The Hunt for Bitcoin’s Creator

correspondent made an incredible claim. He said he possessed documents that revealed conclusively the true identity of Setoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, one of the tech industry's biggest unsolved mysteries. It was the story of the decade, a story that could make a journalist career. Andy and his correspondent started working together. The evidence was pointing towards

a little known Australian computer scientist named Craig Right. If you just took a glance at this stuff, you would very quickly to find enough evidence to convince yourself if you believe the documents were real, that this guy had created Bitcoin, this eccentric Australian genius you know, nobody had ever heard of before they collected his old blog posts. They did linguistic analysis to compare rights writing style with

post written by Satoshi. And on December eight Andy published his blockbuster story and Wired titled Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto is probably this unknown Australian genius. And then it happened what always seems to happen to the Satoshi hunters, this community of bitcoin enthusiasts and cryptocurrency fanatics just went to work to methodically disprove the claim that Craig Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto, and the fallout made Andy Greenberg's life a

living How. Hi, I'm Brad Stone and I'm Julie r H. And this week Undercrypted, we're asking the question whatever happened to the hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto? Now, Bratt, I know this has captivated me for some time. Julie I confess to having fruitlessly spent some time on it as well. And over the years, publications like The New Yorker, Gizmoto, Fast Company, Forbes, the London Review of Books, Vice have all tried to find sitution. It's become a kind of

journalistic tarbie. The more reporters getting tangled in the mystery, the worst fever, and there's this question of whether Satoshi should even be identified. You know, Satoshi still controls about a million bitcoin, making them the largest holder of the cryptocurrency and a billionaire. In paper, a journalist would say, the world has a right to know, but maybe this genius just wants to be left alone. And if we never find out Setoci's true identity, does it even matter anyway?

Stay with its first, Brad, remind us what we really know about Setoshi. All we really know about Setoshi is what he wrote. In October two tho paper appeared online describing a new kind of digital money called bitcoin. A few months later, Satoshi released the very first bitcoin software, And this was right after the financial crisis. Is your money safe? The fault of Lehman brothers, And of course

it is not just Lehman's night. Bank of America sealing a deal to buy Maryland for twenty nine dollars a share that is roughly Bitcoin attracted libertarians and people who had lost faith in the global financial system. They liked this idea of an electronic currency with no central bank standing behind it. In the beginning, Bitcoin was only known within small circles of developers, and for a while Satoshi communicated with them sending emails, talking on bulletin boards, but

those people say they never met Setoshi in person. In two thousand and eleven, as bitcoin was starting to become associated with shady criminal enterprises like the Silk Road, which was an illegal online drug market, Satoshi disappeared and his final post said quote, I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands. And with that the legend of Satoshi was born. So Brad together we went to interview

the very first Setoshi hunter. Right, Joshua Davis is a great journalist who wrote one of the first stories about bitcoin for the New Yorker magazine all the way back in October two eleven. Yeah, and that's just a few months after Setoshi went silent. We went for to the Mission District in San Francisco for this interview, meeting josh at a small office. There was a walk up apartment with just a couple of rooms and a gate on the entry door. We sat down in a quiet room

at the back. Please introduce yourself. My name is Joshua Davis, and I am the co founder of Epic magazine and a contributing editor at Wired. Josh's article cryptocurrency introduced bitcoin to a lot of readers. It also said a pattern that would be repeated over and over. Journalists would set out to understand bitcoin and then get enticed by the Satoshi mystery and end up going down the rabbit hole.

You know, it's like a classic treasure hunt where you don't know exactly where the treasure is, but you could. You see one crumb, and you follow that crumb to the next crumb, and and next thing you know, you've been led down this crazy journey. One big win was only worth about three dollars at this time. Josh ended up buying some and spent them one of the only places you could find that accepted it at the time,

Howard Johnson's hotel near Disneyland. Yikes, and since one bitcoin does around ten thousand dollars today, that ended up being a very expensive hotel room. Josh also attended a cryptoconference in Santa Barbara, one of the first, and became convinced that one of the attendees must be Setoshi hiding in plain sight. He scanned the attendee list and going on clues like the fact that Setoshi seemed to use some British sayings in his writing, he settled on an Irish

cryptography student named Michael Clear. As Josh described it in the story, he met with Michael outside the conference and then asked him, point blank, are you Setoshi Nakamoto? We talked about bitcoin a little bit and I said to him, I'm also looking for the person who created it. And I said, I know, it happened to notice that you have a lot of the same experience, and so I just want to ask you. Are you set Toshi? And he said no, But if I was, I wouldn't tell you.

