We’re no closer to finding Satoshi Nakamoto

Today, enjoy the Empire newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Permissionless III kicks off in Salt Lake City today! 

Whether you’re on or off the ground, follow @Permissionless for all the latest updates. And be sure to check the hashtag for more cool stuff.

Grasping at straws

Despite slick marketing leading up to the release of HBO documentary Money Electric, we’re no closer to finding out the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.

What filmmaker Cullen Hoback, whose most recent work chronicled QAnon and 8chan with Q: Into The Storm, has given us is more of a creative retelling of Bitcoin lore. 

The early efforts of the Cypherpunks, the formation of Blockstream and its victory in the Blocksize War, into the corporatization/industrialization of bitcoin mining and El Salvador adopting it as legal tender.

All that’s squeezed into 90 minutes, including cutaways to incessant negging from Nouriel Roubini and the mainstream media — solid comedic relief.

That side of the film makes for a solid primer on the discourse. It even features a decent, albeit small, roster of legitimate insiders, including, among others: Blockstream co-founder Adam Back, veteran hacktivist Amir Taaki, a prominent early Bitcoiner now working on anonymous protocol DarkFi, as well as cryptography consultant and former Bitcoin core dev Peter Todd. 

Hoback later suggests Todd could be Nakamoto, hiding in plain sight all these years.

The bulk of Electric Money’s baseline reality, however, is woven with clips of Hoback following Back around the streets of Malta, to see if he’s Satoshi. 

If Back was the progenitor, then the surrealness of Bitcoin Miami and nation state adoption were expressions of his genealogy. 

It would also technically make Back a trillionaire, if bitcoin were to hit $1 million per coin, a factoid the film repeats over and over. That’s based on prior analysis that found Nakamoto had mined over 1 million BTC, although there is some dispute about the real number.

Other scenes shadow former Blockstream marketing chief Samson Mow — who advised El Salvador president Nayib Bukele on his bitcoin adoption plan — on a world trip as a self-styled Bitcoin ambassador. The film also tags along with Todd on urban exploration trips in Latvia, before he’s presented as a real candidate.

Back, who has repeatedly denied that he created Bitcoin, is the only person cited by name in the body of the white paper for his work on Hashcash. It was an early proof-of-work system built in 1997 for curbing denial of service attacks and email, which Nakamoto tweaked for bitcoin mining.

Hoback looked for holes in Back’s story, the biggest of which was a letdown: Back was actually interested in bitcoin years earlier than he previously claimed, and he’d even edited a Wikipedia entry to include potential identities for Nakamoto that weren’t him, including Nick Szabo, Wei Dei and Hal Finney. Not exactly proof.

It’s only at the 80th minute that Hoback lays his cards on the table: a bluff based on a loose interpretation of BitcoinTalk forum posts.

Todd was supposedly Nakamoto at the age of 15 because he’d:

• Spoken online about building a digital currency based on Hashcash before 2009.
• Never officially held a position at Blockstream despite working closely on Bitcoin Core, for decentralization purposes.
• Minorly corrected Nakamoto about how a fee market would work in a BitcoinTalk thread, by “finishing his sentence” with a followup post over an hour later.
• Perhaps created a sockpuppet, roleplaying as a US intelligence agent who would later publicly assign Todd the task of coding that fee market.
• Stopped posting on BitcoinTalk around the same time as Nakamoto.
• Cryptically once suggested in an IRC channel that he had physically destroyed the keys to his bitcoin.

“The level of reaching here rivals QAnon stuff (which is pretty ironic if you know what Cullen's previous documentary was about)”

Exactly.

The truth is pretty simple: there's hundreds, even thousands of people who could have created Bitcoin.

We're not going to find Satoshi. https://t.co/TZMtqJhxgU

— Peter Todd (@peterktodd) October 9, 2024

It makes for a fun theory, and for a final showdown, Hoback presents it to Todd and Back in an abandoned railway, a have-fun-staying-poor man’s Point Break. They both — rightfully — laugh it off, which has continued on X following the film’s release.

Whether we should or shouldn’t know who Nakamoto is or was is a tired conversation at this point. 

Still, it’s obvious that for many normal folk, the question indeed presents a Rubicon that they can’t cross. That itself would hinder adoption, I guess, but as far as shedding light on the way through that mess goes, Money Electric ain’t it.

— David Canellis

The Works

• Canary Capital is joining the race for an XRP ETF, filing its registration statement with the SEC on Tuesday.
• BTC and ETH are where they were yesterday: bouncing off $62,000 and $2,400 apiece.
• Solana is “richly valued” against the rest of the market, Standard Chartered said.
• Ex-Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison agreed to turn over assets to FTX debtors to settle a lawsuit, per The Block. 
• $168.4 million has flowed into Ethereum mainnet bridges in the past week, while $215.8 million has flowed out of Arbitrum’s.

The Riff

Q: What are Crypto.com’s chances against the SEC?

To put it simply: Crypto.com faces an uphill battle. 

The firm filed a lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission after it received a Wells notice from the agency.

The case, in some ways, mirrors what we saw from Consensys earlier this year. The firm receives the notice from the SEC — which threatens, but doesn’t promise legal action on the SEC’s behalf — and then responds by filing a lawsuit. 

Earlier this year, Consensys filed suit against the SEC — also disclosing a Wells notice — as the firm took the fight to the regulator. The two cases are clearly a bit different despite some similarities, such as the fact that they both were filed in Texas courts. 

While Consensys was really focused on ETH, the SEC seems to be taking a different approach with Crypto.com.

“The SEC has refused to provide Crypto.com a complete list of network tokens sold on the platform that it plans to allege are crypto asset securities. Instead, it has referred Crypto.com to other enforcement actions in which the SEC has asserted claims based on secondary-market sales of various network tokens, including the Targeted Network Tokens,” the complaint said.

Those targeted network tokens include BNB, SOL, ADA, FIL, ATOM and ALGO. 

A Texas court recently dismissed the claims from Consensys. Now we’ll just have to see how Crypto.com fares. 

— Katherine Ross

Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.