Founder's Story - They Found Satoshi: They Spent 4 Years Hunting Bitcoin's Creators. | Ep. 418 with Tyler Maroney and Tucker Tooley

Episode Date: July 11, 2026

Daniel joins Tyler and Tucker to go deep into the mystery surrounding Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. What began as Tucker's curiosity during COVID turned into a multi-year investigation spanning hundreds of interviews, financial insiders, coders, cypherpunks, family members, and people who worked directly alongside the film's leading suspects. The investigation ultimately points to Hal Finney and Len Sassaman as the two people the filmmakers believe were behind Satoshi. Along the way, Tyler and Tucker explain why the untouched Satoshi wallets are so unusual, how one major piece of evidence forced them to completely rethink the film two years into production, and why Bitcoin may have needed a faceless creator to become what it is today. Key Discussion Points Tucker shares how the investigation began during COVID after another film shut down and he became fascinated by Bitcoin's growing institutional adoption and the unanswered question of who created it. The team initially assumed major financial institutions investing in Bitcoin had privately figured out Satoshi's identity, but Tucker says they were met with resistance when they began asking powerful people in finance what they knew. Tyler explains why obsession is almost a qualification for private investigation and how the mystery became more compelling when he realized even serious Bitcoin insiders did not agree on who Satoshi was. The investigation looked at numerous candidates who fit parts of the Satoshi profile: monetary knowledge, C++ coding ability, cypherpunk connections, and an interest in digital cash. Tyler explains why Satoshi's untouched Bitcoin became a critical part of the mystery, arguing that it is deeply unusual for someone with access to extraordinary wealth to never spend, transfer, donate, or leave any visible financial footprint from it. The team also considered the possibility that Satoshi simply lost the private keys, especially because early Bitcoin had effectively no monetary value and coders from that era told them losing passwords was not uncommon. Tucker shares how difficult it was to convince Hal Finney's widow, Fran Finney, and Len Sassaman's widow, Meredith Sassaman, to participate, especially after the harassment and suspicion their families had previously experienced. One of the biggest twists came two years into production, when evidence showed Satoshi was active during a time Hal Finney was publicly running a race in Santa Barbara, forcing the filmmakers to abandon their theory that Hal acted alone. That setback pushed the investigation toward the possibility of two people, and Len Sassaman emerged as someone with a separate but complementary skill set who knew and worked alongside Hal Finney. Tyler describes the emotional breakthrough of having credible former colleagues of Hal and Len say on the record that they had long believed Hal was connected to Satoshi. The filmmakers explain why they chose to initially release Finding Satoshi directly to the crypto community instead of following a traditional Hollywood distribution strategy, saying it reflected Bitcoin's ethos of removing the middleman. Takeaways The investigation behind Finding Satoshi concludes that Satoshi was likely not one lone creator, but two people: Hal Finney and Len Sassaman. Real investigations rarely have one perfect lightbulb moment; sometimes the biggest breakthrough comes when the theory you spent years building suddenly collapses. Bitcoin's anonymous creator may have been one of its greatest advantages because the technology was allowed to stand on its own without being tied to the mistakes, politics, or personality of a founder. Bitcoin was not created in isolation. It emerged from decades of work by coders, cryptographers, and the cypherpunk community experimenting with privacy, encryption, and digital cash. The human story may be more powerful than the technical mystery: ordinary people working in their spare time may have created an asset and movement that fundamentally changed global finance. Closing Thoughts Tyler Maroney and Tucker Tooley did not approach Satoshi as a crypto conspiracy or a technical puzzle alone. They approached it as a human investigation. After four years, hundreds of conversations, dead ends, and a theory that had to be rebuilt halfway through, Finding Satoshi argues that Hal Finney and Len Sassaman were the people behind Bitcoin's mysterious creator. Whether the wider world ultimately accepts that conclusion or continues debating Satoshi's identity, this episode captures why the mystery has endured for so long—and why the anonymity at the center of Bitcoin may be inseparable from its success. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So today, we are going to uncover the greatest mystery of the financial age. We did not believe that some computer created Bitcoin that it was person or people. An investigative journalist and a producer who bankrolled and drove a four-year hunt for a ghost worth billions. Isn't that dangerous? No one knows who the creator slash founder Bitcoin was. I can't think of another example in history where someone is sitting on, like, you know, a gigantic, pile of money and Satoshi didn't move any of the money. Who the hell is Satoshi? We believe that Satoshi is. So today we are going to uncover the greatest mystery of the financial age. In my opinion, one of the greatest mysteries of my lifetime. Who the heck is Satoshi? Does Satoshi exist? Is it a person?

