The film you're about to watch -
in fact, this whole series -
consists almost entirely of middle-aged white guys
talking about tech.
There, I've said it.
Let's move on.
OK. What, do you want to let it go?
All right. Look, look!
Yeah. Ahh!
When I was five years old,
my dad sat me down with a box set of LPs...
..and played me this.
MUSIC: Das Rheingold: Prelude by Richard Wagner
Wagner.
The Ring Cycle.
It was a story about gold and about power,
about misfits and mythical beings
in a quest to become lords of the universe.
It was epic.
I got hooked on tales of people
who wanted to rule the world.
CHANTING
Absolutely wild celebration here.
I became a journalist,
a war reporter.
INDISTINCT SHOUTING
This whole bridge is full of petrol bombs,
and it's about to go off.
But then, I did a podcast about conspiracy theories...
..and I came across this mysterious figure,
Satoshi Nakamoto...
..the anonymous creator of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin isn't controlled by a government or a central bank.
It's a completely virtual currency.
Satoshi appeared out of nowhere in 2008.
And, just as suddenly, three years later,
he vanished.
Satoshi Nakamoto.
Who is it?
People have been trying to find this guy for years now.
No-one has succeeded.
Intelligence agencies have not been able to figure out
who Satoshi is.
It's amazing that it hasn't come out.
No fingerprints, no identification, nothing.
And his invention, Bitcoin,
is now one of the world's largest currencies.
A lot of people are making a lot of money.
Says here in the paper, they found gold up at Sutter's Mill.
HE LAUGHS
Wouldn't we feel silly if it turned out to be true?
Should I tell you the truth?
I'm not really interested in who Satoshi Nakamoto is
because he invented a new form of money.
I'm interested in why.
Right, what was the plan?
What was he trying to do with it?
Because a lot of these tech guys, right,
they don't believe in democracy.
So, what if Bitcoin was part of a plot
to bring it all down?
SIREN WINDS UP
The whole world is under attack.
Can it survive?
So, I started emailing people,
putting out feelers.
At first, I didn't hear much back.
Hackers and cryptographers,
they're a secretive bunch.
The Google subscriber you have called is not available.
HE SIGHS
There seemed to be some kind of an omerta,
a secret vow of silence surrounding Satoshi.
But then, I had a breakthrough.
HE CHUCKLES It's all going to be worth it.
Somebody put me in touch with someone who was supposed
to know something.
OK, I have information.
I have news.
And I'm going to...
His name was Mike Lorrey,
and he claimed to have been there in the early days of crypto.
..pin you.
What a fantastic background.
What...what is that? Oh.
That is a virtual model of a nuclear reactor on Mars.
OK, you've already blown my mind, and we haven't even started talking
about what I wanted to talk about! THEY LAUGH
So, I started by giving him my spiel -
about how I was on the hunt for Satoshi,
and I didn't really know anything about him.
Impossible task, lots of people tried.
Blah, blah, blah.
And then, he goes...
Well, I can tell you...
..he's one of a half dozen people.
Whoa! All right.
OK, I didn't even ask you, man, but, OK, fine.
Thank you.
And it was...
Well, let me start at the beginning.
So, in the '90s...
.."We go all the way back in the '90s," and blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I keep him talking for ages.
And then, he starts mentioning names.
And so, that's where I-I met Hal Finney...
Mm-hm.
..I met Ralph Merkle... Mm-hm.
..and Nick Szabo and Wei Dai.
You can hear me going, "Mm-hm, mm-hm,"
as I'm, like, scribbling down these names, right?
OK, so, Hal Finney.
Ralph Merkle.
Oh, he's a funny-looking guy, isn't he?
Nick Szabo.
OK, Wei Dai -
this guy is pretty mysterious.
All of us involved were either libertarians
or crypto-anarchists.
What's a libertarian?
Well, people who don't like governments. Right?
Erm, as for a crypto-anarchist,
I'm not sure, but I think we're going to find out.
So, there was... All right. ..Adam Back was another guy.
Bingo!
It feels like he's spilled the beans, right?
You look very pleased.
I am pleased.
I am pleased, you know?
They told me to go and find Satoshi Nakamoto,
and we've just found him.
It's one of these people.
But, you know, that's not enough proof, is it?
Obviously, we need to bottom this out.
I mean, this guy might be a total fantasist.
We should try and talk to these people, right?
I knew almost nothing about the world Satoshi had created.
So, I travelled to Miami
for a mega-gathering of Bitcoin enthusiasts.
There is another reason I'm here,
but I'll come back to that.
Good morning, everyone.
I'm Pete Rizzo, editor of Bitcoin Magazine,
and it's opening day at Bitcoin 2023.
Thousands of people are descending on Miami, Florida.
Hundreds of vendors.
We've got HODlers, we've got celebrities,
we've got the car from Back To The Future.
HE CHUCKLES
We have ciphers, we have scavenger hunts,
we have some Bitcoin trivia, and, like transfers from
Lightning Wallet to Bitcoin Wallet. So...
Like, literally half of what you're saying is going
so far over my head. Yeah, sorry.
And so, now this inscription thing -
oh, it's really blowing up the market.
I felt like I'd stumbled through a portal into
some kind of weird village fete.
A village fete with a VIP area that we weren't allowed into
unless we paid $10,000.
What does that say?
"We are all Satoshi."
Just checking.
15 years ago, this trillion-dollar industry didn't exist.
It was just an idea in someone's head.
This is the guy who is actually called Satoshi Nakamoto -
who's not Satoshi Nakamoto.
I have nothing to do with Bitcoin.
I never worked for the company.
I don't know any people there.
64-year-old Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto
emerged from his Southern California home Thursday
and walked right into a media frenzy,
hours after Newsweek magazine
claimed he was the mystery man behind Bitcoin.
If you go online,
you'll find literally thousands of Satoshi sleuths.
There are plenty of theories,
very few facts.
The first anyone heard of Bitcoin
was in October 2008.
We are officially in recession, and things may very well...
Some are calling a cascading crash, day after day...
Around the world, triple digits...
It was the financial crisis.
The markets were in meltdown.
Investors are losing confidence in the banking system.
They're losing confidence in the economy.
Someone posted a paper on an obscure internet forum
called the Cryptography Mailing list.
Look at this. A cipher.
And short enough to be a headache.
Well, let's go back to the office and get started on it.
They said they'd invented a new sort of money...
..a kind of digital gold that could be sent over the internet,
completely cutting out the banks.
Change has come to America.
CHEERING
And, yeah, I did try the email address.
It bounced back.
There were almost no clues to Satoshi's real identity.
Almost.
CHEERING
There was one strange thing.
Whenever he wrote anything,
he tended to use British,
rather than American English.
And the only Brit on my list
was Adam Back.
He's British.
Was this guy Satoshi?
This was the other reason I'd come to Miami.
I knew he was at this conference...
..but he was ignoring my emails.
Adam Back.
What's the rotating trainer?
Oh, that's just a Bitcoin orange shoe with some cool signatures
from famous people. Right, right, right.
And I recognise that one - Adam Back. Yeah.
He was here yesterday. He's like a legend here, right?
Yeah, he is a legend. Right, did you see him?
I was blessed with his presence yesterday.
He came down from the digi-gods.
THEY LAUGH Yeah, it was an awesome moment.
All right, thank you so much.
I mean, you're looking at the history and the backbone of
the blockchain and Bitcoin right here.
So, this thing, basically, you can mine Bitcoin with it, right?
Yes. This is the DNA of Bitcoin.
This is the engine? Yes.
This story is not really about all the technical stuff,
the blockchain, the mining.
If that's what you're after,
you're watching the wrong documentary.
This is about, what does Bitcoin mean?
And all we really need to know about how it works is this.
With normal money, transactions are verified by a bank.
They keep the score of who has what.
With Bitcoin, the record of transactions is spread across
a network of computers -
which means there's no central authority...
Good morning.
..and governments can't control it.
..That it is an investment stake in the banks.
It can withstand the global financial storms.
It's Freedom Money, it's decentralised.
