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00:00I guess we'll just start off with the yes or no question. Are you Satoshi Nakamoto?
00:05No, I've said this a number of times. There was an HBO documentary last year, and there are generally, from
00:16time to time, it's a fascinating topic.
00:19Everybody's curious. It's part of Bitcoin's backstory.
00:22And so, you know, I think it's natural that people are curious, but Satoshi left the space, I think, in
00:302011.
00:31So there haven't been, you know, he stopped participating on the forums.
00:35So there haven't really been any new digital breadcrumbs for people to look at.
00:40And all of the posts have been analyzed by many people over, so like 15 years now.
00:47So I think what we're left with is really just kind of writing style analysis and speculation about, you know,
00:54people that were involved in pre-Bitcoin discussions of similar ideas and things like that.
00:58So it's really quite circumstantial kind of analysis for, you know, interest, really.
01:05Adam, before we move on, though, how often do you get this question?
01:10I get it all the time at a conference on a panel.
01:12Well, yeah, it's a popular topic.
01:17Do you know who he is?
01:19Have you met him?
01:20He wrote you, I think, a letter right a few years back.
01:23And I'm just curious if you've heard from him since he first reached out many years ago.
01:27No.
01:28So I believe, you know, I got the first email that anybody got from Satoshi in August 2008 before the
01:37Bitcoin paper was released.
01:41And then at some point he stopped, you know, he released Bitcoin in January 2009, participated on the forums through
01:48to 2011, and then stopped participating.
01:51And so I don't think, you know, I haven't, and I don't think anybody else has heard from him.
01:55The extent of my communication was, you know, a small flurry of emails in fall 2008 and spring 2009.
02:07So, you know, there were other people who exchanged a lot more emails with Satoshi.
02:12And actually, I released my emails eventually much more recently in the COPA trial versus Craig Wright, where there's a
02:22not-for-profit, you know, defending the Bitcoin developers versus Craig Wright's claims.
02:29And so as part of that, I was asked if I could share the emails because they might be useful.
02:34And so they're in the court record.
02:35People can look at them.
02:36It's just a handful of emails.
02:37Well, since so many people think you are or ask you if you are, and you know so much about
02:42the industry, and one of the reasons people think you are, and indeed the New York Times investigation, because, you
02:49know, you were essentially playing with a lot of the technology or even inventing a lot of technology that Bitcoin
02:54is based on.
02:56Given what you know, do you think you know who Satoshi Nakamoto is?
03:02No, I mean, it looks like the people that, you know, who were involved in these earlier discussions or who
03:11are involved in the Bitcoin technology today have various reasons why in probability it's not them.
03:20And so, you know, I put it to Colin Hoback, the producer of the HBO documentary in the last few
03:29years, that it's probable that Satoshi is somebody that nobody knows, you know, that he's not talking to documentary film
03:38crews, he's not talking to investigative journalists, he's not going to conferences, speaking under his own name.
03:43And so, you know, and so, you know, then he's not going to be identifiable or suspected.
03:49And so, you know, given the history that he hasn't participated in the forums, like 15 years, hasn't been heard
03:57from in that period of time, I think it's probable we'll never know at this point, because there's no new
04:02information to analyze, if you see.
04:04What do you make, though, before we move on, you know?
04:07Are we going to move on ever?
04:08We might not.
04:10I don't know wherever you want to go.
04:10Yeah, this is fascinating.
04:11Listen, you can understand our fascination with it.
04:15How do you respond to the evidence that is laid out by the New York Times and John Carreyrou?
04:20I mean, he talks, he makes these comparisons that you and Satoshi were both associated with the cyberpunks back in
04:27the 1990s.
04:28You both had the idea to create a kind of electronic cache based on a decentralized network of computers and
04:34that he says is the basis for Bitcoin.
04:36And that there's other similarities in evidence, like your doctorate in distributed system and your use of the programming language
04:42C++, which Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.