Is it people? Is it a country? Is it a government? So I'm excited to hear. Who is Satoshi? Well, you have to watch the movie to get that answer. But we do come up with a definitive answer. And in the film, we believe that Satoshi is actually two people, both of whom are no longer with us. One is Hal Finney and the other is Len Sassman. Okay. Obviously, there's been a lot of names over the years thrown out. Walk me through the process in the beginning of when you said, this is something I'm going to dedicate years of my life to.

Yeah, so, you know, it was middle of COVID, and we had to shut down a movie, another movie that I was working on, you know, a traditional movie. And I got home and I was really kind of, frankly, bored and trying to figure out, you know, something to dive into. And I'd always known about Satoshi, but peripherally. And I started reading about it. And it coincided with the time that, if you remember, the stock market went way down. It was a total V-shaped recovery. we hit, you know, we hit the lows and then the Fed started printing money to bail everybody out. And obviously it was an extraordinary circumstance.

Everybody had to stay home. Productivity went down. So at that time, multiple bigger financial institutions and companies started talking about investing in Bitcoin, many of whom had previously actually started investing in Bitcoin, and some of whom, for instance, micro-strategy, run by Michael Saylor, decided that buying Bitcoin for their treasury was a good idea because the notion was that Bitcoin was essentially digital gold. It was a store value and holding Bitcoin in your treasury over the course of time would outpace inflation significantly. And if you

look back at the history of Bitcoin, you can see that that is actually the case. So multiple people were interested in talking about it. And I just wondered, you know, isn't that dangerous? Like, isn't it sort of, isn't there a risk there because no one knows who the creator slash founder slash, you know, originator of Bitcoin was? And I assumed that many of these companies had already done some diligence, figured it out quietly and understood that, oh, there's not a risk here. And thus invested in it. So we set out to just have some conversations with some of these people, Bill Cohen, our partner, who's not on the call here, decided to go, you know, sit down and interview with us, some really prolific and powerful people in the finance world, all of whom

were interested in or around the hoop on Bitcoin, and asked the question, do you know who Satoshi is? Have you done work there? And we were met with absolute resistance across the board. No one wanted to talk about it. And, you know, whether for an investigator, and I can let Tyler speak to this. And Bill certainly has said it, you know, out loud for an investigator, that's a sign that there is something there that no one wants to talk about. And so that spurred us to continue and go on and pursue this story. So Tyler, when did it become an obsession? It's a good question because it occurs to me to say that to be a good private detective, it's like obsession as a qualification for the job. Like if you're not going to keep digging and digging and digging and

find new people to talk to and new sources of information, you're never really going to get the answer. Which is interesting, too, because when Tucker and I first spoke, I said to him, hey, man, this is fascinating. I'm going to, I'm all in, but I can't guarantee results, right? Because you have to manage expectations. But it became an obsession pretty early on, to be honest, because I was, to be on, pretty shocked that no one knew. Like, you know, Banksy, for instance, is another example of somebody, an artist who had worked under a pseudonym. Nobody really knew who it was. I have some friends in the art world, and they said, like, yeah, we know who this guy is.

There was this sense that some people knew who he was, who were insiders. When I realized that that wasn't the fact with Satoshi, that became really interesting to me. Like, nobody had any clue. There had been a lot of really smart work done by amateur sleuth. Like, if you just kind of went out into the web and found him. people's media posts, people on Reddit, some journalists had taken a shot at it, but no one had the same answer. And everyone relied on different evidence. And so that's when, you know, Satoshi, the fascination with uncovering who this was, like Tucker's willingness to like

fund and be a big part of like a really global, truly global investigation where we talked to hundreds of people over the course of four years where that really set in as a reality. So you have a journalist and a private investigator chasing essentially a ghost. Was there a big lead that you thought was a sure thing, but ended up blowing up in your face because it was not? Well, there's a lot of people that we found along the way who had a similar profile to Satoshi. And by that, I mean like someone who had had a lot of experience like understanding monetary policy, who was a really good coder, especially in C++, which is the language that Bitcoin was coded in, that had come out of the kind of cypher punk world, by which I mean like these computer scientists in the 1990s who decided to use code as a way of. of being an activist and who cared about a new version of digital cash, right? Like in the 90s, there was no word cryptocurrency. Like, that's a word that came out of the Satoshi world.

