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 be wrong.

Carreyrou was motivated by a previous Satoshi-chase HBO documentary. In one scene involving the British cryptographer Adam Back, a perennial candidate in this mystery, Back was asked if he was Satoshi and he said no. Carreyrou felt that Back’s demeanor was “fishy,” and he launched on an 18-month quest—funded by his employer, The New York Times—to prove that Back was Satoshi. The headline of Carreyrou’s print piece (written with colleague Dylan Freedman) hedges a bit: “A Deep Dive Aims to Find the Creator of Bitcoin.” Carreyrou told me that as far as he’s concerned, the case is now closed, repeating to me a remark he made on the Times’ daily podcast that he is 99.5 to 100 percent certain that his Javert-level efforts have nailed Adam Back, who still denies it.

Such is the hubris of a Pulitzer winner. Here’s a reality check: Since the only way to verify Satoshi’s identity is to get the unique cryptographic key linked to the 1.1 million bitcoins in their wallet, the best anyone can do is create a compelling circumstantial case. To really close the book, your evidence must be so powerful that it would convince even those who have gone before you and squandered months of their lives in the quest. I asked several Satoshi hunters—including my colleague Andrew Greenberg (who looked into Hal Finney’s face and believed his denial) and author Benjamin Wallace (whose “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” dove deep into the matter and concluded that the answer was unknowable)—about these recent efforts. Neither was convinced, and both expressed weariness that journalists kept wading into the enigmatic quicksand of the Satoshi hunt.

Projects to unmask Satoshi have a kabuki-style familiarity. They’re crypto-journalistic versions of Clue, the Agatha Christie-esque board game where players identify a murderer from a fixed set of suspects. In the Satoshi game, Clue’s cast of Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlett, and Professor Plum are replaced by crypto luminaries Finney, Back, Nick Szabo, Sassaman, and a few others, mostly associated with the 1990s cypherpunks group where Satoshi was a contributor. (We won’t talk about Newsweek’s implausible cover story, which identified a poor soul who happened to have the last name Nakamoto.) Each investigation typically eliminates suspects one by one until climactically revealing the real Satoshi. Often, linguistic analysis of Satoshi’s messages and code are involved.

But unlike Clue, where the murderer is confirmed by revealing a card, the only definitive answer in real life is that unique wallet. No one has a, um, clue why nothing has been withdrawn from a stash that would make Satoshi one of the world’s richest people. (Both Finney’s and Sassaman’s widows say that their husbands weren’t Satoshi, though they do confirm that both men were involved in the development of Bitcoin once Satoshi invented it. Carreyrou speculates that Back’s post-Bitcoin businesses were so successful that he doesn’t need that money.)

Inevitably, once an investigator narrows the search to one candidate, confirmation bias sets in. Part of Carreyrou’s argument is that Back and Satoshi held similar views about crypto-anarchy, the value of gold, and the virtues of anonymity. As someone who wrote extensively about cypherpunks, I can attest that all of them shared those views.

Skilled investigators, writers, and filmmakers live and die by spinning compelling narratives. While I watched Finding Satoshi and read Carreyrou’s epic feature, the storytelling suspended my disbelief. Some of their strongest points came not from hard evidence but subjective personal encounters. The documentary included heartfelt testimony from Sassaman and Finney’s friends and families, describing how Finney in particular had the time, motive, and capability to invent Bitcoin. Carreyrou’s j’accuse of Back described the reporter’s Columbo-like encounters with his target. Long passages portray a battle of nerves where Carreyrou presses his prey to make a conversational stumble that gives away the game.

But once the movie ends and the newspaper is set down, we’re left with nothing but reasonable guesses. “There’s so many people who are plausible,” says Wallace. “The problem is claiming it’s anything more than plausible.” Greenberg, who still is the recipient of countless unwelcome Signal messages from people claiming they’ve cracked the case, tells me he is tired of the whole exercise. “If somebody is going to find Satoshi, it’s not going to be one of the six people that we’ve all been talking about for 15 years—it might be a name we’ve never heard, possibly from the intelligence world,” he says. Maybe some decades from now, Satoshi will be revealed by a FOIA request.

There is one big winner in Carreyrou’s investigation, though. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, a company that he might have exposed as fraudulent has been spared his scrutiny. Now that he’s finished with Satoshi, the next Elizabeth Holmes should take cover.