00:00Great to have both of you with us. We're not going to reveal who you identify Satoshi Nakamoto as,
00:04but what I will do here is you have a list of suspects.
00:07By the way, that's asking a lot of self-control over journalists.
00:10I'm not going to do it.
00:10Continue. I will adult.
00:12Very recently, the New York Times reporter John Kerry was out with a piece
00:15suggesting that Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto.
00:19I will say that's not who you identify Satoshi Nakamoto as.
00:22Walk us through why he is not. You pick who wants to do it.
00:26You start, Tyler.
00:28Well, I think I'm going to answer that question differently.
00:32Okay.
00:32I mean, our film involved interviews with dozens of people.
00:37We interviewed hundreds.
00:38All over the world.
00:38All over the world.
00:39And that's one of the methodologies that we use that was not used by the New York Times.
00:44I don't think there's any sources that are quoted.
00:47His excellent investigation involved a lot of data analysis.
00:50We also did that.
00:52So our conclusions and our methodology are very different,
00:55and I'm looking very much forward to how people compare the two.
01:00How did you two get connected?
01:02How long have you known each other, and why did you want to do this?
01:05Well, so, I mean, I didn't say to myself,
01:09Bill, you're an investigative journalist.
01:12Today, I mean...
01:13Nakamoto, I've got to write a film, do a film about this.
01:16You know, I was kind of minding my own business, working on another book,
01:20and, you know, I got a call from the producer and the director saying,
01:25would I be interested in sort of being the David Gura of the process,
01:32you know, where I, you know, interview all these, you know, sort of OG crypto people.
01:37Gary Gensler.
01:38Gary Gensler, Michael Saylor, you know.
01:41But was this your world? How much of this did you know?
01:43No, no, no, no, no.
01:44I was like everybody else, like, what is Bitcoin?
01:48You know, I'm sort of interested in that.
01:50I mean, it seems like it's a new form of digital gold or digital currency,
01:53but anytime somebody talked about the blockchain or the ledger like everybody else,
01:57my eyes would glaze over and, like, okay, what are these people talking about?
02:01So I thought, all right, I'm a financial journalist.
02:02I'm an investigative reporter.
02:03I should know what this is.
02:05And this was an opportunity to actually dig in and try to figure out what this was all about.
02:10So you're sitting down with tech journalists and regulators, Kara Swisher, Nick Bilton, the likes,
02:14and you keep hitting this wall, and that's when you bring in Tyler's.
02:17Explain sort of what you proposed or what was appealing to you about this project.
02:21Well, what fascinated me first was how many people had tried to solve it.
02:26I mean, journalists from the top media organizations in the world,
02:29internet sleuths, academics for, you know, 10, 15 years,
02:33people have been digging and digging and digging.
02:34And it was kind of shocking that no one had had it.
02:37And we had a realization, which is that the persona of Satoshi was just as fascinating to us as the
02:44creation of Bitcoin.
02:45The cult of, not even personality, but the cult of this individualism.
02:48Exactly.
02:48Who was this person and what was his or her motives and where did they come from and why did
02:53they create this?
02:53And so while Bill was interviewing people who were using it, I liken it to, imagine we're making a film
02:59about F1.
03:00Bill is interviewing the drivers of the cars, and I'm interviewing the people who design the cars, the engineers.
03:06And so I was able to go back in history and talk to cryptographers.
03:09So these are computer scientists who specialize in creating digital systems to allow us to protect our privacy, to create
03:16security.
03:17It's a fascinating community.
03:19And so I went back and I met people who were studying this and part of this community going back
03:22to the 1970s
03:23and how the idea that we need some kind of protection using computer systems against an encroaching surveillance capitalism.
03:33This is how they thought of this going all the way back a generation or two.
03:37And Bitcoin is in many ways the kind of culmination of that thinking.
03:40That's what was interesting to me.
03:41I didn't know that.
03:43There's great graphics in this film, but you show kind of like the predecessors of it.
03:46There's like a bit gold and a something else and like the predecessors of the blockchain technology, which is what
03:51makes it such a durable product.
03:53I think that's right.
03:54And what Satoshi did so well was he took all of these, and these weren't necessarily predecessors as much as
04:00they were pieces in the building that he was going to build.
04:04So he took all these other technologies that had related but incomplete components and assembled them.
04:11And that was part of the brilliance technologically.
04:13And we were really spurred on by the fact that I did all these interviews, like 25 or 30, and
04:18I kept getting the Heisman.
04:20You know, people kept, you know, blocking me.
04:21Your irritation was palpable.
04:23Why are you interested in this, Bill?
04:26You're a smart guy.
04:26You should move on.
04:27This is not important.
04:28It doesn't matter who Satoshi is or was.
04:31You know, we've got, as Michael Saylor says, Prometheus gave us the fire.
04:35Let's run with it.
04:36And so I think, okay, we have to get beyond this.
04:39We're not getting anywhere.
04:40I'm having these great interviews with Michael Saylor, who's mesmerizing, and Sam Begman-Fried, who's mesmerizing.
04:45But that's when we had to turn to Tyler and say, okay, we need a private investigator, get beyond this,
04:49and really get to the answer.
04:50Tyler, there's this moment at the beginning of the film, it's like the movie Sneakers, if I may, where you're
04:54introducing who's on your team and who can do what.
04:56Talk a bit about that.