From the story, it's clear Josh wasn't entirely sure if Michael was telling the truth, right, because denying it is exactly what Satoshi would do. Many years later, Josh's circumspect about the challenges of revealing Satoshi's identity. I think the biggest problem is that there's just not a lot to go on, and so you very quickly start making assumptions. This is something we heard over and over. You start finding ways to convince yourself that you're on the right track.

A confirmation bias. So, you know, let's look at some of those assumptions. British English, the assumption that it's a heat because he's using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. I mean the very initial assumption that he's Japanese. Again, there's no guarantee that he's Japanese. At many points in the reporting, I was imagining Satoshi just laughing, just laughing at me, and then over the years, as other people have chased him,

just laughing at everybody else. A few years later, in two thousand fourteen, the crypto community got a rather large surprise when Newsweek magazine ran a story revealing the true identity of the creator of Bitcoin. It has been one of the biggest mysteries raging across the internet and business worlds. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? The man who created bitcoin is known as the father of Bitcoin, the online currency now

worth billions. Take a look at this scene last night after Newsweek published an article claiming the man in these images is the Bitcoin founder. Now, this is probably the best known attempt at un mask Satoshi. So speaking to the woman who wrote it, was at the top of our list. My name is Leah McGrath Goodman, and I was the writer of the Bitcoin story cover story for Newsweek.

Back at this time, Newsweek had been temporarily out of print, Leah's article appeared on the cover of their first issue back and there was a lot of anticipation around it. Leah had identified a sixty four year old Japanese American living in southern California, and his real name, as it turned out, was Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. When this hit on March, I was back in New York. I was online and

watching from across the country. There was a huge reaction to the story, something Leah says she never could have expected. Camera crews and police cars descended on Dorian Nakamoto's home. He was hounded by reporters while trying to leave this house. I hadn't seen anything like that in California since I was a little kid with the O. J. Simpson Wake

Bronco car chase. I was in complete shock. I just got up and walked across the room and people were congratulating me and shaking my hand, and I went to the ladies room and just threw up um and just panicked, had a panic attack because I realized that the theories of events that had been found in motion was um something I couldn't change or do anything about. In addition to the media surface, Leah faced an outcry from bitcoin die hards online on Twitter and read it immediately with

people trying to discredit her story as well. But the biggest blow probably came from Dorian Nakamoto himself. When reporters confronted him on this driveway, he told them he had never worked on cryptography or alternative currencies. It took me a while to get Lea comfortable with talking about this moment in her life. Corresponded with her for a few months and met her for coffee when she visited New

York before she agreed to speak with us. I'm not surprised she was reticent because that story was fairly discredited in the in the tech community. So I'm dying to know Julie. If she could go back again, would she still write her story? Yeah? I asked her about that. If you go back again and you knew that this whole reaction was going to happen, and I mean, it's sort of like altered your life quite a bit, would

you still go back and write this story? Yeah. I have actually had this question recently put to me by a couple other people, and I said I couldn't really say if I would do it again to be honest, So does she still think that Dorian is the real said Tosi. Unlike the other people that we've talked to, Leah is still quite certain that Dorian is a guy, just perhaps as part of a group rather than by himself. And we should point out that news Week never retracted

that story. That probably should have been enough to dissuade other journalists from following in Leah's footsteps. But as the price of bitcoin rose from two hundred dollars in the fall to eight hundred dollars a year later, the stakes got higher and the intrigue around the mystery of Satoshi

got even more intense and irresistible. I found it really exciting that there was this unknown thing, like I've always writing about whether anonymitia is possible on the Internet, and it kind of excited me that someone had actually achieved it. Someone had done something really significant on the Internet, and we still didn't know who they were. That's Andy Greenberg, the writer for Wired magazine we met at the beginning

of the episode. Brad and I traveled down to One World Trade in Manhattan, where the Wired offices are located. Andy has a bushy beard which he was stroking as he was remembering a time in his life that he had tried to forget. Andy says he was originally deflated by the Newsweek story. He couldn't believe Satoshi was hiding in plain sight. You see, Andy was a Setoshi hunter himself. When he was still at Forbes magazine. He had written

a story about a man named Hal Finny. Now, How was a computer scientist and the first person to ever exchange emails and bitcoin with Setoshi. Andy suspected maybe How was Setoshi himself. Andy had visited Hal, who had advanced a LS at his home in two thousand and fourteen. At the time, he thought it was significant that Hal and Dorian Nakamoto lived only a half mile away from each other in Los Angeles. Yeah, but then he concluded