04:46Is it all just coinkydink, as we say, coincidental?
04:49Or, I mean, is it?
04:51Well, I mean, so maybe people would not be necessarily aware, but in the late 90s, so the proof of
05:03work system that I'd proposed in 1997 was on the Cypunks list.
05:08And there was a previous somewhat centralized electronic cache system by DigiCache, and that failed because it was centralized, basically.
05:19So there was an initiative by, you know, the sort of applied research people on the Cypunks list to try
05:27and figure out how to make a decentralized electronic cache.
05:30And so, you know, there were people trying to do it.
05:33I was one of them.
05:35And I think we got, you know, we got so close, but so far, right?
05:39So if you looked at the discussions, which John has done, which Aaron Wiedem did with his Genesis book, read
05:47all those old emails, you could see that a lot of the ideas were there.
05:52And that, you know, that's not a secret.
05:53That's something that was happening in the open.
05:55Then people were excited by electronic cash and trying to make a proof of work based electronic cash because proof
06:01of work looked like a key building block to make it decentralized because then you wouldn't need a bank account
06:07to get money in and out of it.
06:08You just mined the coins.
06:10So that idea was there.
06:11But there were gaps.
06:13It was hard.
06:14It's complicated to make it work.
06:16And, you know, so it wasn't until Satoshi, you know, started emailing people and released Bitcoin ultimately in 2009 that
06:26the remaining shortfalls were fixed.
06:30And so he had some new key insights and made it happen where we didn't quite figure it out.
06:35So that's why there's a connection, right?
06:38So, and I think a lot of it is just down to, you know, there was that explicit connection, right?
06:43Which is we were specifically trying to figure out how to make a Bitcoin-like thing.
06:47We didn't quite do it.
06:49So you can see the similarities because we were in the same space.
06:52And then the other thing is if you're trying to figure out who could have done it, you're going to
06:57select people with the relevant skill set.
07:01And so they're going to be programmers.
07:03They're going to know about cryptography.
07:05They're going to have, you know, maybe similar educational background.
07:08And so there's going to be similarities in the way they talk about things.
07:12And, you know, perhaps Satoshi went and read those old descriptions of how, you know, how we were trying to
07:20make it work and figured out the gaps, right?
07:21So there may be some shared reading as well.
07:25We're speaking with Adam Back, the co-founder and CEO of the blockchain infrastructure company Blockstream.
07:31He's also the man at the center of this New York Times investigation this week who is alleged to, based
07:37on evidence, be Satoshi Nakamoto, something that you described.
07:42I want to keep going along this evidence that the New York Times presented.
07:46John Kerry Rue said that there's evidence that you and Satoshi aren't in the same place at the same time,
07:51at least according to these messaging boards.
07:54He writes, when Satoshi appeared, Mr. Back disappeared.
07:57Satoshi goes away.
07:58A few weeks later, you talk about Bitcoin.
08:01Is that all just a coincidence too, that part?
08:04Yeah, it's a coincidence.
08:07I had co-founded a startup before Blockstream called PyCorp.
08:13And it later got acquired by EMC.
08:17And then, you know, we were part of the consumer division.
08:20I was very busy learning about and analyzing another startup they'd acquired called Mosey.
08:27And so it was just a kind of intense period in, you know, startup land, doing very interesting things, not
08:34cryptography, but distributed storage.
08:38And so I was kind of inactive on the ScythePunks list.
08:41And I think the ScythePunks list, I kind of died down a bit.
08:44It wasn't as much traffic.
08:45And then, you know, of course, I was aware of Bitcoin since the beginning of the list of prehistory, right?
08:51But we're getting the first email.
08:52And so, you know, he's alluding to the second thing, which is Satoshi eventual left.
08:56And then a few years later, I joined the Bitcoin Talk Forum.
09:02And really what I did when I saw Bitcoin is I saw that Satoshi has solved the problem.
09:09But I had a question, you know, which is, will people use it?