And the reason I say that is that, like, if you look at the investigations of other people, including the New York Times, did one recently looking, concluding that it was Adam Back. One of their conclusions, which we disagree with is, if you just look at all of those boxes that I just mentioned, that Adam back is an example of somebody who fits into that profile. But the truth is there are dozens of people who fit into that profile. So we found a lot of people along the way who we got really excited by as possible Satoshi candidates. But when we dug deeper, we were easily able to kind of disqualify them.

Do you think part of the major obsession with this is that it's not just a person who created something or people that created something. It's that this person or people have a tremendous amount of money in a wallet that no one has ever touched. Yeah, I mean, I'll let Tucker add to this, but that's a huge part of why the mystery is fascinating. I mean, our colleague Bill Cohen said many times, including in the film that it's essentially not human nature. If you have access to hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, and you don't even like, you know, buy a cup of coffee with it. It's a shocking, I can't think of another example in history where someone is sitting on a gigantic pile of money. I mean, there's all these other stories you may know about

where people realized that they had lost the keys to their own cryptocurrency accounts. And like one guy, for instance, like threw out a hard drive. And then he hired a bunch of people to like dig through garbage piles, like in giant, like, waste management plants to see if he could find the hard drive, because, like, he knew that if he could just get that password, that key, that he would then have access to the money that he had invested in our mind years before. And Satoshi didn't move any of the money, and not even a little bit, right? Not even money that was left to a family member or a friend or invested or donated or given to a good cause or bought a fleet of private jets. And I think that in and of itself made it, you know, in addition to the anonymity,

a fascinating, you know, investigation. Could you imagine, hypothetically, what if they lost the keys? What if they lost the passwords? It's, it's funny you ask that because we talk to a lot of people in the, like in the world who are in the film, people like John Callis and Will Price and Phil Zimmerman, who were these very well-known, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, co-corders, and they said to me, oh, we lose our passwords all the time. In fact, not only that, but they told us that, like, that people like, you know, back in the day when you didn't have like a password manager or like a smartphone, like your password was like on a post-it note, like stuck to your computer. And people in this world told us that it happens a lot. And in fact,

you know, when Bitcoin was started in 2008 and 2009, it wasn't worth anything, right? In fact, It took two years for Bitcoin to have the value of a dollar, right? So before that, it wasn't like if you lost your password, you're not losing $100 million. You're losing $0. And the reason that's important to keep in mind is, you know, a lot of people said to us like, yeah, is it possible? So he just lost his password. And we would kind of laugh and they would say, oh, yeah, it's very possible.

This happens all the time. I'd be sad. I'd be quite sad. I know you got Michael Saylor, Gary Gensler, Kara Swisher on camera. Was there somebody who you really wanted to go, but they were just like, no, I will not show up on this movie. What do you think, Tucker? There were several people that were resistant at first. I think we got the majority of people we wanted to interview.

It took a while. I mean, the biggest one was Meredith Sassman, Len's widow, Lynn Sassman's widow. And that took quite a while. And then Fran Finney, who actually actually. was obviously how Finney's widow as well but it took us a year two years to persuade her to do it and ultimately

what we had to do was finish the movie show it to her and she embraced it and loved it and that was the turning point for us to be able to get her on camera so we had to open the movie back up and put her interview in she and rightly so was very skeptical because in the past you know, a lot of people have speculated Hal was Satoshi.

And she was actually, when Hal was alive, the family was swatted at her home. And it was a very negative thing for them and for Hal. And there have been over the years many attempts to try to contact Fran and, you know, assertions that she had, Bitcoin that she was hiding by malicious people. So she was very skeptical. And I think when she saw the movie and realized that it was really, a human story, a story about honoring, you know, not just Hal and Len, but the entire group of people. Because in many ways, Bitcoin is an open-sourced project. And it took years and years, decades of, you know, advancement and intelligence around blockchain and work, hard work by these coders, different coders, and the cypherpunks, to get to a place where Bitcoin was even possible.

