QAA Podcast - The Hunt For The Richest Anon (Premium E265) Sample

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Someone invented internet money, and we want to find out who they are. We’re not mad, we just want to talk. For a decade and a half, the true identity of “Satoshi Nakamoto,” the author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, has been a closely guarded secret. Several major publications have tried to uncover crypto’s founding father, including New Yorker, Vice, Newsweek, New York Times, and Wired. But definitive answers are elusive, despite the fact that Satoshi possibly controls over a million bitcoin worth tens of billions of dollars. In the HBO Documentary “Money Electric: A Bitcoin Mystery” director Cullen Hoback makes an original case that the person behind Satoshi isn’t any of the usual suspects. Hoback, who also directed the docuseries “Q: Into the Storm,” believes that Satoshi is the Canadian Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd, who was 23 years old at the time of the whitepaper’s publication. Peter Todd, in the film itself and after the film’s release, denies that he is Satoshi. We chat with Cullen about what inspired him to take on this project, why it even matters who Satoshi is, the evidence that convinced Cullen that he’s “very close to the answer,” and the internet mysteries he plans to tackle in future documentaries. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/QAA Cullen Hoback https://x.com/cullenhoback Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Thank you. If you're hearing this, well done. You've found a way to connect to the Internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast's Premium Episode 265, The Hunt for the Richest and On. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky. Liv Egar. And Travis View.

Cryptocurrency, the preferred payment method of St. Petersburg ransomware developers who are holding your grandma's family photos hostage. Crypto's most devoted advocates have a nearer. religious belief that it, or Bitcoin specifically, is at least as revolutionary a technology as the Internet itself and solves issues related to government-issued money, and will inevitably lead to a nerd-ruled anarcho-libertarian utopia on Mars, or something like that. To skeptics, Bitcoin's stratospheric increase in value since its creation 15 years ago does not negate fatal flaws that make it impractical as currency. These include its wild volatility, lack of tangible

backing, negative environmental impact, regulatory uncertainty, and technological barriers that make it too slow for small everyday transactions. God willing, I will be dead before we find out who's right. But until I die, I and the rest of the world are going to have to reckon with a digital asset that has a roughly $1.3 trillion market cap is owned by tens of millions of people, and since 2021 is an official legal tender in the country of El Salvador. Part of that reckoning has to involve in covering the identity of Bitcoin's inventor and largest holder, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. While there have been plenty of online flame wars and investigations related to uncovering

who authored the Bitcoin white paper, there is no consensus on the answer. But an intriguing possibility is offered in the new HBO documentary Money Electric, the Bitcoin mystery. In it, filmmaker Colin Hoback, who also directed HBO's Q into the Storm, travels the globe to interview the central figures in Bitcoin's development and makes an original and controversial case for who is responsible for the blockchain-based money. Spoiler, the film points to the Canadian Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd.

Peter Todd, in the film itself, and in statements after the film's release, denies that he is Satoshi. And here to talk about it is Colin Hoback himself. Colin, pleasure speaking with you yet again. I can't believe it's been three years since the Keylet Storm came out. What? What? No way.

I know. Yeah. Yeah. A lifetime has happened since then. Yeah. Yeah. And also did this investigation, you know? This, I guess this film also happened since then. Yeah. How long would you say that you were working on this? Were you working on it kind of while Into the Storm was finishing up? Or did you start it, you know, shortly afterwards? In the immediate aftermath of Q into the Storm, I really, really wanted to take a break. But, yeah, Adam McKay.

who is an EP on that, he's like, you know, you know what you should do next? After finding this other anonymous guy online, I'm like, don't say Satoshi. Like, Satoshi. Like, uh, man, it's, you know, it's one of those stories that, like,

a lot of people have tried. And if we were going to do it, we needed to bring new life into it. And it's also one of those stories where if it turns out that Satoshi is no longer with us, it just won't make for as compelling of a, compelling of a case.

