Did the creator of Bitcoin just get unmasked?

Shaan Puri

Okay, so maybe they found Satoshi Nakamoto, which is exciting! It's one of my favorite mysteries.

Sam Parr

It's an intoxicating story. You're talking about the new HBO documentary? I didn't watch it yet, but the headlines make it look amazing. I have to watch it. What's the gist?

Shaan Puri

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. The director makes himself a pretty big character, and he also says stuff that feels unprofessional. He'll be talking and then say something like, "And then, you know, they made NFTs, whatever the hell those are." It's like, whoa! Why is the narrator 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.

Sam Parr

Yeah, tell me the story.

Shaan Puri

Okay, the whole story is this: In 2008, the Bitcoin white paper was released. Some guy posted on a forum, stating that he thought he had solved the double spend problem. Many people in the past had tried to create a virtual currency, or "digital gold." There was e-gold, hashcash, and various other attempts, but they all failed for different reasons. For example, e-gold started to gain popularity and had about $2 billion in volume. However, the creator of e-gold established it as a company. He was the founder and CEO of a company called e-gold, and he lived in Canada or something like that. As it hit $2 billion in transaction volume, the website claimed it was a digital currency backed by actual gold, stating, "We'll be around today, tomorrow, and forever." But then, the government knocked on his door, raided him, and put him in jail. So, the first problem with digital currencies was that you can't be the person behind it. As soon as the currency gains traction, you have too much power, and the nation-states that control the currency supply are not going to like you. They might even launch character attacks to discredit the currency. Satoshi solved that problem by launching Bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Nobody knows who he is, and the anonymity of the whole thing is crucial. Then, he disappeared. The second issue was that other people tried to create digital currencies with hashcash and other methods, but to get the actual cryptography to work, you had to ensure that nobody could double spend the money. For instance, when you swipe your credit card today, that transaction goes to a bank. The bank verifies that the person has the money and that it hasn't already been spent. It sends that message back to the register, which then approves the transaction. The bank takes its 3% fee for verifying that the person has the money, that the card isn't stolen, and that the money hasn't already been spent in another shop 10 minutes ago. What Bitcoin did, or what Satoshi did, was release his white paper stating, "I think I've solved that problem. I believe I've created a decentralized way to make money," meaning money that can be trusted even without a central party, like a bank or government, verifying all the transactions. So, that's the breakthrough that happened in 2008. They were discussing it, and in 2009, the first Bitcoin block was created.

Sam Parr

And did this person actually code something? You used the phrase "white paper," which...

Shaan Puri

It starts as a **white paper**, which is just an explanation of a system.

Sam Parr

It's an idea.

Shaan Puri

It's an idea written out like a business plan, but the technical variant of it. Here's the technical plan of how we could create a currency that's decentralized, one that we trust. Alright, great, but it's not coded yet. Then he codes it. By the way, when people have looked at the code, they're like, "This is not done by a super sophisticated programmer." There are things that, when you look at the code, you can sort of see the elegance of it, the styling of it, and the level of technical proficiency. When people look at that, they don't think it's done by somebody who's a super senior programmer. So they think either one of two things: 1. It might be an academic type of person, someone who's technical enough, but really it's the theory that's the conceptual leap—that was the big leap. 2. Or it might be somebody young.

Sam Parr

They're like, "It works, but it's just like the wires are messy."

Shaan Puri

Exactly. And by the way, the sort of sequence of events... I'm doing this off the top of my head, so I might get some dates wrong. In 2009, after the 2008 financial crisis—which many believe was the stimulus for why Satoshi felt this needed to happen—the banks got super greedy. Lehman Brothers failed, and other banks started to fail. The U.S. government stepped in and bought $700 billion worth of bad debt, basically bailing out the banks. They printed more money, trying to paper over the problems. People wanted a currency that was a hard currency, meaning something that couldn't just be printed in excess and devalue their currency because of mistakes made by others. They didn't like the idea that it was "too big to fail" and that the government controlled it.

Sam Parr

And you know that he feels this way because he's blogging every day.

Shaan Puri

It's written in the... there are references to why there's a need for this in the white paper. There's his forum post and this.

Sam Parr

Is all this happening on message board forums? What's a message board forum?

Shaan Puri

Originally, it was just the sort of cryptographers' mailing list. But then he created a forum of his own called Bitcoin Talk. Satoshi created Bitcoin Talk, and his username is "Satoshi," which is very important for how this guy thinks. So, on January 3rd, there's a message embedded in the first ever Bitcoin block which says, "The Times 03 Jan 2009 Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks." In the very first block, Satoshi, who mined that block—the genesis block of the whole thing—is basically putting in an idea, like a statement. The chancellor is on the brink of a second bailout for the banks, pointing out why we need something like this in the first place, right?

Sam Parr

How valuable is this? This is so, like, you know, in high school where you read literature and they want you to dive deep. They're like, "Did you notice on, you know, page 200 he killed someone?" But did you notice on page 50 he alluded to like he was gonna do that? Like, he said he loved bread. Do you know what I mean? This is like what this is.

Shaan Puri

It has big "aim away message" energy. It definitely has that feeling. When I'm in the bathroom and Sean was here, he is always here. It's like...

Sam Parr

What? Why? What does...?

Shaan Puri

He means, "Who was trying to get poetic in the bathroom stall?" Like, that was Satoshi.

Sam Parr

On the first block.

Shaan Puri

Alright, so he posts there. Now, let's fast forward a few years. Bitcoin is at like, you know, 1 cent, 30 cents. It's not at all like what Bitcoin is today—nowhere close to it, right? But the community is interested in it, and they're talking about it. It exists. Now, a couple of years later, something happens where Satoshi posts one day. Then the WikiLeaks leak happens. Satoshi posts and says, "I'm afraid that this has kicked the hornet's nest, and this is going to cause a lot of unwanted attention. It's too young; it's too young to deal with the government coming after us to try to shut this down." Because WikiLeaks is saying, "Oh, we can use Bitcoin," and the government hates WikiLeaks. Therefore, they're going to try to choke WikiLeaks by killing the Bitcoin system. So he didn't lie.

