the right to encryption, the right to store your value and your money the way you see fit without an intermediary, without a bank, without a sovereign being able to control that flow, the ability to send funds value over IP Internet protocol from one individual to another without any interference, without any ability to censor or stop it at some level. That's kind of a dangerous idea to some people and to some folks, for some, it's basically a premise for having freedom. But for others, they see, well, what about the bad guys? What about money laundering? What about terrorism? What about North Korea and the nuclear funding that they could do as a result of these proceeds? What do you think about the cypherpunks? Do you think they were right? Do you think they're wrong? Do you fall somewhere in the middle? I'M curious about your personal conclusions after talking to so many of them, Tyler.
- [34:49]
Tyler Moroney
I'm not sure I'm qualified to tell you if they're right or they're wrong. I will say that I was quite inspired by the conversations I had with them because they taught me a lot of history that I didn't know. And I think that the. I feel, having gone through this exercise of interviewing dozens of them, that I feel that their motives were in the right place. And I'll give you an example. I mean, you know, Whit Diffie, who's somebody who is not in the film, but who I got to know is the inventor, the co inventor of public key cryptography, which is the encryption system that has been used since the 1970s. You know, RSA, PGP, Bitcoin, everything to this day, right? It's how we keep information secure in many ways, or it has been. And you know, what he was able to see and then subsequent generations, people like Phil, Phil ZIMMERMAN in the 1990s, was that, you know, we're. There is an increasing populism, right, that, that maybe the average person is losing the ability to have freedom, right? And, and to be secure and to. And have some kind of privacy. And then if you fast forward, you know, to the 19, you know, to the 2000s and since then, like, I think it's hard to disagree with the following statement that like, corporations and governments have gained increasing power, right? I mean, like, look at social media alone, right? Like social media has essentially become a way to. Become a way for. Not only for us to give information to large corporations, but, but for them to then take our information and repackage it and resell it, right? Like it's, it's. It's almost a joke in some circles that there is true privacy protection these days, right? Because, you know, we give our DNA to 23andMe and we give our birthday to Mark Zuckerberg and we give our medical information to, you know, some portal that somebody else has hacked into. So like, the digital landscape is full of our quote unquote, private information. And I think that the cypherpunks had this very smart fear of this becoming a reality and tried to come up with a system for protecting that. Having said that, you make a great point that ultimate privacy protection also allows for bad actors, right? We think about the first few years of bitcoin. Bitcoin had like a terrible PR machine because the only time the media reported on bitcoin is when it was being used by bad guys by drug dealers, right? It was like Silk Road was the one story that people learned about Bitcoin from and about. And so because inevitably it was a system that people thought was totally anonymous, that they could. And if you're anonymous, like, you can do bad things and no one's going to catch you. I think how many people saw it, and for many years the US government thought that way too. Having said all that, like, I think you make a great point, which is that it's hard to argue that what the systems that the cypherpunks tried to put into place have come to be. I think they probably have not. And I wonder if part of that is. In some ways the kind of ethos of Silicon Valley has changed. There were more progressive thinkers who were coders. Now when you ask somebody about what is Silicon Valley? They probably say, oh, it's a place where you become a billionaire, right? It's a place you go to get rich. And although it's, you know, Bill can report on this much better than I can, you know, the 1990s certainly had plenty of that. But there was more room for a kind of divergent of thought and more conversations about issues like the public interest and privacy protection.
- [38:26]
David Hoffman
So this is going to be the moment where we start talking about spoilers, spoiler questions that are going to require listeners to have watched the movie or already have intimate understanding of all of these conversations. And so now would be the moment to either pause the podcast and go watch the movie again, link in the show notes, or just have to deal with the fact that we're going to spoil things from this moment forward. So you have gotten your, your warning. The, the documentary comes to the conclusion that Satoshi is combo of two people. Len Sassman and, and Hal Finney. At what point in time did you think, do, do you actually realize that like, okay, it's actually likely two people here. Was that and, and was that always a possibility in your head or was it more of an aha moment in which, oh, two people actually really fit this lock that needs to get unlocked and oh, this actually makes way more sense. Like, what was that moment? Talk to me about that, Tyler.