So I just kind of put it on a shelf for a few months. I put together a short list of, okay, possible suspects, picked up whether the researchers left off. Didn't necessarily say this is going to be the next project, more just development. But then, like we were joking about before the recordings started, I got that call set up with Adam Back. Adam Back is this cryptographer, first person Satoshi ever reached out to. Also happens to be the guy who's behind the company that's driving that global adoption effort, which Travis just mentioned, El Salvador. as his company was largely behind that.

So to me, that was enough to say, all right, there might be more going on here. And what if Satoshi didn't actually disappear a decade plus ago? What if they're still involved? So that, yeah, that got me to pick up a camera again and, you know, and then filmed for the next few years and did a lot of research. Yeah, I was to say because, yeah, this is kind of a white whale for online investigators. And there are lots of, like, you know, well-funded newsrooms from, like, you know, the New Yorker and, like, Vice, New York Times, wired. I've all tried to answer this question.

And the answers that came up with have either been too full of holes in order to be widely adopted or they're debunked entirely. So, I mean, it certainly takes a lot of bravery to see the, you know, the number of investigations that have tried to answer this and have not been successful and to dive in anyway. Sure. It's a high risk endeavor. And even if you get it right, which I think we are very close to the answer in this film, you can expect that the community and the power players in that community would do whatever is necessary to protect that secret. So you've got a $1.3 trillion at stake here. The idea that there could be someone who controls $1.20th of the total supply when you're trying to get countries to put this into their treasuries, when you're trying to get, you know, adoption in the traditional financial system, it might impede that growth. So there's a real incentive at the same time to protect that secret. Yeah. You know, yeah, something I really appreciate the film is that in the very, very, you know, first few minutes, you get into like why, why this matters, why this question is relevant and not just beyond the fact that it seems like we just ought to know what to create, you know,

a trillion dollar asset, but also it affects the value of the asset, because it's certainly relevant to know whether or not Satoshi's Bitcoin are accessible or not, or whether or not they can be moved. I hadn't considered that before. I mean, it's like, aren't people who like invest in Bitcoin want to know and know exactly how volatile their asset is? I mean, because like whether or not those Bitcoin can be moved is going to affect, you know, it's, it's value, right? Sure. I mean, there's also an incentive to kind of ignore the Satoshi question because of that. In some respects, it's not that dissimilar from people who believed in Q and the mechanics at play to sort of want to know but not want to know at the same time. If you were to ask

someone who believed in Q, who is Q? They would all have their pet theories. While at the same time say, okay, we need to protect that secret. It works very similar in the Bitcoin space. I think everybody has their pet theories, they all kind of want to know while at the same time knowing would actually affect the asset itself. In the same way that knowing who's behind Q would affect the asset in that case, which was the entire belief system, or could have possibly had that effect. So with Bitcoin, yeah, there's this just giant thing hanging out in the open looming over this investment. And yeah, Satoshi still had access to all. all those coins, it could be a real, it could potentially be a real detriment to their investment.

So there is an incentive not to want to look and want to pretend like that doesn't exist. On a similar note, one of my favorite parts of the doc is, and I'm paraphrasing, but you posed this question, it's like, you have this option before you, right? You can either be the richest, you know, one of the richest most powerful people in the world, but by coming out, you sort of undermine this thing that you invented. And that felt to me also very similar to QAnon, where you've created this insane movement that has changed so many people's lives that has shaped the course of politics, you know, in a major way. But by revealing who the authors are, it undermined, like, there's a similar theme here that I thought was really, really interesting. Yeah, the mythology of this anonymous figure was part of the marketing for Bitcoin for a long time, you know.

It drew people in, oh, it was created by, you know, this anonymous person, no one knows who they are. It allowed believers, people who really wanted to push Bitcoin forward to kind of transpose whatever identity they wanted on to Satoshi, believe that it could be some super famous cryptographer. It kind of results in this biblical story, I mean, the Genesis block. It's the first block that contains Bitcoin transactions. You know, it gave it this almost godlike Promethean quality to it. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries,

go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of man. Klan with Julian the Nanny, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of trickle-down with me, Travis Vue. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. Travis, for once, I agree with you.

And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners. Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think. of gratitude maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying, not me being grateful. I'm very

grateful.