Sam Parr

Isn't that intoxicating? You're just dorking around on a message board, and you're playing with concepts like "the government is after us" or "this big national security threat is bad news for us." You know what I mean? It's like...

Shaan Puri

By the way, there are references to this so early on when nobody, you know, Bitcoin might have had, I don't know, 200 eyeballs on it at the time. Like, 200 people on Earth knew about Bitcoin. But the foresight to say, "I'm gonna be Satoshi. I'm gonna keep this all anonymized." The second thing to say is that there are people like Hal Finney who go in there and very early reply, and they're like, "Well, if this actually became, you know, adopted as the world's reserve currency, that would make every Bitcoin worth like, you know, $2,000,000,000 or something like that." It's like Bitcoin's worth not even $1.

Sam Parr

That's just like a ridiculous thing to type out.

Shaan Puri

Exactly, it's absolutely ridiculous. But this is like sort of the foresight, the visionary sense of it. By the way, that guy Hal Finney... a lot of people think Hal is Satoshi because the case for Hal is brilliant. You know, he was a cryptography mind and the first recipient of Bitcoin. So, the first transaction was Satoshi sending to Hal, which, if you're a programmer, it's like, "Did you send to yourself?" Yeah, usually that's how programmers start things. That might also be the case against it because if this guy is trying to cover his tracks, he would definitely not send to himself as the first transaction, right? And then Hal gets Lou Gehrig's disease.

Sam Parr

and dies.

Shaan Puri

And dies and disappears. Basically, he dies at the same time as Satoshi's last messages were sent, right? The fact that this person has resisted the temptation to either claim credit or touch their $700,000,000,000 fortune is remarkable. Not a single coin has ever been used from that fortune. Maybe it's because the guy's dead, right? That might be the only way to explain someone who has the resistance to it.

Sam Parr

So, that's part of the whole.

Shaan Puri

Company case.

Sam Parr

Which is also related to this current suspect's case.

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, let's carry on. People think it's Hal Finney. Others believe it might be this guy, Adam Back, who created Hashcash and definitely traded emails early on with Satoshi. He runs Blockstream, a company associated with Bitcoin. So, people don't know who it is. They think it might be this mysterious Asian guy, Wei Dai. He's a brilliant cryptographer too, but nobody knows. There are no photos of this guy on the internet, he claims. So, they're like, "Maybe that's Satoshi." People just don't know.

Sam Parr

Alright, so when I ran my company, The Hustle, I think we had something like 2,000,000 subscribers. We made money through advertising, but we didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising, in general, is kind of a crappy business model. I remember sitting down and thinking, "What are all the different ways that I can make money off The Hustle that aren't advertising?" To make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me and the HubSpot team went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business. We put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research. We call it, very appropriately, "The Business Monetization Playbook." Go to the description of this episode, and you're going to see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free; you just click the link, and you can see it. Back to the episode, another person who kind of came into the mix... Have you read the book about Paul Leroux? I think the book is called "Mastermind."

Shaan Puri

Haven't read it, but you told me about this.

Sam Parr

My God, what an intoxicating story! He was thrown in the mix, so there were all these people who were thrown in the mix as well.

Shaan Puri

I think it's Elon... is it whoever? And it's like, okay, we get sort of far-fetched, and that's sort of the fun of it, by the way. Yeah, it's like, you know, the mystery. I genuinely think we are all better off not knowing. Okay, so let's continue on. The WikiLeaks thing happens, I think something like 2011 or 2012. Satoshi posts, and three days later, he makes his last post. So he posts, "WikiLeaks happens," and then two days later, or three days later, his last post disappears, never to be heard from again. Okay, so that's the mystery. Kind of like sits there. Actually, I think he did come back and post something in like 2014 or 2015. And by the way, he didn't disappear as in nobody heard from him. He at some point even said, "I'm gonna move on. I'm gonna stop talking about this. I'm gonna stop contributing to this. It's on its way, and I'm gonna move on." So then in 2014 or 2015, there's a big debate in Bitcoin about like the transaction speeds being too slow. Some people say, "Hey, we gotta make the block size bigger. That'll let more transactions go through." Some people say, "No, no, no, you can't change something as fundamental as the block size. We should do this other more complicated thing that will take years." But the reason we should do that is because if we change anything about the Bitcoin protocol, it undermines it. It's like, "Oh, if you can change that, then can't you change the 21 million supply?" You'll lose the core credibility. There's two sides to this debate. On one side of the debate is this guy Roger Ver, who calls himself "Bitcoin Jesus." He made a huge bet on Bitcoin early on—$1 million—and became a billionaire off of it. And there are other people who are saying, "Look, we need to get this thing adopted now. We need the quick and dirty solution. Just double the block size and shut up about it." Alright, you know, people want to use this thing, and they can't use it today. They gotta... we got a minute to do the fast solution. Let's go, go, go! They end up actually on the wrong side of history. The community goes against them, and they create their own thing called Bitcoin Cash—kind of this thing that has low reputation. The people who said, "No, no, we gotta stay true to Satoshi's vision," were Adam Back, this guy Peter Todd, and like, you know, a handful of others who said, "No, no, no, the thing with Bitcoin is it's gotta be pristine. You can't... it can't be where like the government is printing money. We can't just suddenly arbitrarily change the rules."

Sam Parr

It's like people who want to follow the Constitution, which is like... it's all like a... it's.

Shaan Puri

like a

Sam Parr

It's like a pretty funny thing that the Constitution was just a group of like 20- to 30-year-olds who came up with this idea. Now, billions of people and 250 years have passed, and we've all just kind of bought into this idea that this is the way things are.

Shaan Puri

And no matter how the world changes, we're...

Sam Parr

We don't break it.

Shaan Puri

Change it because even if you think you could... Yeah, the Second Amendment. Do we need that? Is that exactly right? It's like once you change the amendments, now everything's up for grabs. So, it's actually sort of better for the collective that way.

Sam Parr

Which is like a ridiculous concept to think about. You could also say the same is true for religion and holy texts, where you're like, "Someone wrote this," and tens or hundreds of billions of people have dedicated their lives to it.

Shaan Puri

It’s right.

Sam Parr

Like, it is a really fascinating concept. But... is that what's happening? Or is that what you're referring to?

