“Finding Satoshi”—How a Private Investigator Solved the Mystery of Bitcoin’s Creator

Transcript

What if Hal planned this all along? Okay. And so he has a 12word 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 it'll take humanity to restore my body? >> He's actually a huge fan of wealth and money. >> Exactly. It was all a trick. Ryan, I think you have a novel. Bank list Nation. Very excited to introduce you to our next guest. Uh Bill Cohen is a best-selling author. He's a financial journalist. We also have Tyler Moroni. He is 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. >> Thank you. >> Wow, that means a lot. Thank you. Four years of work, it it better be okay, right? >> Yeah. No, uh 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, uh 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 and why you choose to go bankless. Um, 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 do 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 uh who you point to as the creator of Bitcoin." So, this is part one, no spoilers. Uh, 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 are is is the person or people you named in this documentary the actual Satoshi or is there more work to be done?

>> 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. um and how much actually people have been contacting us with either information to 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 um 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.

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Trafi and DeFi finally in the same app. Head to the link in the show notes, download OKX, and see why it's the NYSC's go-to for going bankless in the United States. Not investment advice services not available in New York and Texas. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think uh one of the reasons why Ron and I think this is the best documentary to come out on the subject was just the level of thoroughess and commitment uh 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 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. Uh, 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 thoroughess that you guys clearly put forth in this documentary? Like why why take on this like monumental task in the first place? >> Yeah, David, there's a good question. Um, 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 are 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 frankly 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 and what I'm you may not fully appreciate is that I probably worked on this for uh and I was just minding my own business working on a another book uh when I got called by the producer and the director. would I be interested in being part of the film as like the interviewer uh of of and you know trying to speak to as many uh people as as I

could who could uh help us un answer the question of who Satoshi was. And what you may not appreciate cuz it's only uh 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 crypto currency folks, you know, the the Michael Sailors of the worlds and the Joe Lubins, etc. uh who you know we thought initially you know cuz 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 uh 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 Sailor said you know Prometheus showed up with fire and gave it to us. Who who who do we care who Prometheus was or who who who actually created fire? I mean, who 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 90inute interview with Sam Bankman Freed 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 we're thinking, okay, are we going to get nowhere in with this? Is this going to be a, you know, have I just wasted a year and a half a useless uh exercise of futility? And then it occurred to us we needed we needed the guy to my left or your right my right you know on this film. 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 uh 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. Uh 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 Sailor is probably the most captivating person I've ever uh interviewed. I mean, he's just like mesmerizing. You know, you get done talking to him, you think, "Oh my god, I've got to uh take every last shekele 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, uh, uh, that's when we decided we needed to get Tyler involved and >> I think set the film in a totally new direction and and made it possible for us to get this conclusion that we feel pretty comfortable with. But it's like I I mean I got this incredible education about Bitcoin and and I had a great time talking to all these fascinating people, but they didn't help to be honest.

>> I 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 the word analysis, the language analysis. You looked at the the C++ programming of the original Bitcoin client, how that was designed, 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 cuz 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 OG's didn't seem to care, didn't want to talk about it?

>> Yeah, I mean I I think it's a 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. Uh and then they wouldn't want to answer that. So, um I think it was uh a combination if I if I may of they were either you know heavily invested and I'm not attributing this to Michael Sailor but obviously he's the most heavily invested uh and continues to be heavily invested either they were heavily invested and therefore anything you 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 or an axe murderer or something, then the value of their investment would I think I mean, if it came out that Satoshi was an axe 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, you know, 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, uh, credit default swaps, uh, was? No. We have credit default swaps. Use them. You know, you know, they're there to be used, not to figure out, uh, who who created them. So, I don't think we ever got a good answer, but that that's the best I could figure. 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 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. Um Tyler, from your perspective, how hard was this case to crack versus others that you tried in your private investigator career? >> 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 def 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. Um, and some of these people are investors in Bitcoin who understand it very clearly because they realize that it depends on who your audience is. And so we would have people say things like, well, it's a decentralized, you know, cryptocurrency that's lives on a blockchain. And already you've lost people with that kind of definition, right? If you're not kind of in the no. 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. I 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 um feel that privacy is a basic human right as John Callus who's in our film says.