it was just that confirmation bias at work. Again. There's a line in that story that I thought was resident and really applies to this entire kind of topic, which as I believe that those connections were in fact random, that Finny is telling the truth when he denies helping to an event bitcoin, and that I am only the most recent of a long string of journalists to succumb to the mirage of us Atoshi Nakamoto shaped pattern in

a collection of meaningless facts. Yeah, that's it's even more painful to think about those words now because I I

don't think I may have felt for it again. That's because about a year after the Newsweek story fell apart in late and he started getting encrypted emails from someone using the name weren Brandwyn Goern said he was in possession of emails, texts, accounting documents, and other evidence that conclusively revealed that an esoteric Australian computer scientist named Craig Wright was the one and only Satoshi nakamuk and he was looking for advice and a good journalist to share

this document trove with. So of course I I couldn't let Gun just take this to another reporter. I mean, I would have, you know, been losing out on the biggest story. And I'm sure I'm sure that Green knew what he was doing, and so I negotiated with him that we would delve into it together. Investigated cod byeline of story, which is very strange because he's not a

journalist and I don't know his real name. Andy spent three NonStop weeks working on the story, identifying Craig right as Setoshi throwing himself right back into it despite his hesitation. I dropped everything like eating and sleeping. They reported carefully worried about inadvertently tipping off their competition. So we were constantly doing these really kg interviews where we were just

asking these really circumspects questions that people. They spent hours pouring over old Craig Right blog posts comparing his style to that of Setoshi's. Andy was focusing on a possible cover story for Wired, but he also was preparing a shorter piece just in case he heard that competition was working on the same story. Andy and Goren contacted Craig Right directly, but he was cag full of hints, non

denials and even a little bit of menace. Right was really weird right from the beginning and just got back to us with these pseudo denials, like not really denying that he was the guy. They were kind of menacing responses that were not helpful but not not actual denials either, which is like, I feel like that's what Satoshi would do to kind of but they were meaner than Satoshi

is in his um you know, original persona. A picture seemed to emerge of this eccentric Craig Right, who had worked in tandem to create bitcoin with a forensic investigator in US Army veteran named Dave Kleinman who had passed away. And so the weird tone of Craig Rights writing, which was kind of paranoid and angry and just very strange, the fact that didn't match to Toshi's persona that seemed okay,

like we could explain it away. And then just as that picture was coming into focus, Andy got word that Gizmodo, the tech news site, was working on the same story. Wired rushed its story onto the web. To be clear, we did not have the opportunity to do the story we wanted to do. Instead, I heard that Gizmodo was working on a piece, and like an hour later we published hours because we were not going to like run the risk of losing what could be a big scoop.

The next few days were pretty dark for Andy. They were miserable days because even if you get the rights, everyone's furious a view for having violated the privacy Setoshi Nakamoto. Members of the bigcoin community were furious at him and Wired for trying to unmask Setoshi. Many of them believe the world should never find out who Setoshi is and that the person deserves the privacy. It was like he had desecrated a temple. The blowback was as bad as

anything experienced by lea newsweek. Bitcoin is, by its nature this thing that a lot of people see as a privacy tool, although it actually is very difficult to use in a private way. As you know, everybody knows. Increasingly it's it's becoming more understood that bitcoin is not actually very easy to use in a private way. But it comes from the world of cryptography, where everyone is obsessed with privacy, and so there are a lot of people who are just angry at me and gorn and wired

for having even attempted to out the docs. Setoshi, Um, this poor genius who just wanted to be hidden. My Twitter mentions were just a war zone for weeks to come. So I spent you know, these just defending the decision to try to do this. As journalists. I hope you guys can see that you can't you can't not do it if the clues come to you. It's not like it's not like it's a TOCI is just a random

private person. He would be a multi billionaire with immense power and money and influence, you know, and that you know that really matters, Like I do think it's completely defensible to to to say who's a toci is if

you know. But then things got worse. A journalist from Forbes wrote a story suggesting that Craig Right had falsified his academic record, that he didn't in fact have multiple PhD s, and then another reporter up information showing that Craig Wright had backdated some of his blog posts to make it seem like you wrote them back at the creation of bitcoin. Yeah, and he says he knew about that, but rationalized it. He felt like Craig was leaving him

these breadcrumbs that he'd previously concealed. You know a lot of people have been pointing to that and said, what were you guys thinking? You even saw that he had backdated the blog posts? How could you be so silly? And I don't know. It's a good point. It was confirmation by us, like we had other evidence that was pointing in the positive direction. So we found ways to tell ourselves that the negative stuff didn't matter as much

as it should have. Andy followed up three days after the original article with a story and Wired that said that elements of craig wright story didn't add up. That later story was titled new Clues suggests Craig Wright suspected Bitcoin creator, maybe a hoaxer now, to be fair, and he had hedged his original story well. He made sure to say in that first piece that Craig could be a huckster. But that's the kind of nuance that gets lost in a media scrum, right, and almost didn't matter.