04:57Yes, you're a private investigator, but what resources were you able to bring to bear, not just you, but this
05:01team of experts that you work with?
05:02It's a great question.
05:03So Satoshi lived mostly online, in fact, 100% online, right?
05:09Like, what we know about the creator of Bitcoin comes from emails, internet posts, the white paper.
05:17Like, there's no TV appearances, right?
05:19There's no CEO.
05:20There's no corporate entity.
05:22There's no, it's just almost fictional.
05:25Exactly.
05:26So we had to spend a lot of time going through, you know, data that was not only easy to
05:31find, but data that was very difficult to find.
05:33So we have a cyber investigation practice, which basically means we're able to find information that other people don't want
05:39us to find.
05:39So looking into corners of the web that are difficult to investigate and finding information and then making sense of
05:48that through pattern recognition and the like was a huge part of it.
05:51You also talked to, as you mentioned, a lot of really famous people, but you talked to a lot of
05:54people I, at least, really had never heard of.
05:56And some of them made the more convincing arguments or seemed to provide some of the bigger pieces.
06:01Who did you find the most convincing or compelling?
06:05Well, so the cryptographers we interviewed, in other words, computer scientists to, like, make these privacy systems, were startlingly open
06:15to talking to us.
06:16I mean, very intellectually curious.
06:18I don't know, because I assumed that we'd get the same answer that Bill got, which is a lot of
06:23slam doors.
06:24Of course, well, we know that.
06:25And he's proving it right now on television.
06:28But that openness to address the question, where did Bitcoin come from?
06:33Why do we have it?
06:33What kind of person would be interested in this?
06:36Was wonderful to talk to people.
06:38And many of the conversations we had in the film were the result of years of developing relationships with people.
06:44And a kind of classic journalistic effort of developing rapport with people.
06:48I think to some extent, they really hadn't been asked before.
06:51You know, I mean, Michael Saylor is, you know, filling up the boat everywhere, right?
06:56And backing up the truck.
06:58And everybody's talking to him about Bitcoin.
06:59But, you know, the people you talked to, the people around, you know, the cyberpunk era, they probably hadn't been
07:06interviewed as much and had a lot of memories and they wanted to talk about it, I think.
07:11You're asking about this, Bill, and Tyler, going back to the kind of cult of who this person is.
07:16Someone tells you this could be dangerous.
07:17If this person or these persons are unmasked, it could be dangerous.
07:21Explain that.
07:21What was that individual conveying to you about how things would change if the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto were to
07:28be public knowledge?
07:29You know, I thought about this a lot.
07:31I mean, obviously, there was the whole swatting incident and there have been swatting incidents, which are very scary.
07:36But I had a feeling after so many of these OG types, the people who had big investors or Wall
07:44Street types who were pursuing Bitcoin as an asset class, I don't think they wanted us to figure out who
07:51Satoshi was.
07:52Because what if Satoshi was like a bad guy or somebody we didn't like or did things that weren't great?
07:59Then their whole, you know, like Michael Saylor has what, $50 billion invested in Bitcoin?
08:04On a given day.
08:05On a given day.
08:06And it goes up, it goes down.
08:08And if Satoshi turned out to be some sort of nefarious character, then maybe the value of that Bitcoin investment
08:16would deteriorate dramatically.
08:18And, you know, so we've got a lot of pushback on that.
08:21And, you know, why do you need to know?
08:23It doesn't matter.
08:24That's my question.
08:25Why does it matter?
08:27Why did you guys want to put all this?
08:28Because it's one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th and 21st century.
08:33You know, in financial mysteries.
08:36It's an incredible development.
08:38It's incredible innovation.
08:39There's not that much innovation on Wall Street, generally speaking.
08:42And to create, you know, a digital currency that, you know, you can use for all sorts of interesting things.
08:49And who did it?
08:50And the white paper shows up.
08:51It's not a mystery.
08:53It's not a coincidence that the white paper shows up in the middle of the financial crisis, right?
08:57I mean, yeah, I mean, I understand when this product was developed, wanting to keep it secret because, you know,
09:02there could have been law enforcement action or whatever.
09:04But at this point, why wouldn't these people come forward or this person come forward?
09:09Do we know why?
09:11I mean, I don't want to reveal anything.
09:12But, yeah, obviously, like we do know now.
09:15OK.
09:15And when you watch the film, you'll see.
09:17All right.
09:17We'll leave it.
09:18We'll leave it there.
09:19Please watch.
09:20Tyler, very quickly, there's Jillian Ted at the end of this film talking about what Bill was just mentioning a
09:23moment ago, which is, you know, we can make fun of crypto as being pet rocks or whatever.
09:28But it was born, as you're saying, out of this movement that wanted to really reinvent things.
09:32I'm glad you asked that question because one of our insights in the film, which is well known in the
09:36community, is that if we think of Bitcoin today, we think of it as a big global asset.
09:40It was not born that way.
09:42And in many ways, it was born, it was created by people who saw that there were issues in society
09:49that they wanted to fix.
09:50So they were essentially mathematicians who were activists, who saw the world in a very different way and proposed a
09:56solution to the problems that they saw.
09:58And I think that's a fascinating history project.
10:01Tyler Maroney, Bill Cohen, thank you both.
10:03When is the film out?
10:03This week?
10:0420 seconds.
10:05Yeah.
10:06Come back and talk more about it.
10:07It was fascinating.
10:07It's a great movie.
Comments