- [39:21]
Tyler Moroney
So it took a few years for us to fully realize that it could have been more than one person. Having said that, we never began with the premise that it must be one. As Bill said early on, we both started this, you know, with relative ignorance. And I think in some ways that actually played to our advantage because it allowed us to go out and ask really big kind of open ended questions as opposed to Starting with a hunch or starting with a conspiracy theory or starting with like a leak of information that somebody gave us. Right. Because if you do that, then from an investigative standpoint, you have blinders on at the beginning. So we had to kind of keep everything as a possibility. A big turning point for us was once we got a lot of evidence that Hal Finney was likely the person who coded Bitcoin. And in my view, that's essentially the one who created it. Right. Because Bitcoin is about. The code is that we had colleagues and friends of Hal say to us, for all of Hal's brilliance, he was not an academic writer and he could not have written the white paper, so he must have had help. And we interviewed many people who corroborated that point. That he couldn't have faked that. Right. He couldn't have used ChatGPT. There was no ChatGPT back then. Right. He had to have brought in a collaborator who sympathized with his ideals, who sympathized with his thinking, who understood this world, who had the experience writing academic white papers. And that's where we started wondering about who that would be. And through many more interviews with people, realized that it was almost likely Len Sasserman, who had worked with Hal Finney years and years and years before at Pretty Good Privacy at pgp, which of course was started by Phil Zimmerman. And so it allowed us to start building on this idea that it was more than one person, not because we thought about it, but because our sources told us this.
- [41:17]
David Hoffman
Sure, sure. I'm curious about what you think about. We probably don't know this, but what you think about how Len and Hal teamed up in the first place. As you just said, they formally worked together, so they had a working professional relationship. Obviously there was some amount of chemistry. But if you ask anyone on the cypherpunk emailing list, do you know anyone else on the cypherpunk emailing list? The answer is going to be yes. Like, there wasn't. It wasn't that many people. Any possible permutation of combinations of people probably could have been candidates, but it was Len and Hal that joined forces. You know, in. In theory conspired to both work behind this pseudonym Satoshi, and both work together, one to code, one to write the white paper? Do you have any idea about how. How that moment came to be in which they were saying, like, hey, let's. We have these ideas, these puzzle pieces fit. Let's do this thing?
- [42:12]
Tyler Moroney
We don't, unfortunately. And I think that's Largely because they are both no longer with us. And we have again, spoiler alert conversations with both Hal Finney's widow, friend Finney, and Len Sasserman's widow, Meredith Patterson, who are both incredibly powerful additions to this film. And we learn things from them about the MO as well as from people like Bram Cohen, who was Len Sasserman's best friend and the co founder of codecon with him and both. Let's talk about Lens Hazman, for example, although we don't know about Len and Hell's like we don't have their email traffic, we don't have their dms, right. We don't have an early version of the white paper that one of them wrote. We have the testimony of their widows and their friends who said things like this is Meredith speaking. Len used pseudonyms all the time. And I think that this is actually an important fact to remember for your listeners. And because I learned this is like people assume that if you've done something under a pseudonym that you've done something wrong or that there's something, some secret mission going on in the background. But in fact, what she was saying was that like, you know, we as cypherpunks kind of just lived this way. And then, you know, using a pseudonym was part of your life. Right? It was. Maybe it was fun, maybe it was playful, maybe it was a little bit performance art, but it was also necessary sometimes because they've witnessed governments coming after people like coders. Right. Phil Zimmerman was nearly indicted by the US government for creating a privacy system so secure that it was considered a weapon. And then Bram Cohen said to us that Len had so many, by the way he's speaking about his best friend had so many pseudonyms that he didn't even know what they were. Right. So it's kind of like a lesson in the MO of these people. By the way, we weren't the first ones to consider the possibility that Hal and Len had worked together on this. Bram Cohen, in fact, had tweeted many years ago his suspicions and his curiosities about Len and Hal because they love to use pseudonyms because they were fascinated with the relevant technology, payment systems, remailers, anonymity online. You're right, many people fit this category. In fact, all of our candidates fit that to some extent. But if you really kind of like shred down the relevant skill set, interests and curiosity, we kind of, as Will Price, who is Hal's boss in the film, says, end up at a table with maybe just Hal Finney.
