Debunking the "Finding Satoshi" Documentary

Warning: this show has spoilers!Watch the video of this podcast:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd-jGXonSzMTIMELINE00:00 Spoiler01:00 Three positive features02:00 Fatal Flaw 103:30 Fatal Flaw 205:10 Sleep schedules06:00 And then there were 208:00 Confirmation bias10:20 Hal Finney is NOT half of Satoshi18:00 Widows19:33 Benjamin Wallace's 5 points22:00 ConclusionWatch the trailer for Finding Satoshi.In April 2026, Finding Satoshi is the only place where you can see the full movie. I used the code NATALIE and got a small discount (the total price was $14.31 after the coupon). The code may have expired or been used up by the time you read this. It's expensive, but it's a high-end production. Although I disagree with the film's conclusion, I enjoyed watching it. I hope one day it will appear on the streaming services.Benjamin Wallace’s TakeAfter only seeing the trailer, Benjamin Wallace emailed me his first impressions:They interview some of the same people I did, including Will Price (who supervised Hal Finney), Jon Callas (who worked with Finney and was a close friend of Sassaman), and Meredith Patterson (Sassaman’s widow).When I first spoke with Will and Jon, I, too, had a thrilling eureka feeling that I had cracked the mystery.Alas, there were too many confounding factors to remain confident in this theory:1. Len Sassaman was very critical about Bitcoin, and Meredith said the criticism was sincere;2. it’s far from certain that Satoshi’s 2014 “I am not Dorian Nakamoto” message, 3 years after Sassaman’s death, was from a hacked account;3. Jon Callas and Ben Laurie both told me that Sassaman wasn’t a naturally modest person, likely to conceal his involvement in the creation of a revolutionary technology,4. and both Callas and Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent and Sassaman’s former roommate, told me they didn’t think Sassaman had the technical chops to create Bitcoin.5. Finally, Sassaman wasn’t a close hit on either prose or code stylometry.The 6 CandidatesAt minute 15, the movie suddenly lays out its six candidates that “journalists and other experts have floated.” It does not explain how they came up with these six Satoshi candidates. They are:1. Adam Back2. Nick Szabo3. Hal Finney4. Len Sassaman5. Paul Le Roux6. Wei DaiAlthough this is an excellent short list, these candidates have been thoroughly scrutinized. Furthermore, all these candidates have strikes against them, making them imperfect matches.FBI’s Kathleen PuckettKathleen Puckett is the FBI agent who figured out who the Unabomber was. I enjoyed her profile of Satoshi. At minute 50, Puckett said Nakamoto was an “independent thinker.”She thinks it’s one person: “There’s no way to keep it private” if there’s more than one person.She said that Bitcoin was an “intellectual exercise for Satoshi,” that he had “no need for social affirmation,” he had “no enthusiasm for money,” and was “modest.”Narrowing the candidatesThe documentary excludes Adam Back, Nick Szabo, and Wei Dai because their online activity times are quite different than Satoshi’s. In short, they are often sleeping when Satoshi is active and vice versa.Len repeatedly bashed Bitcoin, but the film says this was a ruse.The documentary labels Hal Finney’s RPOW a “precursor to bitcoin.”58 min: Will Price says that “RPOW is as close to bitcoin as anything can possibly be,” which is complete b******t and hyperbole.Perplexity.ai on Will Price’s claim:It is fair to say RPOW was one of the closest conceptual ancestors of Bitcoin, especially in its use of proof of work for digital money. It is not accurate to say it was “as close as anything can possibly be” unless that is being used as loose praise rather than a technical claim.”If you mean “closest in overall Bitcoin-like design,” the best ranking is Bit Gold, b-money, RPOW, and Hashcash.Min 59: Hal Finney doesn’t write white papers.Min 61: They play a recording of Hal where he says, “I’m making this recording mostly I want people in the future to hear my voice and maybe something of my story.”So while he’s humble, there was a part of him who wanted immortality or at least to be remembered for who he was and what he accomplished: his story. If he created Bitcoin, it