Shaan Puri

Becomes very much like a religion, and the people who follow it are very religious about it. So, anyways, he weighs in one last time, saying small block size is what we should do. It goes the way of Adam Back, Peter Todd, and these other guys. Okay, cool. That's the last we heard of Satoshi, and they tried to find him, but they don't know how to find him. So, this is Tom Henry.

Sam Parr

Yeah, who's the guy?

Shaan Puri

The documentary goes through the premise that the filmmaker visits all the original Bitcoiners. He tells them, "I'm doing this documentary," but he doesn't reveal that he's trying to find Satoshi. Instead, he says he wants to tell the Bitcoin story. I don't know if he mentions that it's going to be on HBO, but he implies that this is good for the community. As a result, many of them agree to participate, which is pretty rare for them to sit down and do these taped interviews. Along the way, as he builds this documentary, he slips in questions about Satoshi. He asks, "Are you Satoshi? Why do people think that you are? What's your claim to not be?" He probes further, asking, "What makes that credible?" The documentary essentially filters out about 80 or 90% of their conversations and keeps the 10% that relates to trying to figure out the Satoshi mystery. In the end, he focuses on a guy named Peter Todd, who seems like an unlikely character for several reasons. First, when the Bitcoin white paper was released, Peter Todd would have only been around 23 years old—essentially a kid. Second, he has joked about being Satoshi, which is interesting because the real Satoshi is probably quite paranoid. On the other hand, some people argue that the meta-game would be to jokingly claim to be Satoshi just to throw suspicion off oneself. There's not a lot of evidence tying him to this identity, so people wonder, "Okay, I guess it could be Peter Todd, but why not Hal Finney, the guy who received the first transaction? Or Adam Back, who was one of the first people to communicate with Satoshi and has never released those emails? He was also the inventor of Hashcash, which makes him seem more sophisticated for this role." People question why it couldn't be a group or even the FBI. The case against Peter Todd isn't strong; it's more about why him when there are so many other more likely candidates. The biggest argument against him is his youth and the fact that he tends to troll and joke around. Additionally, he's very opinionated about various topics, including Russia and Ukraine, which doesn't endear him to many. Overall, he's not a well-liked figure, so it doesn't quite fit with the Bitcoin community's image of a "fearless leader." It's more like, "Wait, we kind of think this guy's a prick."

Sam Parr

Because Satoshi kind of has this stoic mentality, this writing that is like "us versus the world." It's a very visionary attitude. And you're describing someone that may not have like George Washington vibes, you know?

Shaan Puri

Well, look, the funniest tweet I saw on this, because I was trying to see the community's reaction, was from a guy named Peter Todd. He said, "That's the most average-ass name I've ever heard." This guy looks like the most average-ass guy I've ever seen.

Sam Parr

I'm looking at him. He does.

Shaan Puri

Disappointed. Like, if that was Satoshi, I would be disappointed, right? Like, "Oh, it's just this guy, this white dude who has all these other opinions that I kind of disagree with." Like, that kind of takes away the veneer of Satoshi.

Sam Parr

Whereas if you Google Hal Finney, he looks like a person that just studies all day.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, Hal was this beloved guy, then he dies tragically. It's sort of like he went down with the ship; the captain went down with the ship. He never revealed... And the other thing about Hal is he cryogenically froze his head. So, like, if a thousand years from now cryonics are a thing and you can unfreeze him, he's got the private key in his head and he'll come out as Satoshi. It's like, whatever. Okay, so it's kind of like that has that sort of aura. Now, let me give you the evidence. Why does this documentary guy claim that it's Peter Todd? So, the evidence is basically this: back when that thing happened, remember I said there was a post? The WikiLeaks thing happened, and he disappeared. Everybody thinks that it's because of the WikiLeaks thing that he got paranoid and decided to bounce. There was one other thing that happened after that first post that was not to do with WikiLeaks at all. That thing that happened was Satoshi posted about how the transaction mechanism works. Then, the first reply underneath, an hour and a half later, is from Peter Todd. But it looks like a continuation of the thought. He says in the original post, "the inputs and the outputs would match," and then Peter Todd's reply comes in and just says, "to be specific, the inputs and the outputs wouldn't exactly match; it would be whatever." Now, some people would say that's just a snarky internet forum kind of rude comment. Like, you didn't even... there's no formality, there's no understanding. You're just immediately trying to correct something from somebody's post. That happens all the time on the internet. Another lens you can look at that same thing is: Satoshi writes this thing, comes back to clarify, forgets to switch back to his alt account, and that post has been up there and has been left up there for a very long time. So, the guy, the documentary guy, is reading that and he's like, "Dude, are we dumb? Have we missed this? Doesn't this look like it's a continuation of the thought? It's a clarification of the thought." For this guy, who claims to have not been interested in Bitcoin until years later and claims to have been busy in school, for him to come in at 1:30 in the morning and make a super specific clarification as to how the Bitcoin mechanism works, that doesn't really line up with this guy who wasn't interested and didn't follow it and was just a kid at the time.

Sam Parr

Right, by the way, this is how they caught Ross Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road. He just... he posted on a forum where he logged in with the wrong username or he left his email. It was like a clerical error. Exactly. By the way, this is how they got Timothy McVeigh from the Oklahoma City bombing. One of his taillights was out. There are lots of examples of big-shot criminals being busted over minor things.

Shaan Puri

And, but you know, this is... right now on Twitter, people are saying, "Do you think Satoshi, who's been flawless with his OPSEC and security of how he did this, would just stupidly log in to the wrong account and leave the message there?" It's like, yeah, actually, that happens all the time. That's actually a pretty common pattern. In fact, if I said, "What's the most likely way we find them?" it's either that or, you know, maybe the email he registered his Satoshi email with gets leaked somehow. So otherwise, yeah.

Sam Parr

It's like it fits a stereotype. When you think of the brilliant scientist, you think of Albert Einstein with mismatched socks. You know what I mean? This is like the internet equivalent of that.

Shaan Puri

So that's the first piece. Then, there are a few secondary things. For example, there's the language. He writes "color" with a "u" (colour), using Canadian English spelling. This guy was going to school in Toronto at the time. A lot of people are asking, "Is this guy brilliant? Is he Satoshi?" He was so young at the time; is this even possible? Then they find a message from him on the cryptography forums, which was posted eight years prior to when Bitcoin came out.