- [44:49]
Bill Cohen
You know, I'm a student of human nature at this point between being a banker and journalist. And again, while we did not have any preconceived notions and no agenda, one of the things that I thought from the beginning is like, okay, if you have a fortune of this size worth 50 or 60 billion at various points through this film and it's untouched for years, I mean, it's like nobody's touching a fortune of that size. That is not human nature. Right? That is. That is outside of human behavior. That is outside of everything we know about human behavior. So, I mean, again, while I had no preconceived notions, I don't think Tyler did, you know, and, and. And say, for instance, Adam Back was, you know, one of our top five. But I think, you know, and ultimately we didn't think he was. He was part of this. And I think one of the reasons I took comfort from our conclusion is that, as Tyler said, both Hal and Len are deceased and have been for a while. And so, you know, and I don't. We don't have any idea, you know, which one of them had. If they had a key to the fortune or where pieces of the key were or whatever it was. We have no idea about any of that. But we do know that the fortune has not been touched. And to me, you know, it just doesn't make sense. I mean, you know, maybe all roads. Some people think all roads point at him back. Well, one of the reasons it doesn't make sense to me is because, you know, he's alive. And if somebody who's got a $50 billion fortune, you know, is going to do something with some of it at some point, that's just human nature. And the fact that this hasn't been touched and it doesn't seem like it will be touched means to me that the two people we concluded upon, you know, the fact that they're dead until, you know, Hal unfreezes and his brain takes over again, you know, in 500 years, you know, then I think we got. I do think we got to the right place in part for all the reasons that Tyler has said which make obviously huge amount of sense. And then just this basic gut instinct thought process that I have as a student of human nature that, you know, this fortune hasn't been touched. And here's a pretty decent explanation for why it hasn't been touched.
- [47:32]
Ryan Sean Adams
So the basic idea is that Hal Finney was kind of the C coder and that lens was white paper author, also the key communicator, the replier on The Bitcoin Talk forums, the publisher of information about bitcoin. And it's unclear which of them maybe held, if any, if either held the private keys behind kind of the Satoshi fortune. But is that how the division of labor worked out?
- [48:02]
Tyler Moroney
That's what our sources like Bram Cohen and Will Price among many others explained to us. That's correct. Now look, the truth is we don't have access to, you know, a video of how logging into bitcoin and you know, mining or lend, you know, posting on, you know, on forums. We acknowledge that what we do have is I think maybe for the first time and you guys have seen, you know, there may be three dozen documentaries that have been made about this topic and countless articles. I think what we have for the first time is the testimony of people like that explaining that this is likely how it happened and their true belief that this is what happened and their willingness to go on camera to explain it to us. Having said all that like, look, Bill and I again are, we are, we are fact finders and we are curious. And so the more information that can come to us, and by us I mean not just me and Bill, but like to this question, I think the better. And so if this kind of sparks a larger conversation, then I think it's a valuable exercise.
- [49:03]
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- [50:37]
Ryan Sean Adams
Is there something that still triggers, I guess, a conspiracy theory in both of you, or that there might be a larger story out there? I think if you told this story to a person on the street and you just said, okay, Hal and Len, they're satoshi together, person would say, okay, like, what happened to them? Well, they both passed away. They both died. Like, was there anything about their passing that seemed odd to you or weird to you? Because there. There are many other theories of who satoshi is, including conspiratorial ones that are like, this is a product of the CIA and NSA and the US Government. Oh, and isn't it convenient that the two people you're pointing to for satoshi, they passed away? One of them passed away in 2011.
- [51:25]
David Hoffman
Yeah. Relatively quickly after the advent of bitcoin.
- [51:29]
Ryan Sean Adams
It just seems all too convenient for those that are looking for those types of patterns. Was there anything weird to you about that?
- [51:35]
Tyler Moroney
I mean, look, would it have been more fun if Bill and I discovered that it was a secret CIA?
- [51:39]
David Hoffman
It would have been more fun.
- [51:42]
Tyler Moroney
That would have been badass.
- [51:43]
David Hoffman
Maybe this is actually part of the front.
