This profile by Marc Hochstein is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.
As bitcoin's price soared in 2024, another legacy media institution took up the quixotic mission of trying to identify Satoshi Nakamoto, 13 years after the cryptocurrency's pseudonymous creator disappeared. This time it was HBO, the premium cable television network, which hyped "Money Electric: the Bitcoin Mystery," a documentary purporting to solve the long-running mystery. In the days leading up to the premiere, prediction market and memecoin traders bet on whom the film would claim was Satoshi. On Oct. 8, hours before the debut, clips leaked online revealing director Cullen Hoback's bizarre conclusion: that cryptographer and software developer Peter Todd, who would have been a teenager when the Bitcoin white paper came out, was its author. In one of the clips, Hoback confronts Todd and fellow cryptographer and bitcoiner Adam Back with his theory, and they laugh at him. "Of course, I'm not Satoshi," Todd told CoinDesk that day. "It's ironic that a director who is also known for a documentary on QAnon has resorted to QAnon style coincidence-based conspiracy thinking here too," he said of Hoback. Also in 2024, a U.K. judge ruled that Craig Wright was not Satoshi and did not write the white paper despite the Australian's longstanding claims. The evidence in the month-long court case brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance was "overwhelming," the judge wrote. Wright was forced to update his personal website with a legal notice declaring that he is not the inventor of Bitcoin. There is an alternative timeline where anyone who spends more than five minutes studying Bitcoin realizes that A) the mystery can never be solved unless and until someone moves the coins Satoshi mined (or, maybe, signs a message with Satoshi's private key). And B) It has never much mattered who Satoshi is. (There is one conceivable way it might matter a little: If Satoshi is alive, and if he or she or they still have the private keys, and one day he or she or they decided to sell his or her or their holdings, the price would likely take a hit. Even in this scenario, does anyone now believe it would go to zero?) Bitcoin is open-source, has been working for 15 years and is not a scam. "Who made it?" is, ultimately, a parlor-game curiosity at best. Sadly, we don't live in that alternative timeline, and from time to time, gossips and attention-seekers will distract the conversation from the important things about Bitcoin: censorship resistance, confiscation resistance, a fixed and predictable monetary supply. The distractions were short-lived in 2024. As the year wound down, BTC reached an all-time high of $100,000, showing the market does not care that the asset's creator is unknown. Hoback's movie did, however, contain an important lesson for aspiring documentarians: never use that "ka-ching" cash register sound effect unless you want to insult viewers' intelligence. | 