Sam Parr

So, how old was he at that time?

Shaan Puri

He's 15 or 16 years old at the time, and he's hanging out in this, you know, cypherpunk community. He basically says on the forum, "Yeah, Hashcash, blah blah blah," and then he's talking about the mechanism. He's like, "It would have to be something more than proof of work, blah blah blah, effing double spend problem." That's like the snippet from this email chain that he had posted back then. So, okay, you're 15 or 16 years old, you're obviously brilliant and not just some random programmer kid. You're thinking and noodling about this problem eight years prior. His mom taught him about cryptography, and his dad was an economist. So, it's like the two skills you would need to be Satoshi: you'd need the brilliance on the encryption and cryptography side, and you would need the ethos and the sort of ideology on, you know, creating what is a currency anyways. What is money? What is hard money? And how does the world economics work? That's his background as a kid. So, on top of that...

Sam Parr

How old is he now, by the way?

Shaan Puri

Mid to late thirties is his age now. He works for Blockstream and he's very close to that guy, Adam Back. Adam would have been one of the people that he would collaborate with after greatness. Now, the most damning thing is, the documentary confronts him on live...

Sam Parr

And by the way, imagine being 39 and having this documentary come out about you, accusing you of being the richest person in the world and of inventing this amazing thing. There's one part of you that's like, "Oh man, I want all the credit. I want all of this." But then there's the other part where you're like, "Well, if I'm not it, should I say I am? Should I be it?" There's also...

Shaan Puri

A very irresponsible part of this, let's say this documentary is wrong. I mean, you just painted it; you just ruined a guy's life basically. If people believe that you're Satoshi, your life immediately is in danger. People think that you're one of the wealthiest people on earth. Every age, government agency, every government, you know, wants to sort of take you to the back room and talk to you... and sometimes worse, right? So, like, if he is Satoshi, I think it's a very bad thing for him. I almost feel bad bringing it up, but I think we, you know, we gotta talk about it. I needed to hear your reaction to this, and obviously it's out. I'm not the one, you know, putting this out there; it's out now. So just watch this video and tell me.

Sam Parr

What do you think? Alright?

Shaan Puri

So, you reach out to your old buddy Adam back. You say, "We need to do something about this, but we need to pay the devs." However, you can't join blockchain because it would look too suspicious.

Sam Parr

Okay, so I just watched this clip. First of all, this is definitely editorial; it's very opinionated versus factual. This guy, so basically, is a tall, nerdy guy with his hands in his pockets. He's doing exactly what I am accused of doing all the time when I'm nervous, which is I rock back and forth.

Shaan Puri

Fidget... I shift, shifty eyes. I immediately look at the friend who I'm in on it with. By the way, that guy Adam in the back, who's his friend, is the other kind of collaborator on this thing. He's silent the entire time, like frozen. This is because the director sort of sprung this on them. They didn't come out here to talk about that, right? They're doing this walkthrough in this ruins area or whatever, supposed to talk about whatever. Then the director sort of does a "gotcha" moment, and this is their reaction.

Sam Parr

Dude, alright, so he's got his hands in his pockets and he's rocking back and forth. I had to officiate a wedding last week, and Sarah was like, "I could tell you're nervous. No one else knew you were nervous, but I knew you were nervous." I was like, "How?" She goes, "You're rocking back and forth. You kept doing that thing where you rock back and forth." I do it all the time. This guy's doing that exact same thing. He's very clearly uncomfortable, and he's got a very awkward smile. This is... it's a yeah, he didn't respond well, but you could also say like...

Shaan Puri

You could chalk that up to every Bitcoiner. Yeah, there are doors in a social situation.

Sam Parr

They can't make eye contact. Like, that's why they're amazing. You can't be this and also have good eye contact.

Shaan Puri

You can't.

Sam Parr

You can't have both. So, what do you think? Is this the guy?

Shaan Puri

So, I don't know if this is the guy or not, but it is probably one of the most compelling things. It's funny how it's being so discredited by the community. So, either I'm missing something—which is entirely possible—or it's sort of wishful thinking because, like, it's much better if he's not Satoshi. I don't think the evidence is super strong, but it's a very compelling theory. That's kind of where I've landed. It's a compelling theory about this guy who, clearly at 15 or 16, was brilliant and thinking specifically about the double spend problem. Then he talks and comes out with this forum post, which has very interesting timing, right when it happens. The way it's written is intriguing, and then the guy disappears. By the way, this guy also disappeared for two years after that in the Bitcoin forum. He doesn't participate and says, "Oh, I was busy. I was a student, blah blah blah. I should have been more interested in Bitcoin; I just wasn't." Then, when he comes back, he actually does this thing called "replace by fee," which is basically a mechanism where you could pay a little extra to get your transaction done faster. This is actually one of the useful patches to Bitcoin. So, he comes back and contributes this useful patch to the Bitcoin code. In this thing, his nervous answer is basically like, "What? Me? Oh yeah, yeah, I'm totally sedentary. I mean, that's crazy. Why are you saying that? You're going to look really stupid if you release this." It's like those are things I do when I'm trapped in a lie. Maybe I'm projecting here.

Sam Parr

Did he imply something earlier in his career before Satoshi existed that he liked that name or was tied to that name? You alluded to something about the name Satoshi Nakamoto. What do you mean by that?

Shaan Puri

There was no evidence on that. The evidence was basically the combination of evidence from that forum post and the timing of both of their disappearances. It's him, you know, when he's 15 or 16 years old on the forums. It's kind of like his spelling and writing style. Even the way he punctuates, where it's like the two spaces after the "o u r" things that a lot of people do. But they all fit with this guy.

Sam Parr

Did Hal Finney write like Satoshi?

Shaan Puri

No, they've looked at Hal Finney's code and then Satoshi's code. But then, you know, there's an answer for everything. "Oh, he's so brilliant! He knew to modify the code into a different style," right? There's an answer for everything. It's like all conspiracies; it's sort of what you choose to believe or what you choose to not believe.