And so I kind of expected a lot of, you know, slam doors in my face. But what I in fact perceived was a real intellectual curiosity about this um because these are people who are their engineers, they're academics, you know, that 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 of of who 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 to answer your question about the difficulty there were some people who are in the film who I met with maybe eight or 10 times before they agreed to go on camera. >> Wow. >> And that felt that felt good in the sense that they said finally okay I'm I feel comfortable talking. >> So you really had to earn their trust. Was this because you know they had been uh I don't know scammed or or mis they felt misrepresented or is there just a sense of secrecy in in kind of the crypto bitcoin community like why is their natural instinct not to trust?

>> 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 Bit Torrent. You know comes out of the cipher punk world in the 1990s now runs his own cryptocurrency called Chia. and and Bram and I had uh lunch for about four hours during which time I made very clear not to say to him, "Hey, can I interview on Yuyu 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 cipher punks and what is what were some of the earlier um you know precursors to Bitcoin and and and who were the people who were

interested in electronic payment systems and 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 um it seems like you've really done your homework. I I I I'll talk to you. And that felt good because I was 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 like legitimately like intellectually curious questions, not just yes or no questions to, you know, to try to get him to give me a sound bite. One of the things that you

said in the in the documentary, Tyler, that stuck out to me was um the your PI from your uh private investigator firm, uh 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? >> Yeah, I love that question. So I think you know the public interest is you know it's it seems like a kind of like obvious uh 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 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 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 it from it and Satoshi Nakamoto is right in the center of that conversation now because even during the course of our reporting the 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 the US government is a is a fan of Bitcoin today. That wasn't the true when we started our investigation, right?

Like there 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 of different ways, but that's one answer to your question about why is in the public interest. 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? Uh but but basically there

was a hope that it would be used as a currency. Um 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 blah. Okay, >> we do 13 steps and then I'll show you how easy it is. Yeah, >> right. I'll show you how easy it is. It's it's not as easy as using a credit card or or cash, right? Uh still isn't easy as that. So, what it is clearly I is a way to speculate and people are allowed to speculate. That's probably one of the things that makes our economy so vibrant uh in many ways is that you

know we don't frown on that. We encourage that and um 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 uh you know that's sort of an addendum answer to the the public interest question that you asked. you

know, uh, I I feel like one of my, you know, duties as a former Wall Street M&A banker turned financial journalist is to sort of open up the black box that is financial transactions, that 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 but basically uh you know financial transactions the financial system is based on confidence that we have in it and so it's really important is a is 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 going to 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 3 or 4 weeks after the worst of the financial crisis uh appeared and you know as we saw you know again with say you know 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 and and the the the backbone of confidence is, you know, I is this a good thing in the public interest? And I think that's another part of what we're trying to do here. Can we talk about that confidence a bit more and the the confidence in a different type of system or the lack of confidence in an old system? So I mean you mentioned this uh Bitcoin as maybe a social movement was really born out of you know the uh 2008 financial crisis.

Chancellor on the brink of a second bailout. This show even that you're you're on today uh is called Bankless which kind of um shows you where we think the the banks can you know don't need to fit in in the stack. And really the the original Bitcoin white paper was uh was a bankless white paper. Uh let's talk about the ideology a little bit. And in your travels, you talk to many original cipher punks. 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 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 cy the the cipher punks? you know, people you met like Phil Zimmerman for for instance, who was the originator of 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 uh 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. Yeah, maybe start with Tyler because you had so many of these firsthand accounts and you talked to Phil Zimmerman in person. What about cipher punks is interesting.

>> 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 cipher pump 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. Uh 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. Um, and uh, the cipher punks, there was actually a manifesto that I'm sure you all know about written by Eric Hughes in 1993 called the Cipher Punk 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 you know 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 and we don't need the Fed and we don't need Facebook and we don't need the US Treasury like the 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 cipher punks in the 1990s, there was a lot of um disagreement about what that really meant. For instance, Phil Zimmerman told me, I don't even remember if this 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, um they were 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." As that he started winning, Vit Zimmerman started winning all these awards from libertarian groups and he would say, "I'm I'm not a libertarian. it. For 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, were 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 in to send money to somebody else >> my own money >> 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 to 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 could actually we should regain some of this understanding. >> 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. Um, so it was supposed to be, you know, this decentralized uh 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 uh and Phil Zur and privacy and all of 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 the these banks are literally stronger than ever, right? And of course they are pro 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. JP Morgan 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. It's 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. >> This is this is a question of the difference between like, you know, Satoshi and what he had intended and and where maybe crypto and Bitcoin is today. Uh I I guess, you know, I was enticed by something both of you are saying and you know, maybe something that you said uh very directly, Tyler, which is like the cyber punks 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 cipher punk 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 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 a dangerous idea to some people and to some folks. For some, it's