There's no control for a human to make decisions.
With Bitcoin, you are the bank.
You don't need a middle person.
Freedom Money? Yes.
It's Freedom Money.
I'd come to Miami expecting to find a bunch of pyramid-scheme scammers
and get-rich-quickers.
But there's something else going on.
"Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks."
This bland headline from The Times of London -
Satoshi had buried it in the Bitcoin source code.
It was a message in a bottle.
From the very beginning,
Bitcoin was a political project.
But also, yet more evidence that Satoshi might be British.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
What is up, Miami?
How y'all doing out there?
SCATTERED CHEERING
And I'm very fortunate to be joined by Adam Back.
APPLAUSE
Bitcoin is interesting to many people for many reasons,
but one of the differentiated
properties of it is that it's...
The words coming out of his mouth
are literally incomprehensible to me.
..And somebody put together some glass-node data to estimate
that there are one million UXTOs...
But it doesn't matter.
I'm thinking...it's him.
It's Satoshi.
ANGELIC SINGING
There are lots of people trying to stack their stats...
In a minute, he's going to come offstage and disappear
into the forbidden VIP area.
So, I thought it was cool.
Damn right. APPLAUSE
And then...
..pff, he'll be gone.
APPLAUSE CONTINUES
I had to try to sneak in.
Thank you.
Right. Where do we think he is?
Sorry, we... Sorry, no recording back here.
We - oh, OK, right. So...
None at all. Sorry. That's OK, that's fine.
You can't be back there with that... So, I-I just, erm...
I've been talking to, erm, Adam Back's people.
He said to come and find him afterwards,
so I'm just trying to locate him.
OK. Can you help us find where he might be? No.
Sorry.
OK. I-I'm not trying to be difficult.
I'm not trying to be difficult. You gotta go.
I just want you to... I just want you to help.
Let's go on out. E-Excuse me... Head in that direction.
Let's try and see if we can find him out back.
I don't know, this all looks a bit improbable.
Do you think, if we go out of here, we're going to set off an alarm?
WHISPERS: I think we lost him.
I think we lost him.
Wait, I just got a call from Daisy.
Hello?
He's - OK, he's there. Hi.
I think he's with Daisy.
Oh, there he is. There he is.
Got him.
I thought he'd be suspicious,
maybe even hostile.
Hi. Sorry, I-I'm Gabriel. I'm so sorry.
I'm the guy who's been pestering you.
But I was wrong.
Thank you so much for coming...
He even flew to London to spend the day with me.
GABRIEL CHUCKLES
I'd been warned.
"Whatever you do, don't ask Adam Back,
"'Are you Satoshi Nakamoto?'"
So...now what?
So...
So, erm...
..I was writing programmes by
typing in the hex numbers from the reference manual.
And, you know, I still know, like, decimal 201 is return in...
..in Z80 machine code.
Like, what else were you into, apart from computers?
What else were you spending your time doing?
Mm.
So, here I was, in a park in London.
Either I was sitting next to Satoshi Nakamoto,
possibly one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet...
..or just some random computer geek.
It wasn't about making money, b-but the, you know, of the...
..Ability to browse the web anonymously was another one...
Either way... ..But also, the ability to...
..I was having trouble following his conversation.
But that was difficult to do.
Technologically, it was harder to do...
They didn't have the banking set up,
but they would run a demo server and they...
I'd been warned not to bring up Satoshi with him.
I forget the name of them...
But I had to ask.
Yeah, the name sounds ostensibly Japanese, right?
And then, you've got a British headline. Satoshi Nakamoto.
And...
..the writing style apparently is predominantly British spellings.
Right, it must mean that lots of people, like, lots of people
have taken that little clue to think that it's you.
Because you're, like, one of the Brits in this sphere.
Erm, I-I-I've, you know,
I'm happy to say it's not me.
And...
It's not you? It's not me.
And, you know, I think every indication is that he took steps
to be anonymous, and clearly intended to be.
So, presumably, it will stay that way.
Of course, if Adam Back is Satoshi,
that's exactly what he would say.
But, during our little chat on the bench...
It's not really about the money.
It's more about, this is world-changing stuff.
..he said something about a revolution.
There are certain tipping points in society, so...
..one was the historical separation of the church and state,
and the invention of the printing press,
the invention of the internet -
and Bitcoin is one of those on that scale, I think.
Seriously? I think so,
because the government's biggest vehicle of control
is their ability to print money.
What do we think that, you know, separating money from the state
is going to do? And what do you think it's going to do?
It's going to change things in a big way.
You sound like a man with a mission.
Yeah, I was always mission-oriented.
THEY CHUCKLE Yeah.
CHANTING: Where's our votes?! Where's our votes?!
In my previous life as a news reporter,
I spent a lot of time covering America
and the violent culmination of the first Trump presidency.
These people feel that, for many years now,
traditional government has not been working for them.
And I remember coming across this video.
..Example of a dissenting technology
where I think it is purely anti-governmental,
is something like crypto.
The guy speaking is one of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley.
Good evening.
I'm Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel.
I build companies, and I support people who are building new things,
from social networks to rocket ships.
He'd said he no longer believed in democracy...
And it's time to rebuild America.
..and that he wanted to live for 1,000 years.
..And Satoshi learned that you had to be anonymous, and you had to...
I didn't think much of it at the time,
but in this video,
Thiel starts talking about Satoshi.
You know, my sort of theory on Satoshi's identity was that
Satoshi was on that beach in Anguilla...
A meeting on a beach.
And, you know, it was, "We're beginning the revolution
"against central banks on the beach...
A revolution against central banks?
"..and we're going to blow up all the central banks,
"starting right now."
That meeting was the excitingly-titled
International Financial Cryptography Conference.
It was held on a Caribbean island,
and it featured briefly in a documentary in the late 1990s.
It was organised by this guy, Vince Cate.
If I could link any of my suspects to his meeting on the beach...
..well, then, we'd be one step closer to finding Satoshi.
ECHOING: Satoshi was on that beach in Anguilla...
..they're going to blow up all the central banks, starting right now.
ON PHONE: Hello.
Oh, hi, Vince.
This is Gabriel Gatehouse.
I'm a journalist from London, and I'm making a documentary...
So, I think...it's probably that white house there.
Wow, look at these weird stone sculptures.
Hey! Gabriel.
Welcome, welcome. Good to meet you, how are you? Come on in.
Oh, my goodness.
This is exactly what I imagined a coder's den would look like.
DOGS BARK IN DISTANCE
So, while we were married, my wife had this picture
blown up and framed.
And then, in the divorce, she got the house
and all that stuff, and I got this picture.
GABRIEL LAUGHS
She didn't want the picture any more.
But tell me about this guy. What did this guy do to have fun?
Built things and blew up things.
Explosives. Really? Rockets.
You know. Hmm.
This guy is a troublemaker! A little bit.
You ARE a revolutionary!
You're chucking bombs. I like science, right?
It's like the challenge of making something.
So, there's this clip that I got interested in,
of Peter Thiel saying
Satoshi Nakamoto was there at that meeting on the beach
in Anguilla, in 2000.
Do you think that Satoshi Nakamoto was on that beach?
I would think the odds are good, yes.
Yeah. Why?
Because there weren't that many people involved in
this kind of thing, and most of them were here, right?
So, you know, the odds are good. THEY CHUCKLE
Vince was a charming host.
If you look right under there, in that black thing, it says...
He showed me where he'd held his meetings all those years ago.
It does look like it's been forgotten by the world.
Can I show you something?
But every time I pressed him for names...
There's a whole bunch of names.
..I got nothing.
I honestly don't remember most of these names.
He just kept saying the same thing.
"I can't remember.
"Speak to Bob."
This is Bob's? Yep.
Bob Hettinger, another old hacker living on the island.
Hiya, Bob.
Vince said the whole conference was Bob's idea.
I don't look good on camera.
I don't sound good on video.
Well, we're mainly after you for your memory.
Yeah. So...
Th-That is probably wrong, too, but we'll figure it out.