Sam Parr

That's pretty hard. I actually think that, like, when I used to write under fake names, like in fake blog posts, I remember trying to change how I was writing. I thought, "This is really challenging. Everyone's going to know this is me." I used to write fake blogs; I had pseudonyms that I would just fill my blog with. So, that's a pretty compelling piece of evidence, actually, if you ask me.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and like I want to be super clear: I don't know the answer. I'm not saying I believe this or I don't believe this. I'm saying this is the most interesting theory on Satoshi. Over the years, there have been many theories, including the time when, like, I forgot if it was the New Yorker or the New York Post that chased down that random Asian guy and was like, "It's him! Dorian Nakamoto! This is the guy!" And he's like, "What?" He didn't know where he was and basically had his life ruined for like 48 hours. You know, there have been many theories over the years. This might be just another harebrained theory, but I would say it's the most interesting one in a few years to me. As somebody who is just fascinated by the story, I badly want to know. But I also understand that it would be much better to never know—for all of us to never know. And for whoever it is, you know, I think they had a great contribution to the world. Their wish was to be anonymous, and I think that should be respected. I think whoever Satoshi is, is in extreme danger once they get outed, if it ever does get outed.

Sam Parr

In terms of the Olympics or the Hall of Fame of stories, like JFK is up in there. The JFK assassination—who did it? I think actually this story is on par with that. Do you know what I mean?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. You used the word "intoxicating." It's like these rabbit holes that just kind of make you wonder, and you keep going back to them. You know, aliens, certain assassinations, and then there's this one...

Sam Parr

This, like, it kind of keeps me up at night, to be honest. I don't even give a shit about Bitcoin, but I think that it's just like... I think that what it's rooted in, potentially, is how one person had such an impact and was so brilliant. I think that if you read *American Kingpin* about Ross Ulbricht, Ross had the same exact style. It was very romantic. It was very, "I want to get behind you; it's us versus the world. We are on a path to greatness." That whole concept was something Ross had as well. Even though he did a lot of really bad stuff, you kind of want to get behind it because you're like, "Yeah, that's just the price that we pay to be James Bond. We kill bad guys." So, like, the exception...

Shaan Puri

Ross might have been a bad guy. He might have been the bad guy in...

Sam Parr

This case, he... he did a lot of... I think that you can do good things and bad things, but I think he actually did... I think that he should be in jail for a long time because he tried to kill many people.

Shaan Puri

Breaking Bad, where you're rooting for Walt, even though you're like, "Wait, I think this guy is now a drug kingpin who's killing people."

Sam Parr

I'm still with...

Shaan Puri

This guy.

Sam Parr

I mean, it's like Tony Soprano. You want to like Tony, but then you're like, "Dude, you suck." You're a bad husband and you kill people. Just because you're funny doesn't mean I should think you're an amazing person.

Shaan Puri

Can I make a one-minute Bitcoin case right now?

Sam Parr

Are you back?

Shaan Puri

I mean, why am I back? I've been here.

Sam Parr

No, you haven't been here.

Shaan Puri

You haven't been here.

Sam Parr

Your interest has ebbed and flowed from the topic.

Shaan Puri

The conviction hasn't ebbed and flowed. It's like, how much new information is there to pay attention to? It's in the same way that I'm not like, "Oh my God, the internet is amazing." It's like, yeah, I kind of know the internet's amazing. I made that decision a long time ago, and I just use it. You know, like, I'm in, I'm in, I'm in. I've been in. I've been right. Versus when it first came out, it's like every new thing is new, right?

Sam Parr

It was very exciting. But yeah, what's your one minute?

Shaan Puri

The one minute... this is from the beginning with Bitcoin. There's always been these big risks and big question marks. So once you sort of accept that there's merit to having a hard currency, meaning having a currency that doesn't get inflated, the way I look at it is Bitcoin's a savings technology. People think Bitcoin's going to make them rich. Actually, the true purpose of Bitcoin is a store of value, meaning it's meant to keep you rich. I don't know if you've ever seen the charts of like, you know, if your great grandparent or whatever, 100 years ago, had left you a $1,000,000 fortune. It would be worth, you know, only 3% of what they left, right? It'd be worth $30 today.

Sam Parr

Right.

Shaan Puri

And so, just in 100 years, at the targeted inflation or the actual inflation in the United States, your money is going to be cut in half roughly every 30 years.

Sam Parr

Yeah, if you left it in cash.

Shaan Puri

Correct, correct. Yeah, the currency itself... I'm saying, like, if you just said, "I feel safer just with the good old U.S. dollar in the bank account," it's a bowl of ice cream that's melting by design. Yeah, yeah.

Sam Parr

Yeah, because on average, roughly 3% a year, it gets devalued. So, a real...

Shaan Puri

And that's not a conspiracy theory. That is the target. Inflation is 2 or 3%. Sometimes it's higher, like it's been, but the goal for them is to inflate it by 2 or 3% a year. This means that by design, 2 or 3% a year means that in 30 years, you're going to have whatever half.

Sam Parr

Of what's... yeah, understood.

Shaan Puri

So, one generation... okay, if you want to believe that there's merit to just like, "Well, I'd rather save." It's like, "I'd rather have a phone whose battery doesn't drain." I'd rather save my money in a currency that is not designed to inflate. You might say, "Well, there's still a leap of faith," which is: will this be a thing? Currency only matters if a bunch of people believe in it. That's the only question.

Sam Parr

Is Bitcoin even a currency? Of course! I mean, is the definition of a currency liquidity? Is it or not? Liquidity is the ability for a lot of people to spend it.

Shaan Puri

A better way of saying it is, "It's money." So, it's a money asset. Well, money has three jobs: 1. **Store of value** - meaning I have to believe that if I go out and work hard every day and I get paid in this thing, that this thing is going to be valuable tomorrow or the next day.

Sam Parr

Or tomorrow, a collective buy-in, correct?

Shaan Puri

And that's the first stage. Then, after it's already accepted by many people as valuable—like the way gold is accepted by many people as valuable—it can be used as a medium of exchange. This means that I'm willing to trade it back and forth with people because I know they believe it's valuable. I believe it's valuable, and they're going to believe it's going to be valuable. They know that the next person they want to spend with thinks it's going to be valuable. So, once we all buy into the idea that it's valuable, then it's usable as a medium of exchange. That part hasn't happened yet. The final stage is once we're all using it as a medium of exchange, we price things in it. That's called the unit of account. So, those are the three phases of something becoming valuable.

