Financial Insights That Matter
Seeking Satoshi: The Mystery Bitcoin Creator ( Channel 4 )
If cryptocurrency is going to turn us into zillionaires, why did so many of its supporters in Seeking Satoshi: The Mystery Bitcoin Creator (Ch4) wear grubby T-shirts and baseball caps?
Journalist Gabriel Gatehouse set off in pursuit of Satoshi Nakamoto, the reclusive figure who invented Bitcoin in 2008 and then seemed to vanish .
Gabriel — think James May with a mischievous smile — failed to find the digital Lord Lucan , but it was great fun watching him try.
The former war reporter was plunged into a world of cryptoanarchists, conspiracy theorists and people who want independence for New Hampshire .
Right at the beginning, he warned: ‘This film you’re about to see consists entirely of middle-aged white guys talking about tech.’
That was putting it mildly. Some of the men Gabriel met had no interests outside coding, and were sometimes indecipherable to the rest of us.
Adam Back is a Bitcoin megastar, and just one of the men suspected of being Satoshi. Gabriel chatted to him on a park bench in London .
That was a bit of a scoop, but the reporter’s eyes glazed over as Adam droned on in his mid-Atlantic accent: ‘Hex numbers in reference manual… return is decimal 201… demo server… etc, etc.’
Gabriel asked Adam whether he was Satoshi, but that was easily denied. It wasn’t even the toughest question.
‘What else were you into apart from computers?’ asked Gabriel.
There was a very long pause indeed. ‘Mmm,’ said Adam.
For me, the biggest mystery is this. The founder of Bitcoin would surely be one of the richest men in the world.
He’d make Elon Musk look like he operates a particularly lucrative Big Issue pitch. So wouldn’t he rather stand out?
There were some plausible candidates. One of coder Hal Finney’s neighbours in California really had been called Satoshi Nakamoto: he briefly became prime suspect before being ruled out. But did Hal pinch the name?
Hal died from motor neurone disease in 2014, about the time the person using the Satoshi pseudonym disappeared.
But in 2009, records show that when Satoshi was replying to emails, Finney was crossing the finishing line in a ten-mile race.
The early pioneers of Bitcoin were reluctant to speculate about Satoshi’s identity. They operated on the Spartacus principle: ‘We’re all Satoshi’.
As a coder called Bob explained: ‘I believe there are some bad people out there who would just kidnap him and torture him until he coughs up.’
Supporters of Bitcoin believe that banks and big government have us at their mercy. And you can see their point.
Bitcoin campaigner Ian Freeman had his front door knocked down by armed FBI officers, who accused him of money laundering. He got eight years.
But my worry is this. Once Bitcoin has swept away government and the banks, won’t we simply be at the mercy of the techies?
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