The Gizmoto story that also identified Craig was less careful and together, the impression was that both publications had identified Craig as Setoshi. Now they were seemingly big, embarrassing holes in their stories. It seemed like another journalistic failure to hunt Setoshi down. About six months later, by the way, Craig Wright tried to prove publicly that he was Atoshi Nakamoto.

He gave a technical demonstration that convinced Gavin Andreessen, a high profile member of the bitcoin community, But then a reputable security researcher alleged that he had faked as proof. Rights claimed to be Satoshi seems to have collapsed, at least for now, after the whole painful episode. What really shocked Andy was that readers didn't seem to care as much as he thought they would, right. He actually said

readership was kind of disappointing. Craig writes story people were less interested, Like I thought that would blow up the internet, and it didn't because people had already gone through this once with the newsweek piece and they kind of didn't care as much. And then after Craig writes kind of like disappointing mysteries, you know, resolution, but then it's not a resolution, and then he comes out again and then that's disproven, and it's kind of like never resolved. Uh,

it's just made the mystery much less fun. Uh, and it's it's just kind of sad. And I I know that I am part of making that mystery less fun. That it makes me. It makes me sad that like there was this kind of very pure and like super interesting question of who's a Toci Nakamoto And now I

just get like nauseated thinking about it. And there's one other journalist that we talked to, though, Nathaniel Popper from the New York Times, who actually covers bitcoin but has only made a best guess at who Setosi is rather than writing this big expose meant to go on page one of the paper. It doesn't mean he hasn't been interested.

He's just been extremely cautious. There's some part of me that's always on edge, waiting for the email that finally says, you know, here, I am here, here it is right. I doubt anyone could be more curious about the setoci hunt than someone like Nathan. But he says he hasn't believed the previous attempts for more than a few hours. You know, I remember when when Dorian, when that Newsweek story came out, and I remember when the Craig Rights story came out. There were certainly a few hours where

it was this open question. I thought, you know, maybe this this is it. But I think this is one of these cases where the kind of online mob very quickly, uh pulls together the evidence on sized and um, you know, people reached opinions pretty quickly. But Nathan told us that he does hope we'll find out who Satoshi is, and so you know, it wouldn't surprise me if we do

find out at some point. And I'll say, I'm constantly getting emails from people who claimed to be Satoshi and say, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna bring forward the evidence when the time is right. So what do you think, bred, do you think we'll ever find out who Setoshi is? You know, unless Satoshi comes out and move some of that original block of bitcoin. I think there's gonna be some ambiguity that the challenges that we've built up Setohi

into this legend. And yet people are fallible, They make mistakes, you know, they tell little lies that can get exposed. I think Andy Greenberg from Wired said of the best Julie when he told us we're going to need Setoshi's cooperation if we're ever going to settle this. What do you think, Yeah, I think you're right. I think we've just built up this character. And obviously, as a journalist, I'd love to be the one to break this story.

But then as just a person watching this, this creation and seeing how someone has escaped, you know, any sort of tracking is just fascinating. And I don't really want

Setoci to ever be found either. Right, there are a lot of members of the bitcoin community that want them to come back now, because there there's this division right in the community between kind of traditional bitcoin and something called bitcoin Cash, there's lots of animosity without getting too deep into the split, I mean, it's a tocy come back and establish some some order to this world. I mean there's pros and cons of that too, right, it

would be nice to have someone come established order. But it was also a bitcoins, something that's supposed to be so decentralized and not really have one thing ruling it. It It was just meant to be perfect that the onset and now you know, all these divisions had happened. There's other cryptocurrencies out there that people say are going to be better than Bitcoin, and it's just going to be such an interesting story to keep following. Maybe we do

keep Stoshi alone as an icon. I mean, one of the great things about this is that he you know, he establishes that there is such a thing as anonymity online. Right. That principle has been undermined so many times over the years, and yet Stocia kind of re establishes it. And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Join us next week for an even more special episode where we

revealed the true identity of Satoshi Nakamotive. That's not true, folks, but do let us know what you thought of today's show. You can email us at decrypted at bloomberg dot net or reach out to me on Twitter and I'm at Julie ver H and I'm at brad Stone. If you haven't already subscribed to our show wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating or a reef. It really help us reach new listeners. This episode was produced by Pia Gedkari, Magnus hand Lesen, Liz Smith and tofor Foreheaz.

Francesco Levie is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts and We'll see you next week. M