Sam Parr

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

A true, you know, useful currency today is Bitcoin. It is basically completing stage 1, where the bulk of the world and the majority have flipped to believe that Bitcoin is valuable. You can see that in the price: $60,000. You can also see that in who owns it—wealthy individuals, you know, wealthy folks.

Sam Parr

How many human beings own one Bitcoin or own some Bitcoin?

Shaan Puri

I don't know the number of active wallets now, and the hard part is that one person can have multiple wallets. But it's over 100 million for sure; it's in the hundreds of millions.

Sam Parr

Of people? Well, then I think it's a stretch to say that.

Shaan Puri

Bought into the system.

Sam Parr

It's a stretch to say everyone agrees that it's.

Shaan Puri

What I mean is, obviously not everybody—so not 8 billion people on Earth own this. 8 billion people also don't own dollars, right? That's also not the case. But for hundreds of millions of people to have active wallets with value in them is a big deal. I mean, that's a humongous number. So anyway, that's how the currency works. The case for Bitcoin right now is that over time, there have always been two big risks. The first risk is that the government is just going to shut this down. The smart guy case was, "Look, you might be right that this is better than gold. You might be right that it's more secure than gold, that it's easier to transport than gold, and that it's more programmable money. I get all that. But look, the government’s not going to go down without a fight. Their biggest stranglehold on power is that they own the guns and the money. You can't take one of their two big powers away." They might still have the guns, but if they lose their ability to control the money supply, no government is going to allow that. For a while, it looked like China tried to ban it and did try to ban it, but Bitcoin was pretty resilient. Now, you have in this election, for example, both of the candidates are pro-crypto. Donald Trump is very pro-crypto, and Kamala has now realized it is now political. She's supposed to be anti-crazy, which is insane.

Sam Parr

It's crazy. They're both on the circuit. That's why. Alright, I talked to...

Shaan Puri

Speaking at the Bitcoin conference, Kamala stopped saying she's going to kill crypto.

Sam Parr

Well, dude, I talked to our mutual friend who owns a crypto-related media business. He was like, "All these politicians want to talk to me now. It's insane!" They want to speak at our events. They want to do all this stuff. They need us now. They want to participate; they want to be part of the conversation. And that's insane to me. I mean, in a good way, I think. But that's wild that these people want that.

Shaan Puri

I mean, Trump has literally said, in very Trump fashion, "Maybe we'll do bitcoins and that'll pay the debt." Right? He's like, "Maybe we'll just buy some bitcoins and that'll pay everything off." The government is now pro-crypto. They've realized it is political suicide to be anti-crypto because there are too many Americans who have wealth. If you say, "We're gonna either block this, ban this, or confiscate this," that means something to too many Americans. So now, you can't politically be in a position where you're going to shut down or kill crypto, specifically Bitcoin. That's a huge change from like 5 to 8 years ago, and I feel like nobody's really giving that enough credit. One of the biggest risks was that the U.S. government was never going to go for this, and now they're pro-crypto. That's crazy. The second thing is, you know, there are all these clips of Jamie Dimon and BlackRock and all these people just criticizing Bitcoin, calling it the dumbest thing. They said, "You're idiots if you want to go lose your money, go do this." And now, they're the biggest custodians and the biggest salesmen of Bitcoin.

Sam Parr

Dude, aren't they so full of shit, man? It's just funny how... I guess everyone deserves the right to change their opinion once they gather new information, but there it really is.

Shaan Puri

Are very big. So, here's the consequences of that. About a week ago, BlackRock released a presentation discussing why Bitcoin is better than gold. It's literally the same slides that crypto anarchists were using 10 years ago. It's like, "Here's Bitcoin compared to gold." Gold, you can't carry it easily. You can't easily divide it. Gold's not actually that scarce; we can always find more. Bitcoin has a fixed supply. So, all of the old arguments are now on a roadshow to wealthy people and financial advisors. They're training financial advisors and their clients that a healthy portfolio has 1 to 5% Bitcoin in it. They're recommending it as the smart move, the wise move to make. They're on a roadshow because they make a bunch of money. They're incentivized to do this because they make a bunch of money. The fastest growing ETF product in the world is Bitcoin. I think the Bitcoin ETFs are now at some insane number.

Sam Parr

Why do you need a Bitcoin ETF?

Shaan Puri

So, the Bitcoin ETF is one of the other big counterpoints. It’s just too complicated. My mom and dad are never going to go download a wallet off this thing and figure out their private key. They’re going to be afraid to lose it. Okay, Coinbase is easier, but they don’t open up new accounts. They just invest out of their 401(k) or whatever. So, the reason an ETF matters is that now everybody who’s got an account with whoever it is—Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, or Nationwide—can invest more easily.

Sam Parr

Whoever... so funny. I just googled "crypto ETF" or "Bitcoin ETF," and there's a website for Fidelity. It just says it's an ad that Fidelity is running to get me to click on, and it's about their crypto fund on a Fidelity website. Looks interesting.

Shaan Puri

Like life.

Sam Parr

Insurance is funny.

Shaan Puri

It's just like a funny, loving family, hugging and embracing. They're like, "Our future is pure."

Sam Parr

This is like...

Shaan Puri

Like, shit like that.

Sam Parr

This is like Walmart buying the Supreme brand.

Shaan Puri

Dude, come on.

Sam Parr

This is lame.

Shaan Puri

Everybody is incentivized to do it. Meaning, the president's like, "Yo, if we're pro crypto, we unlock crypto donation dollars and this voting block." So they're like, "Alright, politically we're now incentivized to do this." BlackRock's like, "Yo, how much money can be made with this?" Right? There's $61 billion that the ETF has had put into management in the last, like, you know... yeah, but it's...

Sam Parr

Legal for about six months.