- [51:46]
Tyler Moroney
Right, Exactly. But, you know, the truth is, like, in some ways, the discovery that it was two people who did not want credit, did not want wealth, did not want publicity, like, that is shocking, I think, to most people, because we live in a world where we put. We sneeze and we post it on X, right? It's like we walk down the street and it's on, you know, Instagram. Like, and these are people who didn't want any information about themselves, right? And I think that in some way is like, so countercultural and so counterintuitive that it's fascinating, right. That there's someone in the film who says, whoever did this is the opposite of Elon Musk. Like, I love that phrase because, you know, Elon Musk is someone who people have, you know, Theorized that, you know, is the creator of Bitcoin with zero evidence, right? And I think, you know, Musk probably likes that, like many people. But there's just not a single source and not a single piece of forensic information that pointed us in the direction of the kind of conspiracy that you're looking for, as fun as it would have been.
- [52:49]
Bill Cohen
Look, I. I interviewed Katie Hahn when she was still at Andreessen Horowitz in San Francisco. And she's talking about files with potential, you know, investigation of who Satoshi might be when she was a federal prosecutor. And I'm thinking, come on, Katie, you gotta. You gotta share this. You gotta fess up here. You know, I mean, let's make my job easier. Let's get to the answer quickly. And, you know, she f. News me, and next thing you know, she's like, you know, I mean, she's not talking. She won't tell me what's going on, and. Or if she even knows. And she's suggesting she might know, but, you know, she won't fess up. So, look, I mean, each. Hal and Len. I mean, Hal obviously had a tragically debilitating diseases. You know, even a conspiracy theorist can't devise a reason how you would get that. You can't. You can't, like, eat a plant and get it. You can't be, you know, shot up with a virus, you know, or like how, you know, the Russians poison people. I mean, you know, that can't happen. And Len, you know, Tyler would know better, I guess, but, you know, Len had a very complicated person and, you know, a lot of issues. I guess so, yeah.
- [54:14]
Tyler Moroney
Ryan, do you have an opinion on that? Because you ask. I'm curious.
- [54:17]
Ryan Sean Adams
I just think that whenever there is the condition, you know, helicide of a suicide, and when we're talking about the stakes this large, then there's an opening for some other possible explanation that's maybe not the obvious explanation, knowing Ryan.
- [54:36]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Ryan is not saying that he believes
- [54:38]
David Hoffman
in the opening, but he is aware that the opening exists and it's worth identifying.
- [54:43]
Ryan Sean Adams
Right? That's right. And it's sort of like, was there anything maybe about Len's death in particular that struck you as like, oh, this is a little odd, as sometimes those types of deaths do. I don't want to get into unsensitive territory, but these types of questions, I'm sure, have crossed your mind. Tyler, for sure.
- [55:01]
Tyler Moroney
I mean, I will say that, and this is anecdotal what I'm about to say. I mean, I've Been doing private investigative work for 22 years now. And usually the answer to a mystery is much more boring than you imagine it would be. And not only that, but the mechanics of a fraud are often much less boring. Like, you know what Bernie Madoff was doing? He was literally just forging paper and storing it in boxes and just. That's. It was the whole fraud. Right? Like, it wasn't more dramatic than that. And people let him go on with it for decades because it seemed like they were getting wealthier. Right. But so not only the mechanics, but also, like, why? Like, it just. It's all always reduced in many cases to, like, the simplest explanation. It takes years to get there. But as much fun as we want it to be the result of, like, some conspiracy of, like, five guys wearing, like, black sweaters, sitting in a, you know, windowless office in Silicon Valley, you know, with, you know, DoD credentials, it's. It's almost never that. And I think, Bill, it was your interview, I think, with. With Kara Swisher, who said something to the effect of, like, the US Government is just not capable enough to create something like bitcoin. It's too complex.
- [56:15]
Bill Cohen
I mean, the stakes were pretty low when Len committed suicide. I mean.
- [56:20]
David Hoffman
Yeah, that's right.
- [56:21]
Ryan Sean Adams
It wasn't billions at stake. It was basically, the value of bitcoin was almost nothing in 2011.