basically a premise for having freedom. But for others, they say, "Well, what about the bad guys? What about moneyaundering? What about terrorism? What about North Korea and and the nuclear, you know, uh, funding that they could do as a result of these proceeds? What do you think about the cipher punks? Do you think they were right? Do you think they're wrong? Do you fall somewhere in the middle? I'm I'm curious about your personal conclusions after talking to so many of them. Tyler, >> I'm not sure I'm qualified to to tell you if they're right or they're wrong. I I 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 I 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 Diffy, who's somebody who was not in the film, but who I got to know is the the 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. It's it's how we keep information secure in many ways or it has been. And you know what he was able to see and in subsequent generations, people like Phil Phil Zimmerman in the 1990s was that um 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 has essentially become a way to become a way for not only for us to give information to large corporations, 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 23 and me 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 cipher punks had this very smart fear of this becoming a reality and and tried to come up with a system for protecting that. Having said that, you make a great point that like ultimate privacy protection also allows for bad actors, right? I mean, think about the first few years of Bitcoin.

it. 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 and that they could and if you're anonymous like you can do bad things and no one's going to catch you is I think how many people saw it. Um, 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 like it's hard to argue that what the the systems that the cipher punks tried to put into place have have come to be. I think they

probably have not. >> And I wonder if part of that is that in some ways the kind of ethos of Silicon Valley has changed. Like there were more quote unquote kind of 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.

>> So, this is going to be the moment where we start talking about spoilers. uh 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. Uh the the documentary comes to the conclusion that Satoshi is a combo of two people, uh Len Sassman and Hal Finny. At what point in time did you think um did 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 uh oh this actually makes way more sense like what was that moment? Talk to me about that Tyler. >> 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 Finny was likely the person who coded Bitcoin and in my view that's essentially the one who created it, right? because it's this is this is 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 who corroborated that point that he couldn't

have faked that right he couldn't have used chat GBT there was no chat GBT back then right >> he had to have brought in a collaborator who 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 Lens Sassimon, who had worked with Hal Finny years and years and years before at Pretty Good Privacy at PGP, which of course was started by Phil Zimmerman.

And so it 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. >> Sure. Sure. Um, but 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 cippher punk emailing list, do you know anyone else on the cippher punk 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." >> We don't unfortunately. And I I think that's largely because they, you know, are both no longer with us. Um, and we have, you know, again, spoiler alert, conversations with both Hal Finn's widow, Fran Finny, and Len Sassimon's widow, Meredith Patterson, who were both incredibly powerful additions to this film. Um, and and we learned things from

them about the MMO, as well as by pe from people like Bram Cohen, who was Len Sassman's best friend. um and the co-founder of CodeCon with him and both let's talk about Len Sassman for example although we don't know about Len and Hal'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 cipher punks 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 a privacy system so secure that it was considered a weapon. Um, 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, remers, 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 the relevant uh 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 Howal Finny. You know, I'm a student of human nature at this point uh between being a banker and journalist. And again, while we did not have any preconceived notions and no agenda, you know, one of the things that I thought from the beginning is like, okay, if you have a fortune of this size worth, you know, 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 uh think he was he was part of this and and I think one of the reasons I took comfort from our conclusion is that as as Tyler said both Hal and Len are are are are deceased and have been for for a while. And so, uh, you know,

and I don't we don't have any idea, you know, which one of them h had if they had a key to the fortune or how where pieces of the key were or whatever 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 to Adam and 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, uh, that's just human nature. And the fact that this hasn't been touched and it doesn't seem like it will be touched

uh uh means to me that the two people we concluded upon you know the fact that they're dead uh until you know Hal unfreezes and his brain takes over again you know in 500 years uh you know then I think we got I do think we got to the right place in in art 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 here's a pretty decent explanation for why it hasn't been touched

>> so the basic idea is that how Finny was kind of the C++ coder and that uh Len was white paper author also So the key communicator, the replier on the Bitcoin talk forms, 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 the Satoshi fortune, but is that how the division of labor worked out? >> That's what our sources like Bram Cohen and Will Price among many others explain 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 or len you know posting on you know on forums. Um we acknowledge that. Um 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 um to explain it to us. Having said all that, like look, Bill and I again are we are we are factfinders 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 um I

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Well, they both passed away. They both died. Like, was there anything about their passing that seemed odd to you or weird to you? is 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. >> Yeah, relatively quickly after the advent of Bitcoin.