THEY CHUCKLE
Peter Thiel was here.
Peter Thiel was here? Yeah.
So, let me just kind of cut to the chase and tell you...
There is no chase.
It's all complicated. Because...
Who were the people who were here, who were important?
In '97, '98, '99, 2000? BOB CHUCKLES
This is my big moment here.
This... Look at me right now.
I am not Satoshi Nakamoto.
There. OK! All right?
Do you know who is?
HE SIGHS We all have our theories. Yeah?
But, you know, I'm Spartacus.
We're all Spartacus.
I'm not going to laugh at you, OK?
OK. I'm not going to lie.
But - I hear a "but" coming. No, it's just ridiculous.
HE LAUGHS
Do you think it's...
Do you think it's a worthwhile thing to know,
in order to understand the world...?
First of all, I think it would be fundamentally evil.
Evil? Evil.
It's dangerous, right?
The person who is Satoshi Nakamoto made the Genesis Block,
and the Genesis Block is worth how much now, Vince?
A crazy number. Billions and billions of dollars.
When Satoshi first fired up his code,
he tested it out by creating thousands of Bitcoin.
Those Bitcoin are sitting on the internet untouched.
Whoever has the keys to those original Satoshi wallets
could potentially be one of the richest people on the planet.
I really, honest to God, believe that there are scary, bad people
out there who would just kidnap him or the people he loves
and threaten them until he coughs up the key to the Genesis Block.
So, you think we're on a kind of dangerous search?
Well, fuck. Yeah, it's dangerous.
You know, it's not dangerous for you, I don't think.
You know, you'll probably get a Peabody Award,
or a Pulitzer Prize.
You know, like the guys who lied about Trump.
Erm - hi.
Erm, you know, those guys got all kinds of awards,
and you'll probably get all kinds of awards if you find Satoshi.
But that's not the point.
Satoshi will get hurt.
Thank you very much.
Should we take a break and eat?
Yeah, let's get the rest of the food.
Yeah. Yeah.
I kept trying to prod Bob into spilling his secret...
..Here on Anguilla, and I'm interested in these conferences
as the kind of...
..but he clammed up.
..the origin story of Bitcoin.
I began to feel as if they were playing some kind of game with me.
Had my trip to this island paradise
been a total waste of time?
So, what other kind of shots do you think we should do?
Well, a shot just going along the shoreline would be lovely.
But one thing Bob said stuck in my mind.
You know, I'm Spartacus.
He wasn't the only one to bring that up.
We're all Spartacus. It doesn't...
You're all Satoshi? We're all Satoshi. OK?
And who that one person is,
it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter which Cypherpunk it was.
Cypherpunks.
Back in the 1990s, Vince, Bob, and a bunch of other geeks
joined an underground mailing list.
So, I hung out on Cypherpunks for a year,
and in that time, I got what I call now the Cypherpunks stoke.
It was on an offshoot of that mailing list
that Satoshi first posted his idea for Bitcoin.
And Cypherpunks was where the whole crypto thing came from.
My God - they're all here!
Hal Finney.
Wei Dai.
Oh, look!
Nick Szabo.
Lugano, Switzerland.
In the slightly strange world of Bitcoin conferences,
the Cypherpunks are like gods.
All of our Satoshi suspects
were part of this secretive group of hackers and cryptographers.
They were obsessed with anonymity...
..for good reason.
That man who just walked past me -
That's Phil Zimmerman.
Phil Zimmerman who, in 1991, created the encryption programme
called Pretty Good Privacy - or PGP.
PGP was a piece of software that allowed you to send an email
without the rest of the internet being able to read it.
Pretty good privacy.
But the US government believed that Phil's encryption software
was a threat to national security,
and they came after him.
What we're afraid of is the terrorists hit
their encryption button on the telephone.
And, even though we have access,
we can't understand what they're saying.
They wanted to put Phil on trial,
accusing him of being an arms dealer.
They had laws prohibiting the export of strong cryptography.
They regarded it as a munition.
So, if I had exported missiles to Libya...
DISTANT EXPLOSION
..I would've been violating the same law that I violated
by exporting PGP.
Did you think you might go to jail?
Yeah, I thought - I knew I was guilty.
HE LAUGHS Right.
I mean, you know, I...
..I had a family to take care of.
And, you know, I had small children.
You know, they would be homeless if I went to prison.
But to the Cypherpunks,
Phil wasn't a terrorist.
He was a freedom fighter.
He even had a song written about him.
# Nobody can break it
# However good they be
# Everybody's PC got the PGP... #
Electronic mail - or email, for short -
involves linking the computer to the telephone system
via a modem.
While the rest of us were getting to grips with the internet,
the Cypherpunks realised that
the state could use this new technology to spy on us.
It was Big Brother, 1984 - a totalitarian nightmare.
But computers could also set us free...
I think I've got it. Good!
Z is D.
..with encryption so strong, no government could break it.
J is R.
It's terrific, ain't it?
This idea - that code could shift the balance of power
from the establishment to the individual,
that technology could protect us from a dystopian future -
that was key for the Cypherpunks.
The whole motto for the Cypherpunks was, "Cypherpunks write code."
Whoever did Bitcoin, I think that's the ideas they had,
is that you just write some code, and you can change the world.
Phil Zimmermann's clash with the US government influenced
one Cypherpunk in particular.
I got several volunteers to help me with the project.
One of them was Hal Finney,
and he stood out especially.
Did a great job.
Hal Finney.
Hal is a really great software engineer.
Even though Phil eventually won his case,
the whole thing destroyed Phil's life.
And Hal saw all of that.
He was there the day that the feds arrested Phil.
If Hal did know who Satoshi was,
it's not inconceivable that he would've said,
"Look, mate, don't put your name out there,
"because look what happened to Phil." Yeah.
Do you think that's possible?
Yeah.
Do you think Hal did know who Satoshi was?
I'm sensing a real reluctance from you to talk about how...
Oh, you think?
THEY LAUGH
Go on, be blunt.
HE LAUGHS
Erm...
You know, I don't really want to get into a conversation about the...
..all the ins and outs of...
..who is Satoshi.
So, I - especially with a camera rolling.
So... HE CHUCKLES
Here's what we do know.
Just days after Bitcoin first appeared,
Hal downloaded the software.
He was in touch with Satoshi,
helping to fix bugs in the code.
There are those who think that Hal was Satoshi.
Perhaps, after what he'd seen happen to Phil,
he didn't want to take any chances.
Was he, in fact, emailing himself?
And there's more evidence that points to Hal...
..because he'd grown-up not far from a guy called
Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto.
I have nothing to do with Bitcoin.
I just believe that somebody put that fictitious name in there.
Coincidence?
So, it's really meant as a benchmark to see what
the state of the art is for...
There is another tragic reason to think Hal could be Satoshi.
By a cruel twist of fate,
just when Bitcoin was taking off,
Hal was dying.
He had Motor Neurone Disease.
I met Hal shortly before his death.
I went to his home, and he was surrounded by
a family who loved him.
And he had love in his heart
all the way to the end.
Around the time that Hal's condition was worsening,
making it increasingly difficult for him to work...
..Satoshi left the Bitcoin project
and disappeared.
But there's one inconvenient fact.
Hal Finney had been a keen runner.
And, back in 2009, he set off on a ten-mile race
in Santa Barbara.
Just as he was crossing the finishing line,
Satoshi Nakamoto was responding to emails.
I asked Hal if he was Satoshi,
and he told me, no, he wasn't.
I've talked to his wife, Fran,
and she asked him,
and he told her that he was not.
Fran has not lived the high life.
She obviously doesn't have the giant pile of Bitcoins
that were in Satoshi's wallet.
So...you know, I-I think we have to take him at his word.
It's too late to ask him again.
What should I do, Phil,
if I found out who Satoshi was,
as a journalist?
You know, Satoshi prefers to remain anonymous.
Can't we let him remain anonymous?
You're telling me, even if I did find out,
I shouldn't tell the world?
Well, I think you have to look at...
..everything you've learned in life
before approaching the story.
