The world has long wondered who created Bitcoin. Ever since a white paper bearing his name was published on the web in 2008, the digital asset’s conception has widely been attributed to a pseudonymous figure known as “Satoshi Nakamoto.” Still, nobody knows who Satoshi is—or if it’s even a single person. Now, a new documentary from HBO promises to dox the long-secret identity of the supposed crypto mastermind.
Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery is directed by Cullen Hoback, the same filmmaker who took on the mysterious personality behind the QAnon cult in Q: Enter the Storm, another HBO doc. Having allegedly cracked that case, Hoback seems to be trying his luck with yet another long-simmering mystery: the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. A newly released trailer for the film doesn’t give much away but promises another interesting ride.
Hoback seems to have sketched out a compelling thesis for Q’s identity in Into the Storm, but he never got the culprit dead to rights. His documentary points the finger at Ron Watkins, a weirdo systems administrator for 8kun (the follow-up site to 4chan, where Q originally began his posting career). Since the documentary was released, Q’s activity has mostly quieted down.
It will be interesting to see if Hoback validates a long prevailing theory, which is that Bitcoin wasn’t created by an individual at all, but by a government agency—namely, the Central Intelligence Agency. Tucker Carlson, who has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, recently platformed this theory on his dumb podcast. (Carlson said it was “obvious” that the CIA created the digital currency and that it was a “honeytrap.”) This is a believable hypothesis but one that involves little evidence. Purveyors of the “CIA invented Bitcoin” theory have relied heavily on the argument that Satoshi Nakamoto translates (roughly) to “central” “intelligence,” in Japanese.
Others contend that the National Security Agency is Bitcoin’s progenitor—a guess that, frankly, makes a lot more sense. After all, crypto is conjured via cryptography, and the NSA, which employs more mathematicians than any other organization on the planet, is the world’s premier cryptography organization.
Why would America’s intelligence services want to create fake internet money to compete with the dollar? Your guess is as good as mine. If you listen to Russian state media, they’ll tell you that it was invented to generate funds for American covert operations overseas, which, despite being a conjecture spawned by our geopolitical enemy, is as good a theory as any.
Money Electric will be available on Max starting October 8.
