You Found Satoshi? Let’s See the Receipts

In December 2024, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, I met with a professional investigator named Tyler Maroney. He told me he was on a quest to discover the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, and he felt that he had cracked the case. My first thought was, join the club. Literally dozens of journalists and investigators have spent months or even years trying to uncover the mysterious creator of the most popular cryptocurrency, who ended his (or her or their) online presence in 2011 and amassed around $83 billion in Bitcoin. All have failed to make a convincing identification.Maroney’s project is out now, a documentary called Finding Satoshi, where he and his team conclude that Satoshi is a collaboration between two of the most commonly cited possibilities, Hal Finney and Len Sassaman (both are dead). In an instance of unfortunate timing, the doc was released just a week after ace investigative reporter John Carreyrou dropped his own epic Satoshi story in The New York Times. Carreyrou is the guy who exposed the frauds of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, so his descent into the Nakamoto rabbit hole came with hold-my-beer swagger. Both can’t be right. Both might