Episode Details

Warning: this show has spoilers!

Watch the video of this podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd-jGXonSzM

TIMELINE

00:00 Spoiler

01:00 Three positive features

02:00 Fatal Flaw 1

03:30 Fatal Flaw 2

05:10 Sleep schedules

06:00 And then there were 2

08:00 Confirmation bias

10:20 Hal Finney is NOT half of Satoshi

18:00 Widows

19:33 Benjamin Wallace's 5 points

22:00 Conclusion

Watch the trailer for Finding Satoshi.

In April 2026, Finding Satoshi is the only place where you can see the full movie. I used the code NATALIE and got a small discount (the total price was $14.31 after the coupon). The code may have expired or been used up by the time you read this. It's expensive, but it's a high-end production. Although I disagree with the film's conclusion, I enjoyed watching it. I hope one day it will appear on the streaming services.

Benjamin Wallace’s Take

After only seeing the trailer, Benjamin Wallace emailed me his first impressions:

They interview some of the same people I did, including Will Price (who supervised Hal Finney), Jon Callas (who worked with Finney and was a close friend of Sassaman), and Meredith Patterson (Sassaman’s widow).

When I first spoke with Will and Jon, I, too, had a thrilling eureka feeling that I had cracked the mystery.

Alas, there were too many confounding factors to remain confident in this theory:

1. Len Sassaman was very critical about Bitcoin, and Meredith said the criticism was sincere;

2. it’s far from certain that Satoshi’s 2014 “I am not Dorian Nakamoto” message, 3 years after Sassaman’s death, was from a hacked account;

3. Jon Callas and Ben Laurie both told me that Sassaman wasn’t a naturally modest person, likely to conceal his involvement in the creation of a revolutionary technology,

4. and both Callas and Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent and Sassaman’s former roommate, told me they didn’t think Sassaman had the technical chops to create Bitcoin.

5. Finally, Sassaman wasn’t a close hit on either prose or code stylometry.

The 6 Candidates

At minute 15, the movie suddenly lays out its six candidates that “journalists and other experts have floated.” It does not explain how they came up with these six Satoshi candidates. They are:

1. Adam Back

2. Nick Szabo

3. Hal Finney

4. Len Sassaman

5. Paul Le Roux

6. Wei Dai

Although this is an excellent short list, these candidates have been thoroughly scrutinized. Furthermore, all these candidates have strikes against them, making them imperfect matches.

FBI’s Kathleen Puckett

Kathleen Puckett is the FBI agent who figured out who the Unabomber was. I enjoyed her profile of Satoshi. At minute 50, Puckett said Nakamoto was an “independent thinker.”

She thinks it’s one person: “There’s no way to keep it private” if there’s more than one person.

She said that Bitcoin was an “intellectual exercise for Satoshi,” that he had “no need for social affirmation,” he had “no enthusiasm for money,” and was “modest.”

Narrowing the candidates

The documentary excludes Adam Back, Nick Szabo, and Wei Dai because their online activity times are quite different than Satoshi’s. In short, they are often sleeping when Satoshi is active and vice versa.

Len repeatedly bashed Bitcoin, but the film says this was a ruse.

The documentary labels Hal Finney’s RPOW a “precursor to bitcoin.”

58 min: Will Price say