HBO Bitcoin doc ‘Money Electric’ hunts for Satoshi Nakamoto—see a first look at the trailer

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? 

This is the burning question at the heart of the cryptocurrency space, and it has been since Bitcoin was first introduced to the world more than 15 years ago. 

Satoshi Nakamoto is the moniker used by the individual (or individuals) who developed Bitcoin, published the Bitcoin white paper, and laid out a vision for how the cryptocurrency could be used to change the world. The thing is, nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. At least nobody has admitted to knowing who they are, even though some people have claimed to be Satoshi in the past.

As such, here we are, with Bitcoin now more or less a fixture of the financial system and trading for more than $60,000 as of writing. With Satoshi, whoever they are, still holding (and having never touched) a stash of 1.1 million Bitcoins, they could be one of the wealthiest people in the world. That makes Satoshi a pretty important person with, potentially, a significant amount of power.

That’s one of the reasons that filmmaker Cullen Hoback set his sights on unmasking Satoshi in his new film, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, which airs on HBO on October 8 at 9 p.m. ET and will be available for streaming on Max.

Hoback—whose previous work includes Q: Into The Storm and Terms and Conditions May Apply—spoke with Fast Company about the new film, including what sparked his interest in the Satoshi mystery, why unmasking Satoshi is important, and why he thinks the film’s conclusions will be controversial.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I knew about the Satoshi Nakamoto mystery and have always wondered why somebody didn’t just spend some significant time trying to figure this out. So, what sparked your interest in this, and what was the genesis of the project?

How do you spend three intense years just reading forum posts and looking through emails? I knew what Bitcoin was before 2017, and that’s when I really started to wrap my head around the inner workings of it. I think anybody who is interested in investigations in general, or, like, has a penchant for trying to solve mysteries, looks at the Satoshi case and goes, that’d be a fun thing to get into. 

But it’s also something that so many people have speculated on over the years, and  there’s this question of whether you can actually solve it or not. Or, can you at least put together a really good case? Of course, I didn’t know if we were going to be able to solve it. And the reason that I jumped into this story following the Q series (Q: Into the Storm), was, actually, Adam McKay. 

It’s just a story that has been out there for so long, and I wanted to be able to put together a pretty sound case. And I hoped that we would be able to use some of the experience gained from, doing previous digital forensics on Q and kind of the lessons learned with the cat and mouse of these anonymous figures who are doing a lot of things to cover their trail, but then also the psychology of what it’s like to have created something, you know, previously, like Q, but now the psychology of what it’s like to create something like Bitcoin, and if they’re alive, be holding on to that secret.

And that, to me, is pretty fascinating. I think that puts us in a pretty good position to try to crack it. And having the privilege of three years really, to just devote to investigating this story, digging into everything we could read on it, looking into every suspect, reading every forum, reading an unreasonable amount of forum posts, put us in a position to be able to do something that I just don’t know that most have the resources or time to really be able to pursue.

If we can start at the beginning, can you explain how you start to investigate? Was there a larger strategy, or did you see what was already known, and pick up the trail from there?

You have to pick up where other researchers have left off. There’s obviously been a lot of energy and research put into trying to crack this mystery. And that’s part of why there are four or five key names that people tend to circle back to—people who seem like, even if they’re not Satoshi, they might know who Satoshi is. Or, you can start to map that Bitcoin’s origin story emanates from this network or these individuals.

I put that on a shelf for a while and said, all right, if I can get prolonged access to one of them as an entry point, that might unlock the larger story. That entry point was Adam Back[…]so it became a key entry point to unlocking the bigger mystery.

What do you think the value is of figuring out who Satoshi is? Why might this be important, especially to people who aren’t in the crypto space?

There’s real value. I think there’s a narrative that exists that Satoshi disappeared and was never heard from again. I think if Satoshi is actively involved in driving global Bitcoin adoption, rendering themselves the richest person on Earth? That’s a different story. You know how we used to rely on a gold standard? There’s a drive right now to rely on a Bitcoin standard, and it would be like one unknown person controlling one-twentieth of all the gold.

Just having this massive stockpile, because Bitcoin is being baked into the backbone of countries now, it’s being used as legal tender in some places. It’s being used in 401(k)s. It’s now being traded on Wall Street. This question of whether or not there’s an anonymous figure out there who controls a giant share of Bitcoin becomes increasingly relevant. And I think this is very important, and this is one of the things I kept coming back to, is that Satoshi could have destroyed their stash in a public way for everyone to see. Assuming they were alive, this is something they could have done. This would have been good for, you know, sort of Satoshi’s security and for the security and longevity of Bitcoin. But Satoshi didn’t do that—which means that the possibility still exists. So, trying to understand who is behind this, whether or not they would pull that lever, is very important.

As a filmmaker, there’s no guarantee that you were going to have an answer all that digging into who Satoshi is. How do you gauge that? How do you consider the fact that you could work so hard and potentially, not see any payoff?

I guess that’s the risk of these kinds of projects. We’re not looking at a case that’s been in the courts or something like that. We’re not looking at something in the past. We’re looking at a real-time investigation. And there’s always a risk with any real-time investigation, especially when you’re pouring your own resources into it. HBO came on somewhere in the middle of this project. 

Once we’d secured what I felt was enough access to be able to start to gauge the network in real life, not online, you know, because that’s the other thing about these types of stories, is that you can only get so far with, you know, what’s left on the internet? I think that if this could be solved on the internet, it would’ve been solved, I think that helps in that it’s like a compass, and it points you in the direction of the key networks and key players. And then you just have to spend time with them, get to know them, get to know who they know. See who they interact with and who they introduce you to. 

Not to spoil anything, but do you feel like you’ve made headway in solving the mystery?

I think we make a hell of a case in the film, and I think that who we land on is unexpected and is going to result in a fair amount of controversy. I think that people are going to debate it regardless of how strong of a case we made, and that’s fine. That’s the nature of this space. We had a lot more evidence than we were able to include in the film. 

But it’s going to be up to the audience—how they view the case, how they view the evidence, and whether or not they’re convinced. 

See the trailer for Money Electric here or via the embedded video above.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Cullen Hoback’s last name.