Stop Trying to Unmask Satoshi Nakamoto

The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, remains one of the blockchain’s great mysteries. Countless news articles, documentaries, and bits of internet speculation have attempted to unmask Satoshi to no avail. Earlier this month, The New York Times published a massive investigation into who they believed was behind Bitcoin. The man they identified protested that it wasn’t him.

Ben McKenzie—yes, Ryan from The O.C.—thinks it’s better, for Bitcoin at least, that Satoshi remains anonymous. Crypto, he says, “has a lot of aspects of a cult,” and “a deified figure who only exists as a pseudonym” is good for those.

Just to be clear, McKenzie doesn’t want this. He’s spent the last five years on a quest to tell anyone who will listen that cryptocurrency is a bad idea. In 2023, he and journalist Jacob Silverman released Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, a book on the topic that includes interviews with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Tether cofounder Brock Pierce, among others.

Earlier this month, McKenzie, who has an undergraduate degree in economics, released Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, a documentary based on his experiences investigating crypto and writing the book. As it was rolling out to theaters, McKenzie attended the inaugural WIRED@Night event to talk about the book and film (and read some mean tweets). He also sat down with me prior to the doc’s release to discuss his crypto fears—and what might happen to Bitcoin in the future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Ben, thank you so much for joining me.

BEN MCKENZIE: Thank you for having me, Katie. It's an honor to be here.

So, I actually was just at my desk upstairs and was reading the New York Times’ recent investigation into the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. I'm not even interested in talking about who Satoshi is; I haven't cared about that for a really long time. But because this piece just came out, I’m curious about your impressions of the sort of mythology and online fascination, almost obsession, with Satoshi. He’s almost treated like some mythical figure, like this magician or wizard who created Bitcoin and catalyzed this entire movement.

If you think of crypto as a story, it's a story with this really devoted, small following. And it has a lot of aspects of a cult. One great thing for a cult is a deified figure who only exists as a pseudonym. Because, in reality, it might be maybe this guy Adam Back, who's a very interesting character, or some other cypherpunk cryptographer from that era. But then it would be a real person and a real person would be a little bit of a letdown probably. Right?

Whoever it is.

Right. It's just such a better story to have it be a mystery and to have the code take on this mythological status, like it's gonna fix everything that ails our traditional financial sector. Because the crypto story is really simple. It's basically, “Do you hate our current system?” Everybody raises their hand and then, “Well, Bitcoin fixes this.” And it's the second part that's the lie. I would argue it's far worse if we were to try to somehow use cryptocurrency as a form of money on a global scale or even a national scale. But the story is really simple, and it's so powerful because the first part we all agree on: Our current system sucks. So that gets them pretty far.

I love a long story, but at one point in the Times story I was like, I gotta scroll to the end. Like, did they get the guy? Once again, it’s not dead to rights. He's not like, yes, you got me, it's me. I would imagine that whoever it is, it is advantageous for that person if they are still alive to retain that sort of mysterious, mythical air about them. Because, as you said, as soon as everybody knows who you are, that veil of mystery and the sense of nobility, a noble cause, dissipates, or at least starts to dissipate.

And I mean, I would be happy to talk about Adam Back specifically.

What do we know about Adam Back?

So a couple things. I've never met him and never interviewed him. He does not like me. He's referred to me as a crisis actor.

No.

Well, I am an actor.

You are an actor.

It is a crisis.

So, you know, points for creativity. Adam is a cryptographer. He's the first person that Satoshi emailed. So this person that doesn't exist emailed this real person. That's interesting. Then in the article, apparently, there's a lot of similarities in terms of how Adam writes and Satoshi wrote.

But in terms of Adam himself, he started this company called Blockstream, and Adam met with Jeffrey Epstein in the mid-2010s, and apparently there was some sort of financial relationship. There was some sort of investment of some kind at some point.

I think that's really interesting because, of course, cryptocurrency, when it started with the white paper in 2008 and then came into existence in 2009, there really wasn't a use case for it. What could you really do with this stuff? It's just lines of code on ledgers called blockchains.

The first use case was crime. It was the Silk Road, this dark web drug marketplace. That has been a throughline throughout cryptocurrency for forever, far before the retail public got really involved in it. Because that's what you can use it for. Crypto's really only good for speculation or gambling, betting the price is gonna go up and down, or crime, right?

It's trying to get outside the regulated system. It's a tool. Could you use crypto for good? Sure, you can imagine you're trying to send money to a country under sanctions that you don't believe in. Sure. But I mean, let's be adults.

How are people actually using this?

They're using it for crime, and the amount of crime is staggering. There's a crypto company that did an analysis study last year and found that something like $150 billion of illicit activities are financed via cryptocurrency. In a year.

That is just a shocking amount.

And that's from a crypto company's analysis, so it might be on the low end, you know what I mean? So we're talking about like just a staggering amount of crime. Some of the worst people in the world … Jeffrey Epstein loved crypto. Russian oligarchs selling sanctioned oil to the Chinese in exchange for drones that they're gonna send to Ukraine, and it's all done via cryptocurrency.

That's the thing I'm beating on is like, what are we doing? What good is this doing?

I'm not saying to outlaw it, because I don't think that would do any good, but we do have to regulate it stringently, and treat it for what it is, which is both a Ponzi scheme on the speculative side in terms of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Melania coin, Trump coin, fart coin, CumRocket, my favorite meme coin.

Then there is black market money on the other side, which is the stablecoins. Which is really where the game is headed.

The other thing you get, and this is really important for people to understand, the libertarians that love crypto will say, “Oh, this is great. This is money that's free from the dead hand of the state.” Well, first of all, we live in a democracy, at least theoretically. So that seems a little overwrought, but if the money doesn't come from the government, where does it come from?

They don't like to talk about it, but the answer in cryptocurrency is corporations.

Right.

It's World Liberty Financial, but it's also Bitcoin. The Bitcoin that's mined today, the vast majority of it, is mined by multibillion-dollar corporations, some of which are publicly traded.

So we're talking about literal corporate money. If that seems like a good idea to you, then OK. But the vast majority of the public already hates corporations for good reason and is skeptical of them having even more power over our daily lives. So this is a terrible idea.