Shaan Puri

Or so, it's pretty lame though, right? They get a 1% fee for doing it, then they sell this as a product, as an upsell to people. Now, anybody in their retirement accounts or their stock trading accounts can push one button and own Bitcoin without ever having to deal with custodian issues, or the private keys, or your wallet, or losing your hard drive, or any of that stuff. So yes, it's lame because it's not cool anymore. I mean, it's not cool and edgy and alternative, but the whole thing goes to this adoption phase, right? And that's going more mainstream. So I think, what's my... I cannot believe, as somebody who's been watching this thing for probably 10 or 11 years, it was unfathomable 10 years ago to think that not only would Bitcoin be $60,000 a coin— that would have already blown my mind 10 years ago— but on top of that, the presidents are going to be using this in their campaigns. They're going to say this is a good idea. They're going to talk about having a little bit of it on the nation's balance sheet. Corporations are going to own this thing. BlackRock, Larry Fink, and Jamie Dimon, that's going to be their hero product. It's their hero SKU now, and you're just going to be able to click a button and buy it as an ETF. All of that is unbelievable to me, and I feel like people really have not grasped how, once you do that, you can't unwind it. So once everybody owns it in their ETFs or their retirement accounts, what are they going to do? You can't... it's too embedded in the system at that point.

Shaan Puri

You can't... you can't rip it out. Its tentacles are too deep.

Sam Parr

Dude, listen to this. This is kind of indicative of where Bitcoin was going. It's kind of silly. So, I've mentioned that I moved to a small town outside of New York City in Connecticut. My town is very much what you would picture of Connecticut. The other day, I went to this fancy Ralph Lauren store, and they asked me, "Where do you live?" I replied, "I live where these clothes were designed to be worn." There are literally polo fields in my neighborhood, and there's a rowing club next to my house. You're on the river, rowing crew, which, growing up in Missouri, that's like the richest kid, yuppie bullshit ever.

Shaan Puri

Right.

Sam Parr

But I was interested in it, and I went to this rowing club to see if I could sign up for lessons. I saw a Bitcoin book in the lobby of the rowing club. So, a rowing club is basically just like a gym, but instead of just weights, there are areas to row. I saw this Bitcoin book and thought, "Wait, what the hell? Why is this Bitcoin book here?" Then I started walking around and noticed a case full of trophies from high school students who graduated from this rowing club and did well in high school, winning championships and whatever. There was a picture of these two guys who were 18 and looked like huge, strapping dudes. I thought, "You've got to be kidding me! Why do you have a picture of the Winklevoss twins here?" They told me, "Oh, their father owns this place. When they were young and into rowing, he built this rowing club so they could have a place to go." I realized, "That's why you have the Bitcoin book!" They said, "Yeah, I don't remember if they wrote the book or if it was written about them, but their father is proud, so he just has their book in the lobby." I thought that was so funny. So, this rowing club was founded by the Winklevoss father, Wink... whatever. And it's like, it doesn't...

Shaan Puri

It seems like they would totally call their dad "father."

Sam Parr

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Shaan Puri

I'm going to demand that my kids call me "Father" because I feel like that's just like 25 prestige points in life.

Sam Parr

Dude, I tell my little daughter, whenever we FaceTime Grandma, I go, "That's your grandmother."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, that's wild! That's so funny. You live the most preppy life now.

Sam Parr

Yeah, you know what? Embrace it. It's kinda fun, if I'm being honest. I enjoy it. But dude, this Bitcoin stuff... I wouldn't say I'm exactly a hater of it, but I love poking holes in it because I think that's just a fun position to have in this whole conversation. For this podcast, I wanted to be back. I had so much fun hearing these stories. I think it's the stories and the drama regarding this whole community that are so cool. It's like an all-time great story. Just some dork invented this stuff, some nerd called the cyberpunk, and now Fidelity has, you know, however many tens of thousands of employees, and the most amount of money in the world is all rallying around this. I think that is such an exciting story. There's yet to be a great movie about this, and I think it's too hard of a story to tell. There need to be only a couple of storylines for this movie, but I'm really excited for something like that. Frankly, I wanna go and read more books on the topic because every book I've read about Bitcoin has been thrilling.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, well, it depends. Do you want the thriller or do you want the theory? Right? There's like...

Sam Parr

No, no, I don't want that. I just want to know about somebody who died or about sex, death, and war. Like, you know, rebels doing shit. That's what I want, okay?

Shaan Puri

Fair enough, fair enough. Then you might like this documentary. I don't know, we'll see. What is that though? The best one of that is there's a documentary about this business called Quadriga. Did you ever watch this one? No? What's that? It's the best murder mystery. Crazy, like just insane, batshit crazy, scammy movie about crypto.

Sam Parr

Oh, is this the guy who died? "Trust no one." The guy who died in India. And they're like, "Dude, did you fake your death?" And like, the Indian doctor... we already talked about it. The Indian doctor faked the autopsy.

Shaan Puri

Well, they don't know. That's a theory, right? So, yeah, it's called *Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King*. That's probably the most thriller version of a crypto movie that I've seen.

Sam Parr

Dude, I just watched this one about these kids from Long Island who moved to Miami. They came up with some ICO scam, and they document this guy as he's telling his story. Coincidentally, he's also still on trial, so you could see him going through the trial and then eventually getting acquitted. We talked about this particular guy. We're like, he was posting pictures of his abs and his Ferrari on his Instagram. We're like, "Dude, if you have abs and perfect teeth and you're also in the crypto community, you can't be trusted." And like Floyd Mayweather and other guys backed his stuff, and we're like, "This is a complete scam." But he still walked away with potentially tens of millions of dollars and got away with it. He didn't go to prison. Did you see that one?

Shaan Puri

I didn't see that one. No, the kind of the ICO, you know, kids with Lambos version of it. I just hate them so much that it's such a turnoff. I can't bring myself to watch it. But when it's like this kind of ideological rebel person who is more like a selfless figure—maybe evil, maybe genius—it's hard to say. Is he just misunderstood, or is he actually just playing all of us? That's really kind of the sweet spot for me with the crypto crime stuff. Crypto could basically have its own true crime index, right? Because there have been so many issues. I don't like the 18-year-old TikTok NFT doc.

Sam Parr

Because that's just a straight scam. That story is so easy.

Shaan Puri

Art to that.

Sam Parr

There's no... yeah, there's like...