So obviously pre-AI and pre-all of that, literally hardworking people trying to advance the technology. And so in many ways, Bitcoin is here because of all of those people. We think, again, that the two that were the most influential and directly responsible for Bitcoin were Hal Phine and Lens Hasman. walk me through the moment when you were editing and you both in the team realized like we found it I think that was a you know I can speak to this as well I think it wasn't and there wasn't a like the light bulb moment was actually we didn't find it right so two years into shooting the movie

all roads all investigative roads led to Hal Finning and we were in the process of finishing up the movie basically asserting that Howl was solely responsible for Bitcoin. And Jameson Lopp, who's in the movie, had it give a talk. I don't remember where that talk was, Tyler, do you? Somewhere in Europe, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

So he gave a speech and noted that it would have been impossible for Howl to be Satoshi because at the time, Satoshi was actually communicating and transacting. there was an actual Bitcoin transaction that happened from the Stochi wallet, Hal Finney was running a race in Santa Barbara. So we put the brakes on and we were, you know, a lot of money into this movie, two years into this movie, and we had to rethink everything. And we'd always speculated that Satoshi was either a lone wolf or a very small group of people and by very small two, maybe three, but more likely two.

and you'll see commentary in the movie that, you know, if any, a secret can't be kept unless it's two people or less. And so, you know, when we went back down the path of investigation and Tyler and Bill really looked closely at all the interviews and we kind of reviewed everything and where we were, Lent Tasman really emerged as a candidate who not only knew how Fannie, worked with Hal Fannie, but he's, had a totally separate set of skills then held it. How was a really prolific coder. He was a technical person. He was really, really good at what he did. But he did not like the limelight.

He was not someone who wanted to seek attention. The biggest breakthrough in a lot of ways was when we got people who were friends and former colleagues of Hal Finney to tell us that they felt that Hal was Satoshi. And the reason that was amazing is that, you know, one of the investigative techniques we used was to interview with lots of people, people who had worked with, who had been, you know, former employees of friends, of family members of all of the kind of top suspects that we have in the film. And everyone said, oh, everyone thinks, you know, it's Adam Beck, or people think it's Nick Zabo. It could be way die. But no one actually really believed or had any kind of evidence that it was anyone other than how. Finney and Len Sassiman. And that was a remarkable moment in the investigation when it was actually John Callis

who said to me on the record, hey, listen, we've always believed that Hal was Satoshi. And the reason that's important to keep in mind is it's not like John Callis is like a nobody, right? Like this is like Sergey Brin telling us that like the top coder who built Google is the person who created Bitcoin, right? And then Sergey Bren puts me in touch with everybody else who was a senior executive at Google. And they tell me the same thing, right? Like these are the senior founders of this company called PGP, which was this email encryption program in the 90s and early 2000s, where How Finney and Lens Hassan both worked.

And to have these credible, brilliant people on the record tell me first over a phone call, then in a meeting at a coffee shop, And then on camera felt like emotional and real and powerful. So I'm curious, Dr. You didn't take the normal Hollywood distribution route. You released straight to the crypto community, which could come with a massive risk. Why did you do that? Well, we felt from the beginning, if you're making a movie about a technology that essentially disintermediates a middleman, that going direct to the consumer was the best way to release the movie. Really, we wanted to stay true to what the ethos of Bitcoin was from the beginning, at least for the first window.

And we'll go out more mainstream, you know, when that initial window of direct-to-consumer is over. But, yeah, I mean, we just felt like this is the way to do it. It represents really what the technology represented in. And I do think in general, things are moving in that direction. Anyway, so it was a big swing for us. and yet to be seen how great it's going to be or not. But we're happy we went about it that way. Because again, I think it just to the crypto community,

giving them something that is delivered directly to the audience as opposed to through a middleman was the ringwigs. Has this been resonating with people? Because I think when you come out with something, it's like people love something and they hate something, but that both drives it forward. And nowadays we know it's social. Sometimes the more hate you get, the further the reach it goes, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Was there a lot of love and a lot of hate? Both. I would say tremendous love from, I'll call them, for lack of a better term, Bitcoin Maxis, and from people who have been real thought leaders in the space from the beginning. I think everyone was enthusiastically receptive of the movie, because it's not a gotcha movie,

because it's not a tech movie, because it's a human story which talks, it certainly educates people on what Bitcoin is, but it doesn't do it in a super technical way that sort of only, you know, an advanced person in that space can understand. It really speaks to everyone.

