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 says that “RPOW is as close to bitcoin as anything can possibly be,” which is complete b******t and hyperbole.
Perplexity.ai on Will Price’s claim:
It is fair to say RPOW was one of the closest conceptual ancestors of Bitcoin, especially in its use of proof of work for digital money. It is not accurate to say it was “as close as anything can possibly be” unless that is being used as loose praise rather than a technical claim.”
If you mean “closest in overall Bitcoin-like design,” the best ranking is Bit Gold, b-money, RPOW, and Hashcash.
Min 59: Hal Finney doesn’t write white papers.
Min 61: They play a recording of Hal where he says, “I’m making this recording mostly I want people in the future to hear my voice and maybe something of my story.”
So while he’s humble, there was a part of him who wanted immortality or at least to be remembered for who he was and what he accomplished: his story. If he created Bitcoin, it would be his greatest accomplishment and most impressive part of his story. Why wouldn’t he mention it when he was dying? Yet even when he could only communicate by blinking his eyes, he still denied being Satoshi. When his wife asked him, he also denied it.
Min 105: Olivia Dillan, VP of PGP, Inc., said, “[Hal Finney] wanted to change the world, and he wanted a legacy.”
Hal Finney was making no commits at PGP for two months, right when Bitcoin was about to be released. Will Price, “What was he working on? I think it was Bitcoin.”
Bitcoin’s code looks like Hal Finney’s, but Hal “stuck some things in the code to throw you off,” the documentary claims.
Satoshi was emailing bitcoin developer Mike Hearn while Hal Finney was running a 10-mile race, says Jameson Lopp. That proves Hal wasn’t Satoshi. The documentary bypasses this problem by claiming that Hal’s co-conspirator, Len Sasserman, was wearing Satoshi’s mask at that moment, as he represented Satoshi’s prose, whereas Hal represented Satoshi’s C++ coding, according to the film. Quite a claim!
WTF!
Hal Finney told Jon Callas, “Why would I deny Satoshi if I were Satoshi? I have a fatal disease. There’s no reason in the world to deny it because I’m not going to be around in two or three years. No, I’m not Satoshi.”
“At the time,” Callas says, “I interpreted that as a non-denial and I interpreted it as a YES.”
This ludicrous. Hal Finney gives the most emphatic, compelling denial he can muster, and Callas concludes that Hal was saying the opposite of what he was saying.
Conspiracies
The film claims that coding in C++ provided “additional cover” for Hal.
Len bashed Bitcoin publicly to also throw people off.
Stylometric anonymity theory: When the stylometry is an imperfect fit, the solution is easy: Satoshi purposefully mixed his stylometric ticks to cover his tracks. How convenient! Now, almost anyone can be Satoshi.
Occam’s Razor revolts against all these convoluted claims that amount to a liberal use of confirmation bias.
Conclusion
At the end of the movie, Will Price says that Hal was “one of the creators of Bitcoin.”
Yes, that’s true, in a broad sense, in that he created RPOW, one of the raw components of Bitcoin. It’s like someone invented the wheel, and you later say that he was one of the creators of the car. Yes, in a way, that’s true. But not really.
Many complex technological inventions demand that someone synthesize and marry various components. Think of the plane, car, telephone, rockets, and the iPhone. That doesn’t make one of the component makers a co-inventor of that invention.
The final words prove the documentary wrong. The investigators confirm that neither of the widows (Fran and Meredith) has the private keys to move the Bitcoin. How likely is it that BOTH widows lack the keys when both had healthy marriages? If you had millions, wouldn’t you want your wife to keep it? Yes, the widows could be lying, but the investigators are confident that they are not.
Second, Fran reaffirms that Hal was NOT Satoshi and that he would lie to her when he denied being Satoshi.
Ironically, these final words of the documentary unravel the entire film. These powerful words blow down the house of cards they’ve constructed. Together, these two screenshots say:
* The expert investigators are convinced that the “Satoshi widows” do not have Satoshi’s Bitcoin keys.
* This implies that both Satoshis (Hal & Len) lost, destroyed, or hid their keys from their beloved wives or that their wives are outstanding liars, convincing the investigators who would love to catch them in a lie to strengthen their theory. All this is highly implausible.
* Fran is certain Hal was not Satoshi or that he mined one million BTC.
* Fran is convinced Hal would not have a second identity.
* Therefore, Hal was not Satoshi (or part of Satoshi) and did not secretly collude with him.
* And without Hal doing the coding, that leaves Len doing nothing, unless you believe Len’s coding partner was another person.
In short, Finding Satoshi, while entertaining and fascinating, is utterly wrong.
What do you think?
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