Did the creator of Bitcoin just get unmasked?

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
Okay, so, maybe they found Satoshi Nakamoto. Which is exciting. One of my favorite mysteries.

**Shaan Puri** (0:15)
It's an intoxicating story. And you're talking about the new HBO documentary. I didn't watch it yet, but the headlines make it amazing. I have to watch it. What's the gist?

**Sam Parr** (0:24)
So the documentary is not amazing. I'm going to start with that. It's good, but not amazing. It's interesting because the guy thinks he found Satoshi. That's the only interesting part, to be honest. The documentary is kind of poorly made. Like the director makes himself a pretty big character. And he also says stuff that feels like unprofessional. Like he'll be talking, he'll be like, and then, you know, they made NFTs, whatever the hell those are. And it's like, whoa, why is the narrator like so opinionated? It's kind of crazy. But what's interesting to me is, look, I'm into any theory of who Satoshi is.
I think it is amazing that something like Bitcoin even happened. It's straight out of a movie.

**Shaan Puri** (1:08)
Yeah, tell me the story.

**Sam Parr** (1:09)
OK, the whole story is this. 2008, really, there's a white paper, the Bitcoin white paper gets released where some guy posts on a forum and posts in there that, hey, he thinks he solved the double spend problem, which was a lot of people in the past had tried to make a virtual currency, a digital gold. There was eGold, there was hash cash, there was all these different things that were tried, and they all failed for different reasons. So, for example, eGold started to get really popular. It had like two billion dollars in volume. But the guy who created it created it as a company. It was a founder, a CEO of a company called eGold, and he lived in wherever, Canada or something like that. And as it hits two billion in transaction volume and on the website, it says, this is a digital currency backed by actual gold. And it says, we'll be around today, tomorrow and forever. And actually, instead, knock knock, government knocks on his door, comes in, raids him, puts him in jail. And so problem one with digital currencies was you can't be the guy behind it. Because as soon as this thing gets popular, you have too much power. And the nation states who today control the currency supply, they're not gonna like you or that, or they're just gonna do character attacks on you to discredit the currency. Okay, so Satoshi solved that problem, launching it under this pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto. Nobody knows who it is, and the anonymity of the whole thing, and then he disappears. Okay, so the second thing was other people tried to do it with hash cash and other things. But to get the actual cryptography to work, to get the currency to work, you had to make sure that nobody could double spend the money, right? So like one of the reasons when you swipe your credit card today, that transaction goes to a bank. The bank says, yes, this person's got the money and that money's not already been spent. It sends that message back to the register. The register says, approved. That lets you go buy the thing, right? So the bank takes its 3% fee because it's verifying that, yes, this person has the money, that this person's card doesn't appear to be stolen, and that money has not already been spent in another shop 10 minutes ago.
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**Shaan Puri** (3:52)
Back to this episode.

**Sam Parr** (3:55)
So what Bitcoin did, or what Satoshi did, is he released this white paper saying, I think I've solved that problem. I think I've actually created a decentralized way to make money, meaning money that can be trusted, even though there's no central party like a bank or a government that is verifying all the transactions. Okay, so that's the breakthrough. That happens in 2008, they're discussing it. 2009, the first Bitcoin block happens.