- [56:26]
Tyler Moroney
That's right. It took two years for Bitcoin to be worth $1.
- [56:29]
David Hoffman
But both of them knew that they were onto something. Like, the motivation to hide behind the satoshi pseudonym was because they kind of knew, maybe not with complete confidence, but enough confidence to do this whole satoshi rigamarole of. I like, I. We think that we've cracked this case, the case of online currency, the gold standard, as you guys showed in the documentary, that, like, the cypherpunks were trying to figure out. And like, they. They had this strong inclination. This is just my assumption. I don't know them, never talked to them, that they could kind of crack to the nut. It solved the problem, crack the case. And bitcoin actually is going to work, probably probabilistically speaking, that makes it actually worth it to hide behind the satoshi.
- [57:18]
Bill Cohen
But.
- [57:18]
Ryan Sean Adams
But you can kind of see this in, like, some of the satoshi, like, bitcoin talk forums with satoshi actually posting. I. I remember a quote that's like, something to the effect of, like, you might want to buy some in case this thing takes off. Do you remember that quote?
- [57:30]
Bill Cohen
Yes.
- [57:30]
Ryan Sean Adams
Like, yes, satoshi knew that this thing could take off and Possibly at someday be worth a lot.
- [57:36]
Bill Cohen
Yeah, well, again, when you're, when you're limiting the supply, right. Unlike fiat currency, especially dollar based fiat currency, which is unlimited supply, you got a printing press. Limiting the supply to 21 million implies that you have at least thought about it increasing in value. And then don't forget, the white paper appears at what, Halloween in 2008. I mean the financial system at that time was as discredited as it has ever been. It's probably 1929. And so here's a new system of non fiat currency that emerges in a very sophisticated forum. This white paper with formulas and arguments about privacy and being able to do what you want with your money without a central authority. I mean, that is itself very threatening. Right. So even if to the system, to the man, right. You know, one of the most powerful aspects of our system is of course, you know, the ability to print money in the Federal Reserve and the central banking system that we have, which is powerful and powerfully successful. And this was a threat to that at a very, at a, at a moment when the whole system looked like it could collapse. So that makes sense to me. And plus this. Tyler said they were very pseudonym prone anyway, they loved their pseudonym. So of course they had to publish this with a pseudonym and obviously were no doubt concerned about, I don't think it was a financial thing. I don't think they thought they were gonna, that this was necessarily gonna take off and they were gonna get rich. But, but it was a threat to the financial system. And it wasn't the only one. I mean, there was the whole, you know, movement in downtown Manhattan. And you know, if, don't forget the first effort to bail out Wall street failed and then they had to go to the tarp. You know, the Congress voted it down first and then they brought it back and it passed. And, and you know, companies were forced to take capital that they didn't really want. And you know, it was, it was you know, yet another scary time in our lifetimes.
- [59:59]
David Hoffman
I want to talk about the motivations behind why the pseudonym. And there are some of the, more like simple versions, I think a, like one of them Len, like as we've established, kind of his hobby to do Sydney, so it was easy for him. It wasn't a tall order. There's also kind of just like the personal security things. I don't know if they were thinking about this ahead of time, but under the assumption that Bitcoin would be valuable, it would be nice to not have your real world address tied to being satoshi. Wow, what an. What a burden that would be. And so there's some. Some of the self defensive, more like protective mechanisms. But the. To me, the punchline of the whole movie, the part of the movie where, you know, I like just put my phone down, felt my goosebumps and was just like wowed by the moment, was towards the end, especially when you, Tyler, were talking about how there was this interview with Hal and you know, plenty of people had asked hal, are you satoshi? To which he always replied, no. But then when you reframe the question are to. Are you a creator of bitcoin? To which he would answer, yes, because I created our, like the precursor to Proof of Work. But you know who else is a creator of bitcoin? David Chaum, Any of the cypherpunks. Everyone was a creator of bitcoin. And it was a bit of V for Vendetta moment and which is a meme that has actually grown in the bitcoin world. I am Satoshi is kind of a meme that bitcoiners will say, like, I am also I am Spartacus. Like, we are.