Shaan Puri

The Sam Bankman-Fried thing is so interesting because not only is he like an enigma, but he also looks the part, yet he doesn't. Then he did something crazy, but it's unclear why he did it. He actually had a business that would have made him a billionaire many times over. That was like the scam with FTX. Wasn't it that the demand and the customers were fake? The demand and the customers were real; it's just that he took the customer money and gambled on it. You know, he used it for crazy donations to build power and to put in his hedge fund to run up the balance on that side. It was just an unnecessary risk. So, the fascinating thing about that is: why did this guy even do that? He didn't need to do that. He had the real win, and he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in that case.

Sam Parr

How about if I told you, three years ago, when SBF was still considered legit, that he and Diddy are in prison together? Is that the craziest turn of events?

Shaan Puri

It's really insane, like...

Sam Parr

Diddy and SPF are like...

Shaan Puri

Have you ever told the SPF FTX story with Milk Road? What happened?

Sam Parr

How they advertised with you, and they were late to pay.

Shaan Puri

No, no, no. They weren't late to pay. We used to do something called "deep dives," which is basically like if one of our ad products was, "If you pay us a ton of money, we will do a report on you." But the catch was, we're going to do the report we actually want to do. You don't get to say what we say in the report. With FTX, it's like a no-brainer. They're the richest player, and there are a bunch of good things to say, so it seemed like it was going to be a win-win. They pay us a bunch of money, or they told us they were going to pay us a bunch of money, and then we go write the report. In the report, you know, I was trying to... I think I was writing it myself, or me and Ben were writing it. I don't remember exactly what the case was, but I was involved with it. I remember we were thinking about, "Okay, what's the devil's advocate? What doesn't smell right about this?" Because you have to have the counterpoint. And not even just to rip on them, but having a counterpoint—acknowledging the counterpoint—honestly makes the...

Shaan Puri

Stronger. So, even if we were trying to say something positive, which was that they were super fast-growing and they had this really aggressive marketing strategy that was working, we were still like, "What's the counterpoint?" The counterpoint was the guy we had met who was the Chief Strategy Officer. He was 24 years old, and we were like, "Wow, that's so impressive! How did this kid become the Chief Strategy Officer of this, at that time, $20 billion company?"

Sam Parr

I never know exactly where the story's going.

Shaan Puri

And so we were like, "Yeah, actually, a lot of the execs are kind of young, just like their friends." But okay, Facebook looked that way too early on. You know, okay, interesting. Maybe a good thing, maybe a bad thing. Then we were like, "Yeah, it's unclear the connection between Alameda, their hedge fund, and FTX." So we wrote that in there. We said, "One thing that's not clear is what is the relationship between these two parties and is there a firewall?" There was some speculation that it wasn't just that FTX was siphoning the money and giving it to Alameda, and then Alameda was gambling and losing it. It was that Alameda had insider info and they were front-running. That's kind of what people thought. So we wrote that in there, and they asked us to take it out. We were like, "Nah, we're not going to take that out." They said, "Okay, then just hold on to this." We were like, "Cool, but you paid us already, so what do you want to do?" Then they just never replied again. We were like, "Okay, I think they paid us like half of the amount." I remember them checking in every few months, asking, "Hey, are you ready for us to release this yet or no?" And they were like, "No." I was like, "Okay, didn't think too much of it, moved on with our lives." Then sure enough, that connection was sort of unclear, and you know, there were some potential issues that turned out to be a very, very big problem actually.

Sam Parr

And does SBF like being in prison? How's he holding up? Is he still eating just peanut butter? His whole thing is that he only consumes peanut butter in prison because he's a vegan.

Shaan Puri

I think he was sentenced to 25 years, but I don't believe he's going to serve the whole time. I don't know how the whole system works.

Sam Parr

Well, no. If you get sentenced for federal crimes, a lot of people say, "Oh, you got sentenced to 20 years, you're only going to do 10." But for federal crimes, I think the maximum amount it can ever get reduced is 10 or 15%. I mean, maybe 10%. So if you get sentenced to 20 years, you're just serving 18 or something like that. It's a huge deal. This is not like a... and I think the prison he's at is like a... it's a big boy prison. This is not particularly a fun thing, right? There's this idea of white-collar crime. I talked to a guy whose uncle got sentenced for a white-collar crime, and he served 18 years. He told me he would visit his uncle, and he was like, "Yeah, I mean, when you say the word white-collar crime, you kind of think it's cushy." It was kind of that, but like, it's prison. Bad stuff would happen, and you're confined all the time. It's really bad. I don't think SBF is in that type of prison anyway; he's in a real prison.

Shaan Puri

Right.

Sam Parr

Like a prison where for that... yeah, yeah.

Shaan Puri

Do you have... have you ever watched the show *The Night Of*?

Sam Parr

No, what's that?

Shaan Puri

Oh dude, amazing show! I think it's on Showtime or HBO, *The Night Of*. It's just an awesome show. One of the things that I really liked about it is that they showed almost like the actual legal system at work. It's almost painful to watch the whole legal and prison system as the story plays out. But they don't fast forward the way a lot of movies and shows do. It's like, there's the crime, and then there's the courtroom where one lawyer is giving one dramatic speech and the other lawyer is giving another dramatic speech. Whereas this one actually shows the real deal. Holy field! We have the first hearing, okay? The appeal is going to be in three months, and he's back to jail for three months. He's waiting, waiting, waiting, and just going through it. It's just extremely well made and an awesome show to watch.

Sam Parr

It takes forever. This stuff takes forever, which kind of boggles my mind a little bit about why. And then you could push things for a long time. So, you remember Elizabeth Holmes? When she got in trouble, I think it was many years after the actual stuff went down that the trial actually happened.

Shaan Puri

Maternity leave from prison. Remember, she started having babies and she just had two babies back to back and kept pushing it off.

Sam Parr

That's what happens when you wear Ralph Lauren and look like you live in Connecticut. You could take maternity leave from prison. I think that's one of the perks; she took advantage of that privilege.

Shaan Puri

We didn't mean to make this the Bitcoin episode, but an hour has flown by.

Sam Parr

Once you said the magic word, I was in. So, I'm happy that it became that, to be honest. Alright, that's it. That's a problem.