Who invented Bitcoin? That question has become a captivating mystery for the digital age along the lines of whatever happened to D.B. Cooper or who was Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal.
Documentarian Cullen Hoback thinks he has the answer. His new HBO documentary “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” digs into the rise of crypto currencies and the effort to uncover the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the nom de plume used by the author of the 11-page white paper that set Bitcoin and the broader crypto craze in motion after it was distributed widely online on Oct. 31, 2008.
For Hoback, diving into crypto-mania was a natural segue after he probed the netherworld of the internet in his 2021 HBO docuseries “Q: Into the Storm.” That six-episode series posited a theory about the people who are fueling the dangerous and delusional theories peddled under the moniker of QAnon. Both “Q” and “Money Electric” stemmed from Hoback’s interest in how the digital revolution is changing culture and the social order. The rise of crypto has been fueled by the yearning by many to establish a decentralized financial system — governed by publicly available Blockchain ledgers rather than institutions such as Bank of America or Goldman Sachs — and the growing demand for easier ways to conduct financial transactions online and across borders.
“I’ve spent the past 10 years talking about digital rights and digital privacy issues. So making a film about Bitcoin was something that I had wanted to do for some amount of time,” Hoback tells Variety. “I wanted to discuss what [crypto] was trying to be versus what it became. It was trying to be digital cash. It really became something more like digital gold.”
“Money Electric” follows Hoback’s investigative effort to shed light on the Satoshi question. He went into it with no certainty that he would reach a firm conclusion. But after immersing himself in crypto culture, he came away with the conviction that the father of Bitcoin is a Canadian crypto developer Peter Todd.
Todd has dismissed Hoback’s assertion. On Oct. 9, one day after “Money Electric” debuted on HBO, Todd told the BBC flatly: “I am not Satoshi Nakamoto,” calling the claim “ludicrous.”
Todd is a well-known figure from the crypto conference circuit. He spoke to Hoback on camera for “Money Electric.”
“We filmed with him on multiple occasions. He likes being on stage. He likes talking about Bitcoin. You can see throughout the last decade, once he was given a microphone, he kind of took that opportunity,” Hoback said. “Assuming he is Satoshi — I think if you’ve gotten away with something for so long and you’ve done such a good job of muddying the waters, you probably think no one’s going to catch you anymore.”
Cullen Hoback, director-producer of HBO documentary “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery”
Hoback says he pursued the Bitcoin story because the clamor to end the Satoshi mystery not only made for a compelling story, but also because of its broader significance. The inventor of Bitcoin famously held on to 1.1 million coins — or 5% of the 21 million Bitcoins that will ever be mined, according to the protocols laid out in the white paper. At contemporary Bitcoin prices — valued against the dollar at $68,140.74 as of the close of trading Friday — those holdings amount to enormous wealth. There has been speculation that whoever is behind Bitcoin has destroyed or deliberately abandoned those 1.1 million coins. Hoback is skeptical.
Hoback funded the first year of work on “Money Electric” out of his own pocket until HBO came onboard. The slow but steady march of crypto products into mainstream financial systems — El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 — has piqued broader interest in the subject. Filmmaker Adam McKay is an executive producer with Hoback on “Money Electric,” as he was on “Q: Into the Storm.”
“I only really wanted to tell the story if I felt like we could at least posit a compelling theory for who was behind Bitcoin,” he said. “I picked up where other researchers left off and put together a short list. And I said, ‘OK, if I can get access to some of the players in this network, either one of them is likely to be Satoshi or to have known who created Bitcoin.’ But what really motivated me was the global adoption story. When El Salvador announced that they’re going to be using Bitcoin as legal tender, that really breathed some new life into the story for me.”
Crypto markets have been on a wild ride in recent years. The trading price of Bitcoin and other tokens tanked hard in the spring of 2022 but markets have rebounded significantly. Nevertheless it remains a volatile world that is vulnerable to theft, hackers and the loss of the all-important electronic digital “keys” that crypto owners guard as carefully as others would the key to a physical safe deposit box. The implosion of the prominent FTX crypto trading exchange and conviction of founder Sam Bankman-Fried also put a big spotlight on the potential for fortunes to be made by savvy trading of tokens — and the potential for massive fraud.
“What I find interesting about Bitcoin is that it is an intersection of unlikely allies,” Hoback said. “You have libertarians, you have people from the financial sector, you have your stock market guys and you have your technologists. You have nerds who sit on their computers all day and then, and then you just have people who are looking for somewhere to put their money with the hope that this is kind of their way out of the rat race.”
(Pictured top: Peter Todd in “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery”)