- [61:32]
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- [61:33]
David Hoffman
We are all satoshi. And the. It was like a transfer of legitimacy of. Of clout from Len and Hal, who could have done the Craig Wright thing and said, I am Satoshi.
- [61:47]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Look how big my ego is.
- [61:48]
David Hoffman
Look how big my cl. My accomplishments are. That wasn't done. And it transferred the legitimacy to bitcoin itself. Can you just talk about that? You guys put it at the end of the movie. It was, I think, strategic in that choice. It gave me goosebumps. And to me, it kind of underscored
- [62:08]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
the whole importance of the bitcoin movement
- [62:10]
David Hoffman
of like, this is. This is public domain. This is by the people, for the people. Talk to me about that moment and what that felt to just record that and put that into the film.
- [62:20]
Tyler Moroney
Yeah, I love that point. And it reminds me of when we learned very early on, of course, as people had known since bitcoin first came out, that it was released as open source software. Right? So Satoshi said, here, here's the code. Do whatever you want with it. Right? Let's collaborate. Right by its very. The moment it was born, it was born as a collective effort, right? There was no corporate entity, there was no board, there was no CEO. There's still none of that to this day. And I think this comes out of the long tradition of like going back to Bill Phil Zimmerman, like, PGP was released as open source software. Lots of company. Google was not released as open source software. Right. Like Facebook was not released as open source software. Like the whole concept of bitcoin is to say, here is this invention and we would like to share it with you. Let's all tinker with it around the edges to make it work correctly, as opposed to a selfish move, as opposed to one that is born of the desire to control either money or power. And I think that there is some, again, beauty. And this idea that I think, you know, many of the people in the film talk to, it may have been lost in the sense that like, you know, bitcoin is controlled by third parties today. Right. By financial institutions. Cryptocurrencies are largely like. There are large corporate interests and government agencies that are imposing themselves on it today. Right. Whether you like it or not, that's. That's a fact. Even the mining operations themselves have largely been consolidated. Whereas, you know, conceptually was for. Is for one idea. So I love, David, that you kind of got that from it. If I'm answering your question correctly, and I really hope your listeners hear it because I too felt that during that part of the film.
- [64:10]
Ryan Sean Adams
Bill, there's one other subplot that you hinted at earlier in our conversation, which is the resurrection of Hal Finney. Like, listeners who have not seen the documentary probably have no idea what I'm talking about now, but I want to describe it briefly. So there's this whole cypherpunk movement ideology. Also. You, you go into some detail in the documentary of, you know, how some of the cipher cypherpunks thought about transhumanism and the integration of. Of technology into their life. Well, Hal Finney was someone who believed in the possibilities of being cryogenically frozen. So actually at his death, he has him. He had himself cryogenically frozen. So he's in a freezer somewhere. I believe this is somewhere in California.
- [64:57]
Tyler Moroney
Scottsdale, Arizona.
- [64:58]
Ryan Sean Adams
Arizona. Okay. So he. And he was frozen shortly after death, the way you're supposed to do it. You actually have the founder of this cryogenics company on the documentary to talk about that process and what it means. But this leads to, I don't know, I felt like this implication or possibility that Hal Finney, if the technology progresses enough could come back. And there was something to me that was so messianic about this. Like one way of thinking about Bitcoin is as a technology or as a. As a social movement. And is those things another lens is like as a religion. And I kind of wonder what we might think of this in A hundred years time, 200 years time, centuries that pass about. The legend of, say, bitcoin is still operational, worth many hundreds of trillions of dollars. The legend of Satoshi and who he was and whether maybe he was Hal Finney and whether he's maybe coming back the prophet to reclaim his private keys and resurrect because he's in a freezer somewhere in Scottsdale, Arizona. Bill, what is this whole plot line? Like, how. Yeah, just talk about that.
- [66:08]
Bill Cohen
Well, first of all, it's my favorite part of the film. And I'm going to turn, you know, ask Tyler's going to talk about it, because he's the one that went out there and did it.