You know, what kind of boy did your mama raise?
Golly!
HE LAUGHS
I would've thought that, to say...
..thinking of you as a young person,
if I was to have given you the idea not to go intellectually,
or with your mind, or something down one road,
you'd go down it.
That's the kind of boy I seem to have raised.
THEY CHUCKLE
Right, so you're saying to me...
You're saying to me, you think I will just carry on?
I mean, you've always had this terrier quality.
Once you get hold of something, you know, you kind of want
to worry it away till you've... sorted it out.
But what do you think I should do?
What do YOU think you should do?
Well, I think... I'm going to carry on.
Because there was something that Mike Lorrey said
that I hadn't picked up on.
And so, you know, Hal -
it was his demand that the paper
be published with a pseudonym
that was not connected to any of us.
What if Satoshi wasn't one of these guys?
Even if it was connected to just one of us,
they would basically force everybody else out in the open.
What if Satoshi was a collective?
A pseudonym shared by more than one of our suspects?
But if Satoshi's identity was such a dangerous secret,
then why was Mike Lorrey telling me all this?
HARD ROCK MUSIC PLAYS # Live free or die... #
ALL: We will not comply!
THEY CHEER
In June, there's a state-wide event
called the Porcupine Freedom Festival,
or PorcFest.
Usually brings between 4-5,000 attendees.
My source, Mike Lorrey,
had invited me out to this libertarian camping festival
in New Hampshire.
Hi.
A mix of libertarians who already live here,
and people who are coming to see what it's all about.
The guys who run PorcFest are part of something
called the Free State Project.
New Hampshire can be free with your help.
Sign the petition and learn more at...
They reckoned that if enough libertarians moved to New Hampshire,
they could take over, abolish laws, cut taxes,
and eventually get rid of government altogether.
It's time for New Hampshire to declare independence,
just like we did from the King
a couple of hundred years ago! CHEERING
In their version of Utopia,
you'd pay a private company to take care of infrastructure
like schools or roads...
..or else, just do it yourself.
I didn't expect there to be this many children.
It's a funny place, isn't it?
Guns and kids.
And politics.
He's like, "Child abuse!" I'm like...
When I see a little fucking kid, I'm like...
CHILD SQUEALS IN DISTANCE
I'd come all the way out here -
but Mike Lorrey was nowhere to be found.
Mike!
Hi, it's Gabriel Gatehouse here.
I came to New Hampshire in the hope of finding PorcFest.
Are you here?
OK. No - OK. HE CHUCKLES
Mike said he was ill,
and would be out of action for a few days.
What now?
Well, it turns out that libertarians
have a lot to say about crypto.
We're heading towards Keene, New Hampshire, which...
..at one point, at least, was kind of the global epicentre
of the Bitcoin experiment in real life.
Basically, there was this guy called Ian Freeman -
I don't think that's his real name.
Have a seat, have a seat!
And he tried to get shops to take Bitcoin instead of the dollar.
But then, the FBI came for him.
Good morning.
HARD ROCK MUSIC PLAYS # Live free or die... #
They use the battering ram to smash in this window here.
Then they sent a drone in.
Into your house? Uh-huh. Yeah, it was very loud.
If they'd just knocked on your door, what would've happened?
We would've opened it and gone outside.
This is Free Talk Live, here in Keene tonight...
Ian Freeman hosts a libertarian radio show
called Free Talk Live.
He would've been at PorcFest...
..except he was under house arrest.
In the Crypto Six case...
Prosecutors said he was a money launderer,
allowing criminals to use his Bitcoin exchange
to scam dozens of elderly victims
out of their life savings.
Back up! You're not allowed in this area.
This is a law enforcement area.
Hey, don't touch me! Back up! Don't touch me! Back up!
The government said Ian Freeman was dangerous.
It's ridiculous, the idea...
Are you dangerous? No, of course not.
But you want to be dangerous? Dangerous in what way? No.
Like, dangerous to the... To the status quo?
To the status quo, right? Sure, yeah.
I mean, we're a peaceful threat to the status quo.
Sure, but your whole point is that you want to be dangerous to them.
Otherwise, everything would be pointless.
Well, we want the state to go away.
How does Bitcoin fit into this kind of vision?
Well, Bitcoin's really cool, and cryptocurrency in general,
because it has, for the first time in generations, if not ever,
it has put the power of money into the hands of the individual.
For people who love freedom, Bitcoin's about the freedom.
That's what Bitcoin - that's what cryptocurrency is about.
Satoshi Nakamoto created this thing
that takes power away from bankers.
And that's why they're fighting it tooth and nail here
in the United States, they hate it.
We're not going anywhere.
You can go after Ian Freeman all you want.
We're not going anywhere.
We're going to remain, and we'll continue to fight for freedom.
I want to say hey to Mr Bitcoin, who came out today.
CHEERING Hi, Mr Bitcoin!
And I understand that, you know,
when you do activism like we do,
it could result in going to a cage.
And it's quite scary out there, with what the government are willing
to do to keep their power.
It's pretty dark.
Not long after we shot this interview,
Ian was sentenced to eight years in prison...
..for, among other things, running an unlicensed business
and turning a blind eye to the criminals using
his Bitcoin exchange.
The state is a new form of slavery.
You aren't in control of your life.
But, you know, every empire comes down.
They don't survive forever.
PHONE LINE RINGS
Hello? Oh! Hi, Mike.
For tomorrow morning?
Yeah, we can do tomorrow morning. That would be fantastic.
I-Ideally, we'd come and film, I think, at your house,
if that would be possible.
No, my house is not... conducive to this.
OK.
I've got a place across the river in Windsor, Vermont.
Fantastic. All right.
I really appreciate it, Mike. All righty.
I wanted to ask Mike about that idea that Satoshi was a collective -
but he sounded a little paranoid.
He asked me to meet him in a safe house across state lines.
Maybe he's got something to hide,
or he's got a secret...
..that he's ready to spill.
Maybe he's ready.
I'd come to New Hampshire to meet my source, Mike Lorrey,
the guy who'd let slip that Satoshi
might be some kind of collective.
Even if it was connected to just one of us,
they would basically force everybody else out in the open.
He'd asked me to meet him in a safe house.
Mike, good to see you. How are you doing? Great.
It turned out to be an empty community centre.
When I first contacted you, what did you think?
Well, you were referred by someone I trust. OK.
So, I assumed that they knew what they were talking about.
But at the same time, I was concerned that this was
just another way for the feds to get at Prime players.
You thought I was the feds? Well, I had a suspicion.
But, like, as we're sitting here now, do you think I'm...
Do you think I'm a spy?
My concerns are much lower.
I would've expected that some feds would've shown up by now. Right.
I would've pulled out the little pistol in my sock and...
THEY LAUGH
Er...OK.
Do you think you know who Satoshi is?
And do you think there's value in knowing that?
I believe I know who it is.
I'm not absolutely positive.
I don't want to know. Why not?
Well, the same reason I don't tell people where I live.
What do you mean by that?
Given the abuses with Gitmo and Abu Ghraib,
the WikiLeak guys, Snowden...
ECHOING: If you reveal information,
you go to prison for the rest of your life.
Knowing the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto would achieve what?
It would be like them catching Osama Bin Laden,
from their point of view.
Really? Yeah.
A terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands
of innocent men, women, and children.
So, you think the American establishment sees Satoshi Nakamoto
as the kind of financial equivalent of Osama Bin Laden?
A large chunk of them do.
The way you describe American society today
sounds like a dystopia. Oh, yes.
Yes.
HELICOPTER FLIES SIREN WAILS
When we first spoke,
Mike had given me this list of names.
Hal Finney, Ralph Merkle,
and Nick Szabo...
You gave me this tantalising clue,
which was that Satoshi wasn't an individual,
but was a collective.
Did I understand that correctly?
Loose collective, you know, people from the same online community
who felt the same way and were used to collaborating
on developing each other's ideas.
Cos what my idea is, if I can speak to all of the people
who kind of made up the collective Satoshi... Yeah.