>> It just seems all too convenient for those that are looking for those types of patterns. Was there anything weird to you about that? I mean, look, would it have been more fun if Bill and I discovered that it was a secret CIA project? >> That would have been more fun. That would have been more fun. That would have been badass. >> Maybe this is actually part of the front, >> 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 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. Look, uh, I I interviewed Katie Han when she was still

at Andre Horowitz in San Francisco, and she's talking about files, uh, with potential, you know, in investigation of who Satoshi might be when she was a federal prosecutor. And I'm thinking, come on, Katie, you got to you got to share this. You got to fess up here, you know? I mean, let's make my job easier. Let's get to the answer quickly. And you know she fu lenus 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 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.

>> Brian, do you have an opinion on that? Because you asked, I'm curious. I just think that whenever there is the condition, you know, halicide 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 that's maybe not the obvious explanation. >> Knowing Ryan Ryan is not saying that he believes in the opening, but he is aware that the opening exists and it's worth identifying. >> Right. Right.

>> That's right. And it's 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 I I don't want to get into unsensitive territory but these types of questions I'm sure have crossed your mind Tyler >> for sure. I mean I 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. Yeah. And not only that, but the mechanics of a fraud are often much less boring. Like, you know what Bernie Maid off was doing? He was literally just forging paper and storing it in boxes and just that's it. That was the whole

front, right? Like it it wasn't more dramatic than that. And and people let him go on with it for decades because it seemed like they were getting wealthier, right? Mhm. >> 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 um with Caris Swisser who said something to the effect of like the US government's just not capable enough to create something like Bitcoin. It's too complex when uh >> when when when Len committed suicide. I mean >> there wasn't billions at stake. It was basically the value of Bitcoin was almost nothing in 2011. >> That's right. It took two years for Bitcoin to be worth $1. But both of them knew that they were on to something. like the motivation to hide behind the Satoshi pseudonym was because they they kind of knew maybe not with complete confidence but enough confidence to like do this whole Satoshi rigma roll 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 cipher punks were trying to figure out and like they they had this strong inclination my this is just my assumption I don't know them, never talked to them that they could kind of crack to the nut and solve 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 uh >> but 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? >> Yes. Yes, >> Satoshi knew that this thing could take off and possibly at some be worth a lot. >> 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, you know, 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 >> since probably 1929. And so, here's a new system of nonfiat 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 uh you know one of the most powerful aspects of our system is of course you know the ability to print money and the Federal Reserve and the central banking system uh that we have which is powerful and powerfully successful and this was a threat to that at a 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, as Tyler said, they were very pseudonym 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 going to that this was necessarily going to take off and they were going to get rich. But but it was a threat to the financial system. And it wasn't the only one. And I mean there was the whole, you know, movement in downtown Manhattan. Um 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. Uh

you know the Congress voted it down first and then they brought it back and it passed and and uh 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. I I want to talk about uh the motivations behind why the pseudonym and there are some of the more like simple versions I think a like what about Len as we've established kind of his hobby to do sinm 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 a burden in 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 um 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 are like the precursor to proof of work. But you know who else is a creator of Bitcoin? Uh David Chum. Uh any of the cypher punks, everyone was a creator of Bitcoin. And it was a bit of a V for vendetta moment of and which is a a 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 we are all Bitcoin we are all Satoshi and there 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 look how big my ego is look how big my my my uh accomplishments are that that wasn't them and it it transferred the legitimacy to Bitcoin itself. Can you just talk about that? Uh to you guys put it at the end of the movie. It was I think strategic in in that choice. It gave me goosebumps and to me it kind of underscored the whole importance of the Bitcoin movement of like this is this is public domain. This is by the people for the people. Uh talk to me about that moment and what that felt to just record that and and put that into the film.

Yeah, I love that point and it reminds me of when um we you know we learned you know 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. Um lots of company Google was not released

as open source software, right? Like Facebook was not released as open source software. Like the the whole concept of Bitcoin is to say here is this um 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 um either money or power. And I think that um there is some again you know beauty in this in this idea that I think um you know many of the people in the film talked to um it it may have been lost in the sense that like you know Bitcoin is controlled by third parties today right by by

financial institutions. Cryptocurrencies are largely like they there there are large corporate interests and government agencies that are imposing themselves on it today. right? Um whether you like it or not, that's that's a fact. Even the mining operations themselves have largely been consolidated. Um whereas you know the conceptually was for is for one idea. So I I I love David that you kind of got that from it if I'm answering your question correctly. And I and I really hope your listeners hear it because I too felt that during that part of the film.