- [66:18]
Tyler Moroney
So it's part of this history of. There's this group of people in the 1990s, 1980s and 90s called the extropians. And these were a kind of, like, movement of people who believed that the human race was. We were really kind of not taking advantage of the technology and the science community in the best way that we could. And it's part of, as you say, transhumanism, this idea that we can live longer, that we can populate other planets, that we can. That we can achieve things way beyond what we've been able to do. Like, why should life end at 80 or 85? Like, why can't we live to 200 to 500, right. Like, why can't we, you know, look like we're 27 years old forever? Right. Like, maybe we can. Right? Like. And so three of the top candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto, who we examine in the film, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo and Wei Dai were all members of this group of what's called Extropians. And as you say, Ryan, Hal had his body cryo preserved at Alcor, which is a preservation center in Scottsdale that's been there for 45 or 50 years. And they have a few hundred customers who have done this to themselves who have essentially that.
- [67:32]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Because you don't know how long it's
- [67:34]
Ryan Sean Adams
going to take in advance.
- [67:35]
Tyler Moroney
They took Bitcoin for a while, but they don't anymore. I asked them that question, by the way. You become a member when you're still alive, obviously, and so you pay them and the ideas. And actually, your. Your point about religion is a good one, because one of the things that the creator of the Etropian movement, who knew Hal very well, who was at the time running Alcor, said to me was, it's a version of Pascal's Wager. And I Said, what's that? And he said, well, Pascal had this idea that, like, you should believe in God, you should become a Christian, because what if it's right? What if it's true? That there is, you will be saved some day, that you will live forever, right? That you will not burn in hell, so why not take the risk and choose to become religious? He has the same argument for why we should all cryopreserve our bodies. And many people, like Peter Thiel, for instance, has signed up to do this because there's no downside if you're already dead, or if you'd rather pause the death process, as they call it, while we wait for the scientific community to catch up to us, then let's do it. But one point I just want to make at the reason it's all relevant is that the Extropians thought a lot about the future, right? And what do we need to have in the future? We need to have money, and we have a way to store money. Yeah.
- [68:51]
David Hoffman
What's the point of going into the future if you just wake up and you're in the
- [68:56]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
side?
- [68:56]
Tyler Moroney
So you put your money in bank of America and bank of America goes bankrupt and you wake up in 200 years and your money's gone. Right? But what if it's on the blockchain and there's nuclear holocaust, Right? Or if there's climate change that causes floods, Right? Or what if AI destroys everything? Right? But what if there's a computerized system that's decentralized, that lives out there in the world where our money can sit and wait for us? This is part of the kind of fascinating sci fi thinking.
- [69:21]
Ryan Sean Adams
This is the other part in the documentary where I got chills in addition to then where, where David did as well, which is like, okay, think about the sci fi implications of this. What if Hal planned this all along?
- [69:31]
David Hoffman
Okay?
- [69:31]
Ryan Sean Adams
And so he has a 12 word seed phrase in his cryogenically preserved brain, and at some point in time, the technology will catch up. And his whole plot was like, how do I hold value across decades, maybe centuries? That'll take humanity to restore my body. And we wake him up, we cryogenically unfreeze him, he's alive again, and he has those 12 words and yet locks his Bitcoin. 1.2 million Bitcoin in supply. That is worth hundreds. How much will it be worth?
- [70:04]
David Hoffman
A huge fan of wealth and money.
- [70:08]
Tyler Moroney
Exactly. It was all a trick. Ryan, I think you have a novel right there.
- [70:12]
Ryan Sean Adams
Serious, like you could not write better sci fi. And that's the reason I think this. This story sticks so much and, and who knows how it will evolve into the future, but is incredibly fascinating.
- [70:22]
Bill Cohen
Well, there's no guarantee that bitcoin will be worth Anything in 500 years. It could be a total round trip back to the pennies that it was when it started.