..then I can understand this project and what they were trying to create.
If I could figure out that backstory...
So, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney...
I'd come here hoping that Mike Lorrey
would spill the beans on Satoshi.
..Myself and a few others were all pretty much libertarians
or anarchists...
..but he wanted to tell me about something else.
..we were all transhumanists...
Something much weirder.
And so, we were all on the Extropians list,
that the Extropy Institute ran.
Erm, very individualist-oriented, futurist think tank.
And so, they were pushing all of the ideas that are now
what's called transhumanism.
Like what? Well, artificial intelligence,
intelligence augmentation of humans,
erm, space colonisation, digital currencies,
nanotechnology, genetic engineering.
The Extropians had an almost blind faith in technology.
They believed it could make humans immortal.
When one of our Satoshi suspects died,
he had his head frozen in the hope
that he might be resurrected in the future.
Preserving you until such time that you can have
your personality uploaded into a cyborg or a clone.
And we were all fans of Neal Stephenson,
so Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age.
OK, stop, stop, stop!
There's too much going on here.
Neal Stephenson - he's a sci-fi writer.
Mike called his novels
"the books of the Extropian Bible".
"And we have a small, extremely literate power elite,
the people who go in...
He wrote about cryptocurrencies way before Bitcoin.
"..who understand that information is power..."
He came up with the idea of a Metaverse
when Mark Zuckerberg was still at primary school.
Today, we're going to talk about the Metaverse.
For some of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley...
Perfect.
..Neal Stephenson is like a prophet.
The founders of Google - they were influenced by him.
This is incredible.
Jeff Bezos hired him to work at his space tourism company,
Blue Origin.
When PayPal started,
Stephenson was required reading.
And who ran PayPal?
Elon Musk.
And, of course, Peter Thiel.
..blow up all the central banks, starting right now.
The world envisaged in this book
is one where there's no such thing as a strong federal state any more,
with central taxes and social security systems,
or any of that.
Sovereignty has fragmented into these, kind of,
he calls them burbclaves.
Whatever nation-state, whatever country you happen to be in,
you could just withdraw from it
and set up your own little thing
with whoever wants to join.
So, if you're a white supremacist,
you can join the Ku Klux Klan burbclave.
Or, if you're into neoliberal capitalism,
you can join the burbclave where everything is basically
financialized and money is king.
If you look at the plot of Snow Crash,
it portrays what we call a post-federal world,
where the federal government has collapsed from hyperinflation,
cos everybody's been able to avoid taxes from cryptocurrencies,
and starve the government of tax revenues.
And Bitcoin's basically the project to take away
the power from the state to do all that kind of stuff. Yes.
Simple. Clear.
It's important that people understand where Bitcoin came from,
so that their fears about it can be allayed.
But, at the same time, they can understand where we want
to take society for the better.
I don't know about you,
but my fears are not allayed.
The world today looks very different to what it did 500 years ago,
and there are all kinds of twists and turns of technology
that got us there.
So, somebody has to build the things to get there.
What's your favourite book?
Snow Crash. THEY CHUCKLE
For some people,
Satoshi didn't just invent a new kind of currency.
He invented a libertarian weapon
designed to undermine the state.
ECHOING: Every empire comes down.
They don't survive forever.
The future that he and the Cypherpunks
and crypto-anarchists imagined,
it's not as far off as you might think.
Tucked away on an island off
the coast of Central America,
a group of tech bros are already
building their own burbclave,
A private state, in incubator for a new world order.
That's next time.
TYPING ON KEYBOARD
Dear Neal,
I don't know if...
For months, I've been emailing Neal Stephenson
..but I'm really hoping I can persuade you
to speak to me for this documentary...
The sci-fi writer who predicted how cryptocurrencies
would shatter our world.
CONTINUES TYPING I started wondering about the
world of Snow Crash...
And I have heard nothing back.
I've contacted him through his publicist,
I've contacted him through his publisher.
WOMAN: I'll be able to contact Neal as long as...
I've had emails forwarded to him, I'd like to get
a sense of Neal Stephenson at work.
I mean, he's an impressive looking guy. That's the other thing.
He's exactly what you think he should look like.
He's the man who not just predicted the future,
maybe he created the future.
CLICKS FINGER This whole thing began
with a simple question.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
I can tell you he's one of a half dozen people.
Bitcoin, his invention,
has become on of the biggest currencies in the world,
but Satoshi has vanished.
Intelligence agencies have not been able to figure out who Satoshi is.
I'm sensing a real reluctance from you to talk.
Oh, you think? THEY LAUGH
You think were on a kind of dangerous search?
Well, fuck. Yeah, it's dangerous.
On my search, I'd stumbled into some kind of libertarian revolution.
A revolution that's inspired some of
the most powerful people in Silicon Valley.
We'll blow up all the central banks, starting right now.
Every empire comes down. They don't survive forever.
Back up your not allowed in this area.
This movement emerged out of the 1990s
with a secretive group of hackers and cryptographers.
The whole motto for the Cypherpunks was "Cypherpunks write code."
Whoever did Bitcoin,
I think that's the idea that they had.
Just write some code and you can change the world.
And we were all fans of Neal Stephenson so,
Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash. The Diamond Age
were all books of the Extropian bible.
So far, I'd failed to find Satoshi Nakamoto
But if I wanted to what kind of world Satoshi was trying to create
when he invented Bitcoin.
Then, perhaps, Neal Stephenson was the key.
So I kept pestering him.
Dear Neal...
Finally, he agreed to meet me near his home in Seattle.
At a place called the Hazard Factory.
I love the sign that says, "Do not."
"Violators will be."
Neal is usually kind of back over here... OK.
..by the CNC machine.
Hi, Neal.
Hi. I'm Gabriel. Yeah, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
Hidden away in his metal workshop,
Neal Stephenson is building a model of the cosmos.
So, eventually it's going to look like this.
The '90s were this era of extreme idealism.
Everyone saw this vision of...
.."OK, we're going to make everything digital.
"We're going to put everything on the internet - everything."
You know, "We're going to put money there.
"We're going to decentralise banks.
"We're going to undercut the evil power structures of big countries,
"big governments.
"And we're even going to turn it into immortality.
"We're going to..."
You know, "We're going to turn ourselves into digital..."
You know, digital gods.
He wants to be Ozymandias, king of kings.
In Stephenson's sci-fi future,
cryptocurrencies sap the state of its power,
democracies crumble, humans merge with machines,
and technology allows a chosen few to live forever in the metaverse.
We have a small, extremely literate power elite.
The people who go into the metaverse, basically,
who understand that information is power,
and who control society
because they have this semi-mystical ability
to speak magic computer languages.
I mean, that seems to me pretty prophetic, in a way.
Do you ever worry that you've created this template
that is showing these powerful Silicon Valley tech guys
this is the way to go?
I think the book shows possibilities,
and the possibilities, by and large, kind of make sense.
I mean, readers say,
"Oh, yeah, I could see that happening."
You know, "That makes sense."
And it seems to me that ultimately what it's about is about, like,
who's going to rule the world.
I think...
..that at least the people I talked to were entirely earnest
and serious about trying to do away with centralised power structures.
And in the course of pursuing that goal,
some of them have actually become pretty powerful.
So, there's a funny contradiction there.
Stephenson told me he was no prophet, he was just an entertainer.
But some are working to turn Stephenson's fantasy into a reality.
There he is - orange T-shirt.
He's on the travelator.
It's the documentary crew.
They've just started filming me.
This is Patri Friedman,
son of an anarcho-capitalist,
grandson of a Nobel Prize-winning economist...
..single dad and crypto bro, who wants to change the world.
What are you reading?
I only read...
I only read one genre of fiction these days.
Which is? It's a new one.
It's called cultivation or progression fantasy -
generally called LitRPG.
And so it's these universes where,
characters who are just absolutely dedicated to climbing in power,
they get so strong that they are immortal,
and then so strong that they can challenge
the gods themselves. GABRIEL CHUCKLES
So how can I not love this as, like, a transhumanist?
