The identity of the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator has eluded sleuths for years. But does finding the real Mr. Nakamoto really matter?
There are two ambitious missions behind “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” a new documentary by the filmmaker Cullen Hoback that was released Tuesday by HBO.
The first is to solve one of the internet’s great mysteries by revealing, at long last, the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous programmer who created Bitcoin in 2008.
The film’s second mission is to make the case that the identity of Bitcoin’s creator actually matters — that Bitcoin, for all its flaws, represents an important technological breakthrough with far-reaching implications, and that there are good reasons, aside from prurience, to care who created it.
Let’s start with the first part. Among Bitcoin buffs and cryptocurrency journalists, the mystery of Mr. Nakamoto’s identity has been the subject of fierce debate and painstaking investigation for more than a decade. But nothing has been proved conclusively, and a handful of bungled attempts to crack the case — most notoriously a 2014 Newsweek cover story that put the blame on a physicist, Dorian Nakamoto, who turned out to have nothing to do with Bitcoin at all — have only muddied the waters.
(My former colleague Nathaniel Popper suggested that Nick Szabo, who created a digital currency with similarities to Bitcoin, was most likely Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2015, but Mr. Szabo has denied it, and no conclusive evidence has emerged.)
Mr. Hoback, who spent years diving down the rabbit hole of the QAnon conspiracy theory for his last film, “Q: Into the Storm,” took a similarly exhaustive approach this time. He and a camera crew spent three years flying around the world interviewing early Bitcoin contributors, following digital breadcrumbs buried in ancient message board posts and piecing together the evidence.