‘Finding Satoshi’ Makes the Case for Hal Finney, Len Sassaman as Bitcoin Co-Creators

A documentary launched on Wednesday asserts that Satoshi Nakamoto was by no means a person, however slightly a pseudonym shared by two knowledgeable cryptographers who mixed forces to create Bitcoin earlier than their respective deaths: Hal Finney and Len Sassaman.

Directed by Tucker Tooley and Matthew Miele, “Discovering Satoshi” showcases a four-year investigation guided by American enterprise author William D. Cohan and personal investigator Tyler Maroney, delving deep into one of many twenty first century’s biggest unsolved mysteries.

The movie options effectively over a dozen interviews, starting from the wealthiest individuals on this planet to laptop scientists who helped uncover Satoshi’s identification, generally unintentionally. 

Investigations into Satoshi’s identification can convey undesirable authorized or private scrutiny to the people—longtime Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd, for instance—but the conclusion of “Discovering Satoshi” provokes little consternation as a result of its suspects are not alive.



In some methods, the documentary seems to interrupt new floor, that includes an interview with Fran Finney, the late cryptographer’s widow. Within the movie, she concedes that her husband in all probability performed a task in Bitcoin’s creation. Cohan advised Decrypt, “I believe [that] was very, very highly effective.”

Sassaman’s widow, Meredith L. Patterson, can also be included within the documentary, assessing whether or not her husband might’ve been Satoshi as effectively. However that’s not earlier than different suspects are recognized first: Adam Again, Nick Szabo, David Chaum, Paul Le Roux, and Wei Dai.

In some ways, the movie comes throughout as a love letter to the digital underground the place Satoshi discovered fertile floor, particularly privacy-fighting cypherpunks. Phil Zimmermann is among the many most notable featured within the movie, a privateness pioneer who armed the general public with “military-grade” electronic mail encryption within the early ‘90s by creating Fairly Good Privateness (PGP). 

Sassaman, who took his personal life in 2011 after Satoshi’s ultimate public submit, and Finney, who handed away because of issues from ALS in 2014, each labored on PGP’s encryption. The documentary theorizes that Finney composed Bitcoin’s code, whereas Sassaman dealt with written issues, together with Bitcoin’s foundational nine-page white paper.

Earlier than Cohan and Maroney land on their suspects, Discovering Satoshi’s administrators dedicate ample time to mapping out the cultures that Bitcoin was possible born from—such because the Extropians, a gaggle of techno-optimist transhumanists—and varied Bitcoin forerunners that Satoshi mixed parts of, together with Adam Again’s Hashcash.

Again, the co-founder and CEO of Bitcoin infrastructure agency Blockstream who established the idea of proof-of-work, was just lately fingered as Satoshi in a New York Occasions investigation, which leaned closely on linguistic evaluation. Following the article’s publication, Again denied that he was Satoshi, as he has carried out many occasions.

“In case you had a $100 billion fortune, you’re not simply going to sit down there and dwell a lifetime of frugality,” Cohan stated, referring to the estimated 1.1 million Bitcoin that Satoshi holds. “We simply used our evaluation and deductive reasoning to get to a special conclusion.”

The movie’s investigators enlisted the assistance of Kathleen Puckett, a former FBI agent who helped bust Unabomber Theodore John Kaczynski, to evaluate the motivations of whoever wrote Bitcoin’s white paper. Her evaluation: Bitcoin’s creator didn’t appear to care about cash.

Again is ultimately eradicated alongside a number of Satoshi candidates following a dialog with Alyssa Blackburn, a knowledge scientist who beforehand labored at Rice College and Baylor School of Drugs in Houston. She supplies Cohan and Maroney with information that enables them to measure suspects’ on-line historical past towards Satoshi’s. The profile matches Finney and Sassaman.

The flick additionally presents a truth flagged by Jameson Lopp, CTO of safety agency Casa, as a possible counterpoint: Satoshi emailed backwards and forwards with a developer on the identical time that Finney, an avid runner, participated in a race in Santa Barbara, California.

That discrepancy finally backs investigators’ idea that Finney composed code, whereas Sassaman composed sentences. Nonetheless, Cohan and Maroney stated that they carried out loads of interviews throughout the cryptosphere that didn’t transfer the needle a lot.

Carried out on the peak of his powers in 2021, a 90-minute interview with FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t make the ultimate lower, Cohan stated. The disgraced crypto mogul was later sentenced to 25 years in jail for orchestrating a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme.

The documentary options interviews from different figures in finance, together with Technique’s Michael Saylor and Microsoft’s Invoice Gates. Cohan famous that these people appeared to downplay the significance of Satoshi’s identification, successfully giving investigators a stiff-arm.

“We spent a yr and a half interviewing all these individuals,” Cohan stated. “They’re fascinating, and they need to be their very own separate documentary, however we weren’t getting anyplace.”