You grind and you grind and you grind
to get better and better and better,
to live forever and control the world,
to protect your loved ones.
In a lot of them, like, 90% of humans die in the first 24 hours.
You get strong or you die.
I fucking love it.
Shall I show you what I'm reading?
This is a great book.
COMPUTERISED VOICE: Warning, warning, warning...
In Snow Crash, countries have been replaced by corporations.
Let's think of government as an industry,
where countries are firms and citizens are customers.
Patri has already started building that world.
A lot of people look at government through the lens of,
"Is it moral?", or, "Does it represent me?"
And I take a different view.
I say drop that,
and just look at government as an industry.
We've got this legacy industry doing a crappy job.
How do we fix it?
With start-ups, with competition.
We just have to change the world so that people can create cities
and countries like they start companies today.
Simple, right?
I mean, not easy, but simple.
APPLAUSE
This whole movement, it's only possible because of Bitcoin.
Are new countries even possible, right?
We've started new companies like Google,
we've started new communities like Facebook,
we've started new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Can we start new countries?
That's the concept of the network state.
People from Patri's tribe -
the anarcho-capitalists, the libertarians -
they got into cryptocurrency early.
And some of them got rich - really, really rich.
So I wrote a book on seasteading back in 2004,
and then in 2007 Peter Thiel funded me to start
the first competitive governance non-profit,
the Seasteading Institute.
Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor who said
he believes freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.
One of the things I like about technology is that,
when technology's unregulated,
you can work on changing the world
without getting approval from other people.
At its best,
it is not subject to democratic control.
The network staters argue that democracy is out of date.
PATRI: The United States is still using a constitution
written over 200 years ago.
If you drove a car from 200 years ago, it would be a horse.
They want new systems, fit for the modern world -
tech-based alternatives to public institutions...
..from healthcare, to policing, to education.
I want to redesign, like, kind of... Everything. ..everything.
You know, I focus on, like, governing,
but I think that we've got a lot of 20th century systems
that need to be redone.
But the money for this comes from Peter Thiel, number one,
and crypto, number two.
Oh, thank you.
Nice to meet you. Thank you.
My dreams are simple, really.
I just want to help start 1,000 new societies all around the world.
These people talk a lot about voice versus exit.
Voice is democracy -
try and change the world through voting.
Or, "Fuck it, exit!" - just leave.
And these are exit people.
When I first spoke to Patri,
he told me he'd been warned not to talk to the mainstream media.
Hey, how are you?
PATRI OVER LAPTOP: Pretty good.
We are very grateful to you for agreeing to speak to us.
You know, I like the spotlight.
And so my inclination's always been to say yes to everything.
I'm definitely well above the average on the narcissism spectrum.
But I've gotten bitten a few times.
But it seemed like he just couldn't resist.
He wanted to show me this brave new world he's building.
He's using his investors' millions to fund eight new start-up cities.
And Patri said we can follow him
to the one he's thinking of moving to himself.
VOICE-OVER: Prospera is building
the fastest growing private city project in the world,
elevating human potential through
a radically decentralised private governance framework.
It's on an island off the coast of Honduras, in Central America...
..a real-life Burbclave, where tech bros rule.
He wants to be Ozymandias, King of Kings.
Look, it's simple...
VOICES SWIRLS AND ECHO
Just landed in Coxen Hole, Roatan.
What do the people on the island think about Prospera?
A lot of people are looking at it like it's a bad thing.
And what a lot of people are scared of is robots.
Robots? Yeah.
These robots, have you seen them yourself?
I've seen what they look.
Like something like a hand or something.
No idea what's going on in there.
That's far-out.
I didn't know about the robots.
Yeah, they have robots there.
TAXI DRIVER:
GABRIEL: Mm-hm.
TAXI DRIVER:
THEY CHUCKLE
The magic word that opens everything - Bitcoin.
LAUGHTER
PATRI: All right, first in-person sight of the Duna Towers.
14 stories - it's going to be the tallest building on the island.
And here we have the sign for Prospera.
So exciting!
What we'd like to do, if possible, is just, like, you guys do your thing,
imagine we're not here.
And you've come for your tour, right, Patri?
Yeah. I mean, I want to see everything.
I want to see this, the Beta offices,
the circular factory. Let's walk around.
I wanna see whatever there is to see.
Wow. I mean, that's just going to be amazing. Yeah.
I mean, the views from the top... Yeah, yeah.
I just love that idea to be in the same space with
so many other entrepreneurs... Yeah.
..the ones that are here early.
Like, bump into each other.
Community. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's going to be awesome.
They have big dreams for Prospera.
They want to create a futuristic city, that'll attract thousands of
international frontier tech entrepreneurs...
The idea is - close the loop between digital and physical.
..people and their robots, who will build the future
without interference from government.
And then you can send it to the circular factory.
And that's what these robots can do really well.
But the Honduran president who granted them this enclave
was busted for corruption.
NEWS REPORT: The former president's alleged to have helped facilitate
half a million kilograms of cocaine through Honduras.
Hernandez declared that he wanted, and I quote,
"to stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos".
And now, a new president has been elected.
TRANSLATION:
CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
Xiomara Castro ran on a promise to take back the land from Prospera.
Es un enemigo!
But Prospera is fighting back.
They're suing the government for $11 billion.
And if they win, Honduras will be effectively bankrupt.
If the world is changing
and power is no longer with the politicians,
but power is with the big tech guys. The tech people.
Right. Yeah.
I think it's incredible. I love it.
For me, the fact, like, first the tech boom
and then crypto each showered wealth on people who are my tribe.
And tech gave tons of money to people who think in certain ways -
to systematisers,
to people who believe in making new things
and not accepting current reality, right?
Imagine something and then build it.
The people who are dreamers and doers.
And that's amazing -
that's what we need to change the world.
And then crypto did that again,
for the libertarians and the anarcho-capitalists and,
like, exactly the kind of people who are like,
"Yes, we want to live in a different kind of society."
Like, "Yes, we're willing to bet on something
"that other people think is weird."
Like, trying to make it so we can live to 160,
and making charter cities,
and someday making independent states.
So crypto has caused a transfer of wealth -
and therefore, power -
to a bunch of people who are into this kind of thing.
Exactly.
We put this up here because, after lunch,
I'm getting my genes edited,
in a treatment only available here in Prospera.
APPLAUSE
Because the tech bros that run Prospera write their own laws,
they can do things that would be illegal almost anywhere else
in the world.
Things like human gene editing.
SHE SCREAMS
How are you getting there?
The clinic's sending a car. OK.
Can we squeeze in the car with you?
Oh, the driver's here waiting.
OK, let's see. "Small red car".
Small red car.
A challenge.
All right. GABRIEL CHUCKLES
GABRIEL GRUNTS
All right.
Are you feeling nervous at all?
No. It's just turning a knob in my body to get it
to make more of something that it already makes.
Patri is about to alter his genetic code
to make it produce more of a particular protein...
Just says, "Hey, make more follistatin."
..follistatin.
To make me stronger and lower my epigenetic age.
Patri's documenting the whole thing for his Instagram feed.
Super excited for getting my gene therapy injection.
I know I should be scared, but it just seems so fun!
You ready, Patri? Yeah.
Now he's roped me in to be his personal cameraman.
Feel better, live better.
Don't we all want that?
"I understand that some of the services, procedures and products
"offered by Garm have not been evaluated, tested
"or approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration."
That's why I'm here.
How are ya?
I'm good, thanks. How are you?
Couldn't be better.
Here comes the sting.
How are you feeling?
PATRI GROWLS
Hulk time!
Careful, you'll rip your shirt! PATRI GROWLS
PATRI CHUCKLES
Have YOU had it done?
Yeah.
And so, what was your experience?
GABRIEL CHUCKLES
Oh, he's wiry.
We can't stop people from ageing, but what we can do is,
we can offer and explore different things
that can contribute to longevity.
When you talk about life extension, most people say, "That's bad."
Their reaction is like, "Why would you want to do that?"