- [70:33]
Ryan Sean Adams
Well, this is why this is actually a live issue for us. So recently we've done some episodes on the quantum threat to cryptography and to bitcoin. I don't know if you guys have kept a pace of this, but there is some question as to whether quantum computers, at what point in time they become capable of actually hacking the elliptical elliptic curve cryptography that secures Satoshi's stash of keys. And so there's this question of if we get quantum computers, anyone can hack Satoshi's 1.2 million bitcoin. And essentially it's like a. The. The world's greatest treasure hunt. So first come, first serve of whoever creates the quantum computer that can hack this, they get the funds. And so there's talk in the bitcoin community of like, oh, what should we do? Should we actually freeze Satoshi's 1.2 million? Should we break immutable property rights? And my hope for this is that we find some way not to do that. So we leave some opening for satoshi to cryptographically prove that he is the owner of the 1.2 million Bitcoin, so that if HAL resurrects and comes back to life and gives us those. Those 12 word seed phrases, he gets to keep the bitcoin. That's my hope. But it's a very much alive issue. And they're like, there's a. There's maybe a second documentary to produce at some point in time, guys, about this whole quantum treasure hunt that might start to happen. And like, a part two of satoshi's story here.
- [71:56]
Tyler Moroney
I love it. We actually brought that topic up with a few people, including people like Phil Zimmerman, who reminded me that the kind of quantum fears have been around for decades and that he remembered in the 90s talking about how it could be three years, it could be five years, so that there's also this, like, every new generation of us thinks, like, we're on the verge of some, you know, seismic change, and then we're not, right? So it's so hard to predict, which is one of the reasons why we didn't include it in the movie.
- [72:25]
David Hoffman
I have a stupid question to ask you guys. Did you guys ever talk to Craig Wright? No. Okay. All right, no further questions.
- [72:39]
Ryan Sean Adams
Guys, fantastic documentary. We will encourage everyone listening. I do encourage everyone listening to go. To go watch it. It'll help you recall why you joined crypto in the first place. And that was the best thing about this documentary. Very honoring to the story and the ethos. And you could tell that by all the participants who were so glad to talk to you, including the widows and loved ones of those who passed. Those who might be satoshi want to end with this question, which is a question that I think is been a theme throughout this conversation, which is satoshi, what you know about them, both Len and Hal, what would they think of bitcoin today in its current state?
- [73:21]
Bill Cohen
Well, I mean, they talk about pure speculation because we never met either individual. I mean, again, I think that if you read the white paper, I think they thought that it was going to be much more disruptive to the fiat financial system than it's turned out to be. And I think they thought it would be probably be a useful currency by now, which obviously it has not really turned out to be. So I think they would be blown away by the 77,000 or 72, whatever the 75,000 that each Bitcoin is worth today. And you know, at 125,000 even more blown away and probably be blown away by the stash that Michael Saylor has amassed and BlackRock too. Right. So through their ETFs. But I think would probably be disappointed that some of the basic ideas that were put forth in that white paper remain unrealized.
- [74:30]
Ryan Sean Adams
Tyler, what do you think?
- [74:31]
Tyler Moroney
I think that's a great answer, actually. I think they would be fascinated by how it's evolved, but also I think disappointed. This is my personal opinion. Disappointed that it's just become. It's evolved way beyond what they envisioned it would be. Because I think that we probably live in a world today where we have less privacy than we did in 2008.
- [74:51]
Ryan Sean Adams
So success from a store of value, replacement for gold perspective, that would blow them away that the thing is worth over 2 trillion. Disappointed that it didn't become or hasn't yet become peer to peer currency, peer to peer cash. And also disappointed with the lack of privacy and the ability to de anonymize all of these bitcoin addresses.
- [75:11]
Bill Cohen
And it's not as decentralized as they hoped. I mean it's quite concentrated among a few big players.
- [75:19]
Tyler Moroney
And having said all that, it's not the first invention that became something that it wasn't intended to be from the beginning. I mean, bubble wrap, Listerine dynamite. These all had different, you know, ideas when they were first created, and they've become very different things. So it's actually very common in the, in the technological world for something to evolve into something very different. But. And it's great that we're able to have this conversation all these years later.
- [75:44]
Ryan Sean Adams
Well, we are still only 15, 16 years into the project, so. Tyler, Bill, we'll have to see where it goes. Thank you so much for joining us today.
- [75:51]
Bill Cohen
Thank you for having us.
- [75:52]
Tyler Moroney
Thank you both.
- [75:53]
Ryan Sean Adams
Got to let you know, of course, even though we mentioned some bitcoin prices here, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot,
- [76:16]
Tyler Moroney
Sam.