09:13Will it have a price?
09:14Will it, you know, get momentum?
09:16And for a while there, a few years, there was literally no market and no price and almost no transactions,
09:23no users, right?
09:24And so I was just looking at the news.
09:27And once in a while, there'd be some news that came up.
09:29So I think in 2013, it crossed a dollar and then it crossed a hundred dollars.
09:34And I was like, wait a minute, there's 10 million coins mined at a hundred dollars.
09:38That's a billion dollars.
09:39So it's hard to say that.
09:41That is probably a bootstrap.
09:42So then I got busy trying to learn the rest of the details and joined the forum.
09:47So that's when he's like, oh, Adam appeared.
09:49But I think Satoshi had, you know, stopped participating already a couple of years before that.
09:53So, Adam, there's, you know, a lot of people are arguing there's not proof that you, you know, definitive proof
09:58that you are Satoshi Nakamoto.
10:00You deny it.
10:01Is there a way you can prove that you're not?
10:04Like, what do you tell, you know, what is your evidence when people say, I know you are him or,
10:10you know, I know you invented Bitcoin.
10:12What's the proof that you didn't?
10:14Yeah, I mean, I put some thought into this over the years because it's a recurring question.
10:18So very, very early on, some colleagues of mine emailed me and asked me if it was me, basically.
10:26And I was like, no, no, like, it doesn't have very much privacy.
10:31I would have used this paper, the Sander and Tashmar paper, which actually works in a decentralized electronic cache.
10:42And then another thing, as I got more familiar with it, is that there are some small sort of cryptographic
10:50serialization formatting mistakes, which I wouldn't have made because I was familiar with those mistakes that other protocols have made.
10:56That was kind of my specialization, right?
10:59And the last thing that I thought might be convincing is that there are IRC channels.
11:08And so when I was learning, catching up with the details about Bitcoin, I read the information and then I
11:15went and asked the developers on IRC channels to explain things.
11:18And some of those channels have scroll back and logs.
11:21And so you can see the kind of learning process of me asking questions that Satoshi would obviously know the
11:27answer to in the person who designed the system.
11:31Unless you were trying to be sly, I'm just going to say.
11:35Well, I mean, yeah, John didn't seem very convinced, but, you know, I thought it was convincing.
11:41And so I think it really depends on the audience because, you know, if they're a very technical audience, that's
11:47meaningful to them because they're programmers and so on.
11:50Hey, one thing we wanted to, keeping aside the identity of who Nakamoto is, his wallet has about 1.1
11:57million Bitcoin valued at around, I think, 73 billion, 5% kind of the total supply of Bitcoin that's out
12:05there.
12:06And it hasn't been touched for years.
12:08Right. If those ever moved, though, Adam, it would have enormous impact on the price of Bitcoin. Enormous.
12:16Is that a governance risk problem for the Bitcoin community that really hasn't been addressed yet?
12:23Well, I think that there would be an incentive for, you know, for any party holding a lot of Bitcoin
12:32to not have the price because they have a lot of skin in the game, right?
12:38So, you know, like with a big managed fund or a big treasury, they would try to sell slowly via
12:49OTC to realize the best price.
12:52So, I think you can sort of assume that people don't want to hurt their own savings, right?
12:59So, that's one factor.
13:01And Bitcoin has absorbed, you know, large shifts in Bitcoins between new waves of investors.
13:08You know, the ETFs currently hold a lot of coins on behalf of, you know, many, many subscribers, right?
13:14The Ibit ETF, the new Morgan Stanley ETF a couple of days ago, already absorbed almost a whole day's supply
13:21in the first day.
13:22So, there's a new buyer in town.
13:25So, I think, you know, Bitcoin has absorbed, you know, things like 80,000 Bitcoins sold in an afternoon by,
13:33you know, somebody liquidating apparently an inheritance or an estate or something.
13:39It wasn't super clear, but there were some hints given by the institution that sold it on behalf of the
13:44client.