If there was a way for us to live to an average of,
like, let's say, from 80 to 160, their reaction to that is negative.
That's insane.
Taking off those years, it's advocating for, like,
mass murder halfway through people's lives.
PATRI GROWLS
That's the values that's against, like,
me and my tribe's values.
And if you want to choose to die, go and fucking die.
But don't advocate that, like,
all the humans on earth die before their time.
That's insane!
And it's normal!
Show us those muscles. Go on.
Hang on, let me... Go on, go on.
OK, this is the before.
And that's what makes it fun.
I'm trying to get, like, even stronger from being strong.
Like, I'm going to be completely honest with you.
I think you're a lovely guy,
and lots of these people are really nice people.
And obviously, like, the current world is not perfect, right?
There's a lot of inequality and stuff.
But it kind of feels like
the world that you're building here would inevitably turn into
this kind of two-tier society
where there's the kind of hyper-mobile cyberspace people...
Yeah. ..who are then kind of served by this kind of underclass.
I mean, in a way that's different than how the world works today?
I guess I wonder if you're comparing to utopia.
There's no claims of utopia here.
Maybe I'm just a stuck-in-the-past Luddite,
but I just, I worry about the future.
There's a lot to worry about, but not us.
Huh.
All right, we got to go. We got to go. OK.
In the beginning,
Bitcoin was a project to claw back power from the state,
to put control of money into the hands of the individual.
But since Satoshi disappeared, crypto has evolved.
It's morphed into a multi-trillion-dollar industry.
Power is being concentrated again...
..but in different hands.
The one thought that I was just struck by - he says,
"The moral imperative of our time is
"to turn all states into peaceful service companies."
Backed by their crypto billions,
the new lords of tech think the sci-fi dreams of their childhood
are now within their grasp.
COMPUTER GAME LEVEL-UP TONE
Can you, like, 360 me? Yeah.
Be my drone, Gabriel. OK.
Anything for you, Patri.
VOICE-OVER: I want to chip away at democracy
so we can try out other things that might be better.
You learn new things by trying new things.
If you don't try new things,
you get no innovation and things are stagnant.
It's just as true for government as anything else.
Instead of trying to spend billions of dollars
trying to build a new country,
you want to do something that works
much more incrementally and organically,
where it works on a modest scale,
and then you can sort of scale it from there.
Does it swing?
Sort of.
Was this Satoshi's plan from the start?
A whole new way of organising society,
privatised city states financed by crypto and built on the blockchain?
There's only one way to know for sure,
and that's to find the man himself.
And you know what?
I've got a new suspect - someone who wasn't on our radar.
With the disappearance it would be consistent,
because, you know, it's easy to avoid giving yourself away
when you're dead.
We've all got our favourite detective stories, right?
They all kind of follow the same pattern.
The truth is only arrived at
by the painstaking process of eliminating the untrue.
And so that's where I met Hal Finney...
We start with a bunch of suspects. ..Ralph Merkle...
Any one of them could have done it. ..and Nick Szabo.
And we follow the clues until the final reveal.
And now I have a most regrettable task to perform.
Well, that's kind of how it's been for me,
looking for Satoshi Nakamoto.
We tracked down Adam Back.
It's not you? It's not me.
He denied it, of course.
But there were others in the frame.
Oh, my God, they're all here!
Hal Finney, Wei Dai...
Ooh, look, Nick Szabo.
APPLAUSE
Nick Szabo.
A decade before Bitcoin,
he'd proposed something called Bit Gold.
You can think of Bitcoin as
an army of robots checking up on each other's work,
verifying each other's work.
I got close to him a couple of times, but he didn't want to talk.
Ralph. Ah, there you are! Hello!
I spent an afternoon with Ralph Merkle and his wife, Carol.
This is Gabriel. Hi, Carol. Gabriel, this is Carol.
Nice to meet you. Very nice to meet you.
Lovely guy - but not Satoshi.
You want me to express an opinion on
one of the greatest mysteries of the century?
Yes!
Absolutely not!
Our search led us to a coder who was the last person
to communicate with Satoshi before he disappeared.
Really good to meet you. I'm Gabriel.
Did you get a sense that he was withdrawing?
Yeah.
Did you get a sense of why? No.
Did you ask him? Yes.
And what did he say? Nothing.
And so the quest went on.
For police work is not all glamour and excitement and glory.
There are days and days when nothing goes right.
Sometimes the thing you need to crack the case wide open
is a little bit of luck.
THUNDER RUMBLES
And while we were in Switzerland filming that cypherpunk conference,
this happened.
Hi. Hi. Are you the artist?
He is the artist, yeah. Great, I really like it.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
We honoured them like apostles. Like apostles?
Yeah, really. They are the 12. It's a little bit like a church.
This is the Sistine... The chapel.
The Sistine Chapel.
Do you think that one of these guys - or some of these guys - are Satoshi?
Yeah, for sure.
Who do you think? I have...
Nobody knows.
I have three favourites.
Go on.
One is Nick Szabo together with Hal Finney,
because Nick Szabo had the intellect... Yeah.
..and he had the skills to do it. Yeah.
And then there was a guy who is nearly forgotten.
It's Len Sassaman.
You know him?
He knew Adam,
he knew Phil Zimmermann, he knew Wei Dai,
he worked together with Hal Finney,
and he disappeared weeks after Satoshi's last message.
Because he suicide... He committed suicide.
This is...
This would be my favourite - Len Sassaman.
You think Len Sassaman?
Len Sassaman.
He didn't have his portrait up among the apostles.
But at the end of the '90s he was in California,
sharing a flat with another cypherpunk who did.
I'm here with Bram Cohen.
Yes, I'm Bram. He is Bram.
I like working on hard and interesting and rewarding problems.
He has Asperger's syndrome, based on self-diagnosis.
Where does he say that? On his...?
Wikipedia.
THEY BOTH CHUCKLE
Cohen's hobbies include original origami
and juggling up to five balls.
MELLOW HANDPAN MUSIC
I do these sets of, like, 200 catches...
..of five balls. But, yeah.
That's crazy. Well done.
Yeah, thanks.
GABRIEL CHUCKLES
Just start off by telling me about Len Sassaman.
Oh, uh, well, he's long gone now. Mm.
And he was my friend,
but he was mostly just kind of this rah-rah,
you know, ranty cypherpunk kind of person.
And there was the Cypherpunks Mailing List,
and he really liked posting, you know,
righteous political diatribes to it under pseudonyms.
That was, like, his life.
Under pseudonyms? Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Good afternoon.
I am Len Sassaman, otherwise known as Rabbi.
Len was a popular speaker on the hacker convention circuit.
Here he is at Defcon 11, in 2003.
A little bit about my background - I've been a cypherpunk,
crypto researcher-ish person for about ten years now.
It seemed so innocent.
He did a lot of just political ranty stuff.
Like what? Give me an example.
It was all this, like, very libertarian,
you know, "There should be no government."
Not quite that anarchic, but you know.
And, "Technology will save us all", kind of stuff.
The big cypherpunk theory is
political activism by writing code, right?
You build tools to make things happen.
Like, an example would be,
he wanted something like Bitcoin to exist.
The idea that there should be a cryptocurrency that did this stuff.
By 2011, Bitcoin was growing.
It was spreading from the dark web -
where people used it to buy drugs, mostly -
to more mainstream websites.
But when Wikileaks started using Bitcoin...
ARCHIVE: What Wikileaks has done amounts to espionage.
..Satoshi worried that they'd kicked the hornet's nest.
The authorities might come after him and shut the whole project down.
I remember Bitcoin was more a silly project back then. Right.
It was an experiment that got out of hand.
In April that year, Satoshi emailed,
"I've moved on to other things."
And that was it - he was gone.
Satoshi actually ragequit.
What is "ragequit"?
Ragequit, where you go, "Fuck y'all! I'm out of here!",
and just leave, and burn the bridges on the way out.
Well, the next issue is why anonymity is a good thing.
Can you guys hear me OK?
Ten weeks after Satoshi disappeared, Len killed himself.
