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Cryptocurrency News Articles
Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery Review – Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Oct 09, 2024 at 08:00 am
The search for Satoshi has now gone on for more than a decade. It has produced spectacular misfires, including Newsweek’s infamous 2014 cover story that claimed to find Satoshi hiding in plain sight in Los Angeles.
The search for Satoshi has now gone on for more than a decade. It has produced spectacular misfires, including Newsweek’s infamous 2014 cover story that claimed to find Satoshi hiding in plain sight in Los Angeles. The discovery was wildly wrong—Newsweek had instead found a confused older man whose last name happened to be Nakamoto—but the episode would become another piece of Bitcoin lore. It also served as a textbook example of the perils of confirmation bias.
Now comes Cullen Hoback, whose new documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery purports to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto once and for all. The film debuts at 9pm PT on HBO, the network that in 2021 released Hoback’s Q: Into the Story, a close-up look at the Q-Anon conspiracy that credibly pointed to the people who orchestrated it.
Hoback does not lack confidence (the trailer for Money Electric proclaims the “Internet’s greatest mystery” will be revealed) and, by and large, his documentary is a good one. It avoids the pitfalls of most other crypto films. Money Electric is not a fan film by groupies looking to promote a token. Nor does it disparage and ridicule the crypto industry without trying to understand it—a common approach by would-be sophisticated critics.
Instead, Hoback depicts a group of long-time Bitcoin advocates the way they see themselves: As the stewards of Satoshi’s gift, which gave the planet a form of money beyond the reach of intrusive, profligate governments. In this view, the villains are JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon—the Bitcoin-hating banker who is shown at the beginning and end of Money Electric—and Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator who allied with Wall Street against crypto.
Meanwhile, the central characters in Money Electric are those tied to Blockstream, a company that promotes the adoption of Bitcoin by individuals, companies and even countries. At the outset of the film, we meet Samson Mow, a self-proclaimed Bitcoin ambassador who helps persuade the Prince of Serbia and the President of El Salvador to embrace the currency.
There is also Adam Back, the founder of Blockstream who is famous for creating Hash Cash, a precursor to Bitcoin. We also meet figures like Peter Todd, a Back acolyte and core Bitcoin developer, as well as Roger “Bitcoin Jesus” Ver, another influential early crypto figure who is currently facing charges for tax evasion. There are also cameos from high profile figures from the business world, including Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder who renamed his other company from Square to Block as part of his dedication to crypto.
The documentary’s interviews with this roster of longtime Bitcoiners lends it authority, as does its succinct handling of major events in crypto’s evolution. Those include the so-called block size wars over Bitcoin’s architecture, the rise of Ethereum and alt-coins (“shitcoins” to detractors) and the U.S. government’s recent campaign to hobble the industry.
Satoshi ‘revealed’
Money Electric also stands out from other crypto films because of its hefty production budget—Hoback shoots scenes in Malta, Canada, El Salvador and numerous other places—and because the director pushes in all his chips in claiming to identify Satoshi Nakamoto. Unfortunately, his bet is almost certainly wrong.
Hoback’s quest to identify Satoshi begins in the right direction. He identifies the most prominent figures in a network of “cypherpunks” who shared a passion for privacy and cryptography, and corresponded via a now-famous email list of the same name. It was this mailing list as well as an online forum called BitcoinTalk where, in addition to his famous white paper, Satoshi shared his vision for Bitcoin.
Early in the documentary, Hoback shows photos of the cypherpunks most closely associated with Bitcoin and who represent the most likely candidates to be Satoshi. They are Back, the creator of Blockstream and Hash Cash, as well as other names familiar to longtime Bitcoiners: Hal Finney, Nick Szabo and Wei Dai.
Hoback makes a brief half-hearted effort to assess if these candidates are Satoshi, and then moves on to Craig Wright, an Australian charlatan who arrived on the crypto scene in 2016 with falsified evidence to claim he invented Bitcoin. Mercifully, the film maker is not taken in and moves on to other candidates. As Money Electric progresses, it zeroes in first on Back as a potential Satoshi and then on Back’s Blockstream protegé and friend, Peter Todd.
Todd is much younger than the other figures long identified as likely candidates, and would have been 19 or 20 years old at the time Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper. To make his case that Todd is Satoshi, Hoback seizes on his 2013 email exchange with an unknown figure named John Dillon about a technical upgrade to Bitcoin.
The emails were leaked in 2016 and caused a minor
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- HBO's 'Money Electric' Bitcoin Docuseries Accidentally Leaks Its Own Secret: Everyone Is Satoshi Nakamoto
- Oct 09, 2024 at 12:30 pm
- The IMDB page for HBO's upcoming documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery — which claims to reveal the true identity of Bitcoin's pseudonymous inventor — has blown the secret early: everyone is actually Satoshi Nakamoto.
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- Bitcoin Core Developer Peter Todd Debunks HBO's Claims That He is Satoshi Nakamoto
- Oct 09, 2024 at 12:25 pm
- Moments after HBO aired their highly anticipated documentary “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” and pointed out at developer Peter Todd as a possible face behind Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym, the fabled creator of Bitcoin, Todd took to ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) to debunk HBO’s claims.
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- Oct 09, 2024 at 12:25 pm
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- Oct 09, 2024 at 12:25 pm
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