“Finding Satoshi”—How a Private Investigator Solved the Mystery of Bitcoin’s Creator | Bill Cohan & Tyler Maroney

**Ryan** (0:00)
What if Howe planned this all along? Okay, so he has a 12-word seed phrase in his cryogenically preserved brain, and at some point in time, the technology will catch up. And his whole plot was like, how do I hold value across decades, maybe centuries, that'll take humanity to restore my body?

**David** (0:19)
He's actually a huge fan of wealth and money.

**Tyler Maroney** (0:23)
Exactly, it was all a trick. Ryan, I think you have a novel.

**Ryan** (0:31)
Bankless Nation, very excited to introduce you to our next guest. Bill Cohan is a best-selling author. He's a financial journalist. We also have Tyler Maroney. He's a private investigator. So we've got the journalist plus investigator combo on the show today. Gentlemen, I wanted to congratulate you on making what I think, and David has agreed with me, we've talked about this in depth, the best Bitcoin documentary that I've ever seen. It's probably ever been produced, well done.

**Bill Cohan** (0:59)
Thank you.

**Tyler Maroney** (1:00)
Wow, that means a lot, thank you. Four years of work, it better be okay, right?

**Ryan** (1:05)
Yeah, no, you guys put in the work and it shows, let's say, and you got many of the themes that I think we value very much in the crypto community. You've expressed those, you told the story in marvelous detail. I wanna kind of split this into two parts, because at the end of this, we're gonna include a link in the show notes, of course, to the documentary, Finding Satoshi.
And so, the call to action is really for Bankless listeners to go watch this documentary. It'll get you fired up on crypto again. It'll help you remember why you came here in the first place and why you choose to go Bankless. But I wanna divide this conversation that we're about to have into two parts. So the first part is the no spoilers part, okay? So full disclosure, this documentary does reveal who the creators of the documentary think Satoshi actually was, all right? So the first part of this, we're gonna talk about this without revealing who Satoshi was. And the second part, we'll pause, and I'll say, okay, insert spoilers, and then we can talk about who Satoshi actually was, because David and I have some questions about who you point to as the creator of Bitcoin. So this is part one, no spoilers. And I want to start with the question that I was wondering as I left the documentary, which is, do you guys think you did it? Do you think you actually found Satoshi?
Is the person or people you named in this documentary the actual Satoshi, or is there more work to be done?

**Tyler Maroney** (2:32)
So the answer to that question is yes, we believe we found the answer. Having said that, both Bill and I come out of a journalistic tradition, an investigative tradition of being open to more information, right? Like, there is always insights to be gained, knowledge to be had. And one of the things we've loved about this process is how many people have been receptive to what we've done and how much, actually, people have been contacting us with either information to support what we've done or otherwise, you know, try to learn more based on what we've learned, which means I think we've done a good job in terms of inspiring people to think about this topic. And one of the reasons why we feel very confident is that we did something, I think, in this film that nobody's ever done before, which is to get the relatives, the friends, the coworkers of the Satoshi Nakamoto that we concluded created Bitcoin to come on the record, on camera and talk to us.
Meaning it wasn't simply an effort in using AI or doing some kind of linguistic analysis, which many people have done for, you know, the last 10 or 15 years or so. So in that sense, it's also the methodology that we used. It gives us a lot of confidence in the conclusion.

**David** (3:46)
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