He was 31 years old.
He had just always depression.
Um...
You know, and he tried to...
Like, when he died, he tried to delete his Wikipedia page,
he deleted his old LiveJournal.
He really tried to wipe himself out.
My final comments are, I'm out of time,
so who wants to sneak in some questions?
Yes.
VOICES FADE OUT
Do you think Len was Satoshi?
Well... BRAM SIGHS
..a pretty good likelihood he was involved in it.
Unlikely he wrote it,
because there's a bunch of things that just don't match all there.
The code? Yeah, the code.
The thing is...
..Len didn't seem to have the technical skills to do it.
But he knew someone who did -
an old colleague...
..Hal Finney.
They'd worked together on PGP,
the encryption software that had got Phil Zimmermann
in trouble with the law.
The idea that Bitcoin was something that Hal wrote,
and then Len was doing all the ranty posting about it,
would fit really well. BRAM CHUCKLES
But Len couldn't have been the only one posting as Satoshi.
Because in 2014,
three years after Len died,
Satoshi broke his silence to make one final statement.
It was only a few words.
The main reason I'm here is to clear my name
that I have nothing to do with Bitcoin.
Hal had grown up a few blocks away from Dorian.
I just believe that somebody put that fictitious name in there.
Did Hal feel guilty
because he'd inadvertently put an innocent man in the frame?
He had love in his heart all the way to the end.
I don't know.
The thought that, you know, they had potentially built this thing
and then both died really horribly afterwards is just like...
..I don't know, it's something I hope isn't what happened.
But also, with the disappearance, it would be consistent because,
you know, it's easy to avoid giving yourself away
when you're dead.
BOB HETTINGER: First of all, it's dangerous.
There are scary, bad people out there who would just kidnap him,
or the people he loves.
Satoshi would get hurt.
BRAM: I try not to think about it too much,
because what's the benefit of knowing?
What does it matter?
You want them to be dead in peace? Yes.
Satoshi prefers to remain anonymous.
Can't we let him remain anonymous?
VINCE CATE: It doesn't matter which cypherpunk it was.
We're all Spartacus.
We're all Satoshi.
Perhaps they're right.
Perhaps it doesn't matter which cypherpunk wrote the actual code.
Nick Szabo...
All of our suspects were part of
a loose collective of hackers and cryptographers...
..who were exchanging ideas, fixing each other's code,
and probably passing the Satoshi pseudonym among them.
Nakamoto.
No fingerprints, no identification - nothing definite.
Take a look.
But here's the thing -
all the evidence they left behind is circumstantial.
In the world of crypto, there is only one accepted proof.
The person who is Satoshi Nakamoto made the Genesis Block,
and the Genesis Block is worth how much now, Vince?
Billions and billions... It's a crazy number.
Billions and billions of dollars.
If you've got the keys to those original wallets,
then, according to Bitcoin legend, you are Satoshi.
And no one has ever touched those Bitcoin.
Which lends credence to the idea that Satoshi might be dead.
And if they are...
..then we'll never know.
Except for one thing.
A lot of these guys, they don't believe in death.
Here it is.
Phoenix, Arizona.
Inside this building, stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen,
is the frozen head of Hal Finney.
He hoped that, at some point in the future,
perhaps not so long from now,
technology would bring him back from the dead.
It's here in this anteroom to the afterlife...
..that our story comes to its conclusion.
The CEO of Alcor had been a little reluctant
to let us in with our cameras.
Good morning. James. How are you? I'm Gabriel.
What's your name? Gabriel.
Gabriel, come on in. Very good to meet you.
You know, I think we're very misunderstood in the media. Yeah.
I understand the fascination, you know,
with what we do, because obviously,
we take bodies and things and we call them patients.
Our members become patients at the time of death.
So, on the wall here,
we have people from all over the world.
So, Hal Finney, you know, he passed away in 2014
and we have his brain in stasis here.
So, that's back of the house. There's nothing there to see.
In any event, come on this way.
So, when our team gets a call, so, when this phone goes off,
our team can deploy anywhere in the world.
We try to deploy within a few hours.
This all happens quickly.
Just because your heart has died,
that doesn't mean your brain cells have died.
We're going to walk through the back here
and go to our patient care bay now. OK.
So you'll actually get to see where patients are stored.
Feels like, I don't know, opening some kind of tomb.
Well, it's a very serious thing, and I tell people to show reverence.
I am going to allow you to walk through, and I'll walk with you.
But, you know, it's a reverent space.
So it's a serious thing.
Wait, so this is...? Patient care.
This is where our patients are stored. OK.
200-plus people.
And it's surprisingly not as cold as you would expect,
so go ahead and walk through.
Each of these cylinders holds four full bodies, or 40 heads.
It costs $80,000 for a head...
..over 200 grand for a body.
Can I ask this? Sure.
Do we know which one of these Hal Finney is in?
If I did, I couldn't tell you. OK.
But he's in one of these?
He is in one, yes.
I call it a cruise ship - a cruise ship into the future, right?
But again... A cruise ship into the future?
Yeah, think about this.
Like, I'm on a boat with a bunch of other people
who've elected to do this.
And they are fascinating people.
I wish I could tell you some of the people.
They're people you've heard of,
that have invented things that have changed the world,
and I get to be a passenger on that cruise ship.
Do people take things with them?
Yes, when you sign up here, you're actually given a box.
And that box -
called a memory box, or what have you -
that is not stored here.
Just to make it clear to everybody, we don't have that here.
And so you get a memory box to...
Essentially, if you were to be reanimated -
your brain - in any meaningful way,
that would be a way for you to kind of, like, connect the dots.
So, what kind of things do people put in their box?
Photos, thumb drives.
Some people, you know, there's a big question of money.
What happens if you're brought back
and there's no money to live off of? Right.
What if Satoshi, whoever they were... Mm-hm.
..was, let's say, preserved in a facility like this?
They would need money when they were reanimated in the future. Sure.
Could that original Bitcoin wallet be, basically,
a trust for the afterlife?
Could be.
Like, when I first thought of it, I was like,
"Oh, no, that's a crazy theory."
Is it crazy? Is it?
Or is it logical?
What would you do?
VOICE-OVER: What WOULD I do?
Well, if I believed I was going to come back from the dead...
..I'd do what the Pharaohs did.
I'd have myself buried with my treasure.
Perhaps no one has touched those original wallets...
..because they're a pot of gold for the future.
Or maybe there's a simpler explanation.
BRAM: Satoshi actually rage quit.
"Fuck y'all! I'm out of here!" BRAM CHUCKLES
And just leave,
and burn the bridges on the way out.
Maybe, whoever Satoshi was, they destroyed the keys,
got rid of them,
to ensure that they would remain anonymous forever.
VINCE CATE: So, you know how when Cortes came to the New World,
he burned his ships so there was no going back?
I would suspect that all those early Bitcoin that he did,
he's probably destroyed the keys for those coins.
And that anything that could prove that he was Satoshi,
it's all gone.
So it would never be possible to change his mind.
In the 1990s, at the dawn of the internet age,
a group of cypherpunks had a vision.
MIKE LORREY: Artificial intelligence,
intelligence augmentation of humans,
nanotechnology,
genetic engineering,
space colonisation.
Bitcoin was just a part of it.
They wanted to change everything...
..from the way we use money, to the way we're governed,
to conquering death itself.
Once upon a time, those ideas seemed like distant dreams.
Not any more.
APPLAUSE
DONALD TRUMP: His name is Elon Musk.
He saved free speech.
He created so many different, great things.
Come here.
Take over, Elon. Just take over.
Hi, everyone.
CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
All of a sudden,
the geeks and misfits who got rich off the cypherpunk revolution...
..are in charge.
The 20th century went on in this zombie way for,
like, another 20 years in the 2000's and 2010's.
And somehow the 20th century is actually over.
I don't see how it recovers.
It's over.
COMPUTERISED VOICE: Warning, warning, warning, warning...
The future begins right now...
..and it belongs to them.
UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC, CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
ELON MUSK ROARS
That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.