13:45So, you know, the liquidity is there that quite a lot of Bitcoin can be sold.
13:50You know, it caused a short dip, but it wasn't very dramatic.
13:54And, you know, Bitcoin's getting more liquid and more deep markets over time because you've got more professional money managers.
14:05The Bitcoin users, you know, the Bitcoin investors tend to be, they would like to buy more Bitcoin if the
14:11price falls, but they tend to be a bit all in.
14:13So, they don't really have the firepower to buy more, whereas the sort of fund managers, they're looking at analyst
14:21reports.
14:22If they see that Microsoft is a buyer at this level, they'll sell something else on Amazon and they'll buy
14:27it, right?
14:28So, when they have an allocation, they can reallocate.
14:32Yeah.
14:32And you're obviously one of those people who is all in on it at Blockstream.
14:35It's an infrastructure company, but also a digital asset treasury company.
14:38So, it accumulates Bitcoin in a similar way that MicroStrategy does.
14:41But it raises the question, since you've been in this space for more than 30 years and been thinking about
14:46this, at least the concept of digital money for so many decades, I'm wondering if Bitcoin, as it stands right
14:53now, has achieved what you thought digital money could achieve.
14:58And the reason I ask this is because it's not necessarily used, at least for a lot of people, as
15:03a currency to pay for things, especially in the United States, especially in the quote-unquote developed world.
15:10It's more so used as people think it will go up in value, so they buy into it because they
15:15think it's a good investment.
15:18Is this the solution that you were looking for 30 years ago?
15:24Well, that is one of the differences between the late 90s discussion on the Cypunks list, which is almost more
15:35like a stable coin, right?
15:37Because the DigiCash centralized system that I'd found was literally a stable coin.
15:42And the solution to not needing a bank account of mining the coins, now we didn't quite figure it out,
15:48but Satoshi's solution is that the market will tell you what the price is.
15:53And the system just ensures a steady supply of new coins per day per hour and so on.
15:59And so, you know, from that point of view, Bitcoin is not a stable coin.
16:04So if you see, you know, growing popularity and you foresee more people are going to buy it in the
16:10future, then it, you know, it starts to become a store of value, a scarce asset.
16:16And so it became an asset class, right?
16:17And so Bitcoin is actually more, you know, it's both the electronic cash and an investable asset class, which is,
16:23you know, pretty novel in terms of technology that you can invest in an asset in the technology.
16:29So Adam, 30 seconds left.
16:30Wall Street's embrace of Bitcoin.
16:32It feels like it kind of contradicted the idea of having this decentralized system.
16:37Are you okay with that?
16:40Well, I think it's the same with the internet stocks.
16:42You know, the internet kind of changed the balance of power in the world.
16:45And establishment didn't always like that.
16:48But, you know, fund managers, mutual funds were investing in internet stocks because they could see the users wanted it.
16:56So, and I think the other thing is with the ETFs, they're a form of accessibility, right?
17:00So for many people, the IT complexities of managing your own wallet, maybe that's not for them or they want
17:07to start gently.
17:08And it's, they're more familiar with making investment decisions by talking to their broker or financial advisor.
17:14And so the ETFs just make it easier for them to do that.
17:16So I think it's all about access and the mature use of Bitcoin is going to pervade society.
17:22Now you've already seen it in treasury stocks and, you know, now some states in the US, some countries, the
17:30Swiss National Bank, Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund.
17:33So I think you're just, this is a sign of success as, you know, you get further adoption that it
17:38permeates into more, you know, public companies, private companies, individuals, different types of organizations.
17:45So if it's something that uses one of the arbitrators, correct?
17:45So I think it merely says thehumans for your intégration.
17:45Say hello, my orientations for the Kim Heart of its geography.
17:45Is there anything we can make, if it's a개� Mongolia of all these sort of modifications and the information, I
17:45think Spider Anyhow?
17:46So that should you have to take or see if it's a bounce back?
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