>> Bill, there's one other uh subplot that um you hinted at earlier in our conversation which is the resurrection of Hal Finny. 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 cipher punk movement ideology. Also, you you go into some detail in the documentary of, you know, how some of the cy cippher punks thought about transhumanism and the integration of of technology into their life. Well, um, how Finny 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 this

is somewhere in California. Scottville Arizona. >> Arizona. Okay. So and he was frozen shortly after death the way you're supposed to do it. You actually have the founder of this cryogenics company uh on the documentary to to talk about that process and what it means. But this leads to I don't know. I I felt like this implication or possibility that Hal Finny 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 Finny and whether he's maybe coming back to reclaim his private keys uh and resurrect because he's in a freezer somewhere in Scottsdale, Arizona. Bill, what is this whole plotline like? Um, did how many thought? Yeah, just talk about that. >> Well, first of all, it's 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 that went out there and did it.

>> Um, so it's it's part of this history of um there's this group of of people in the 1990s, 1980s and 90s called the Extropians. And these were a kind of like movement of people who believed that um the human race was that we were really kind of not um 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 um 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 um 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 Finny, Nick Sabo, and we die were all members of this group of what's called extropians. And as you say, Ryan, how had his body cryerved at Alor, which is a preservation center in Scottsdale that's been there for 45 or 50 years, and they have a few hundred uh uh customers who have done this to themselves who have essentially h because you don't know how long it's going to take advance.

>> They 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 Extropian movement who knew how very well um who was at the time running Alor 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 cryerve our bodies. And many people like Peter Teal for instance has signed up to do this. Uh 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 the one point I just want to make at the 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. What's the point of going into the future if you just wake up and you're in the bottom% society? >> Let's say you put your money in Bank of America and Bank of America goes bankrupt and you wake up in 200 years and there's 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 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.

>> This is the other part in the documentary where I got chills in addition then where where David did as well, which is like, okay, think about the sci-fi implications of this. What if Howal planned this all along? Okay. And so he has a 12word 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 it'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 he unlocks his Bitcoin. 1.2 2 million Bitcoin in supply that is worth hundreds.

How much will it be worth at time huge fan of wealth and money? >> Exactly. It was all a trick, Ryan. I think you have a novel right there. >> I'm serious. Like you cannot write better sci-fi and 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. Well, there's no guarantee that Bitcoin will be worth anything in 500 years, >> right? >> It'd be a total round trip back to the pennies that it was when it started. Well, this is why this is actually a live issue for us. So, uh, recently we've done some episodes on 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 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 uh

cryptographically prove that he is the owner of the 1.2 2 million Bitcoin so that if Hal resurrects and comes back to life and gives us those those 12word seed phrases, he gets to keep the Bitcoin. That's my hope. But it's a very much a live issue. >> And there 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 and like a part two of of Satoshi's story here. >> 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 '9s 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 include it in the movie. I have a a stupid question to ask you guys. >> Did you guys ever talk to Craig Wright? >> No. Okay. >> All right. No further questions, >> guys. A 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 were so glad to talk to you including the the widows and loved ones of of those um who who passed those who might be Satoshi. want to end with this question which is a question that I think has been a theme throughout this conversation which is Satoshi uh what you know about them both Len and Hal what would they think of Bitcoin today in its current state? >> Well I mean they talk about pure speculation because we never met either individual. Uh I mean again I I I think that if you read the white paper I think they thought that it was going to be uh

much more disruptive to the fiat uh financial system than it's turned out to be and I think uh they uh thought it would be uh 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 uh today and you know at 125,000 even more blown away and probably be blown away by the stash that Michael Sailor has amassed uh and and Black Rockck 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. >> Tyler, what do you think? >> I think that's a great answer. Actually, I think they would be um fascinated by how it's evolved, but also I think disappointed. This is my personal opinion, disappointed that it's just become it's 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. 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 the lack of privacy and the ability to deanonymize all of these Bitcoin addresses. >> And it's not as decentralized as uh you know, they hoped. I mean, it's quite concentrated among a few big players. >> And having said all that, you know, it's not the first invention that became something that it wasn't intended to be from the beginning. I mean bubble wrap, lististerine, 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. >> Well, we are still only 15 16 years into the project. So uh Tyler, Bill, we we'll have to see where it goes. Thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you both. 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.