And again, it's an emotional story. It's a story about human beings. And I think if you can't relate with the people in the movie, there's only so much, you know, emotion, that can elicit. And we wanted this to be true. We wanted it to be an emotional story and we wanted to be a story about people because at the end of the day, we did not believe that some computer created Bitcoin, that it was, you know, the CIA or the KGB. We knew from Tyler's great work that

it was a person or people. And that was fascinating to me. Like just an ordinary person who has, you know, problems just like everybody else, a family, you know, all the ups and downs that everybody has, coming up with something that's so profoundly important and has been in the financial community and has gone from zero to a trillion dollars in less time than any other company or asset has, you know, 10 years. What a profound and incredible invention creation. And that was created by people, not by anything else. How different do you think things would be if we had known who Satoshi was from the beginning. Do you think that part of the success of Bitcoin

then moving into obviously all these other cryptocurrencies, do you think it's because we didn't know? I do. I mean, I think some degree of it, yes. I think that it cuts both ways. When you have a founder, let's just take Elon Musk as an example, clearly a brilliant person,

way ahead of his time, you know, in terms of seeing, the future, seeing what can be possible, but has his ups and downs as a person. And everybody sort of goes to the founder and says, well, what does Elon think about this? What is Elon's opinion on this? And when you have the absence of that, and it's just the creation that's left over, the personal life of the personal sort of interests of the ups and downs of do not get intertwined with the creation, right? So Bitcoin is so profoundly important and elegant in terms of what it does and how it does it, that I can see a scenario in which if the creator of Bitcoin

was, I don't know, arrested for DUI or, you know, something, you know, that blemish somehow goes on to the creation a little bit. And, And I don't think that's right. And I think that without knowing who Satoshi was all this time, I believe that it's helped Bitcoin in many, many ways become something of its own volition, of its own creation without worrying about the personal issues of the people who created it. on the on the flip side you know look at the SpaceX you know IPO um you know i think Elon is a tremendous you know CEO leader inventor creator and you know that can that can also attract a lot of attention and and respect from from the markets and from people so again i think it cuts both

ways, but I think it probably is better that for the first, you know, decade plus no one really could know who Satoshi was. I think maybe that's partially how the community was created because it was never about a singular individual. If Satoshi, or I guess Satoshi's, in this case, we're watching right now, what do you think they would be feeling? Do you want to, do you want to go first? How do you want me to? I'll give a quick answer just because I had this thought the other day, and this is going to sound crazy, but one of the things we learned about both Hal Finney and Len Sassiman is that they built Bitcoin in their spare time, right? Hal had a job at PGP, and Len was working on a PhD. So these guys were busy. Hal also had a family and children.

And I mentioned that because one of the things we learned about both of them and their like wonderful, brilliant personalities is that they were tinkers, they were entrepreneurs, they were creators. And I like to think that both Hal and Lynn would have gone on to create many other things, right? And when they released Bitcoin, as Tucker said, as an open source code, that basically says, I'm done. World, you take it from here. See what you can make of it. They very much didn't want to control it.

They wanted to take on a life of its own. And so I think they'd be fascinated with what it's become and also would have created many other entrepreneurial things. I couldn't have said about it than Tyler just did I wholeheartedly agree with him I would add on only that both Lend in particular

was very focused on the right to privacy and and how was as well they were both very humble people didn't grandstand you know weren't out there you know saying hey look at me

world look at what we did So the humility behind it, I think they'd be proud of. And I think that they would let the invention of Bitcoin speak for itself, just like Tyler said. But I think they would also reaffirm the importance of the conditions that gave rise to Bitcoin, the importance of being able to transact from one person to another person without someone in the middle, the importance of privacy, the importance of having something that is completely decentralized that doesn't rely on money printing or a government to stay in power and number one in power for its existence. It'll exist long after that. And long after perhaps the dollar is the world

you know, currency. You know, so I think that there were the principles that gave rise to Bitcoin were really important. And I think they'd be very proud of that. And I think they would have gone on to do many more things, as Tyler said, in that space. We just had a guest on who was telling me that he was buying Bitcoin in 2011. I think it was like $2 or $20. It's kind of insane to think about what Bitcoin was just 15 years ago and what it is now. I mean, it's insane.

Like you said, like the fastest probably market cap or growth of anything in history. At the same time, it was the greatest mystery in my lifetime, either was aliens or who is Satoshi. So I think aliens have already been figured out. Now you've... We should ask the aliens who they think Satosh is. I was kind of thinking it was aliens, but I mean, it might have been. I don't know. Maybe Len or maybe they're part alien.

You have Satoshi and aliens. And so everything in my life has. has now been figured out. So I appreciate that. But finding Satoshi, Tyler and Tucker, what an amazing movie. I highly recommend it. Thank you for finding this. So I don't have to wake up in the middle of the night thinking about who Satoshi is. So I appreciate that. Thanks a lot. Thank you for having us.