00:00 Speaker A

The search for Bitcoin’s creator seems to be far from over. Yahoo Finance’s David Hollerith joins me now with a closer look.

00:09 Speaker A

So, David, this comes from a very long New York Times piece about one Adam Back. And this guy, he might not be a household name, uh but he was a legend. He has been a legend in computer science and cryptography circles for a long time. I remember I had a computer science professor in the ’90s talking about him. So, what what is the evidence here?

00:36 David Hollerith

Oh, yeah. Um, so it is a 10,000 word investigation, so uh plenty of reading, but it’s it’s fun to read.

00:42 Speaker A

Yes, it is.

00:43 David Hollerith

Um so I I recommend it. Um I I would say the evidence, the way they’re looking at it, um is they used it was actually um uh they used a a they compiled a database based around um these mailing lists that um people believe um and have good reason to believe that uh Satoshi Nakamoto, um one, he posted on some of them but was a reader and sort of part of this online community. This was through the ’90s and 2000s, um even after Bitcoin was created. Um so it’s three different mailing lists. And um out of that, uh they have they compiled a list of about, you know, thousands of of subscribers, people who were commenting. And um they did sort of like an AI analysis of all the correspondence that was going in um through, you know, at least three decade, two or three decades of correspondence about um right different writing styles. And what they found was that um Adam Back’s uh certain writing ticks most closely resembled uh Satoshi Nakamoto’s.

01:52 Speaker A

Yeah, pretty interesting there. Uh, I’m what if we spend a lot of time, you know, just as journalists asking this question, I think it’s because Bitcoin has become such a huge phenomenon, but it also because of the money involved. Satoshi Nakamoto, this unmasked giant, has a huge Bitcoin stash worth potentially billions of dollars. And, you know, if you find the guy, does it make a difference at all with respect to the price of Bitcoin? I guess that’s where I’m going.

02:27 David Hollerith

Totally. I I mean, I think that like at the highest level, there’s just a fascination for people to understand this. I mean, Satoshi’s sort of a mythic character in terms of crypto. And it’s now a 2.4 or 2.4 trillion dollar industry in general. And he was the creator of that, but he also owns a a a a wallet. There’s a wallet in connection with with him that um has gone dormant. It’s uh about 1.1 million Bitcoins. Um which is

03:07 Speaker A

Yeah, you multiply that by whatever, 75,000, whatever the current price is, that’s how much it is now.

03:11 David Hollerith

Yeah, it’s about 43% more than uh Microstrategy, which is like the known largest holder of Bitcoin. So whoever has control over that wallet could do, um, you know, could completely change the crypto market depending on what they wanted to do with it, or build a huge crypto empire, you know, however you think about it. And the whole thing is that uh that wallet has been left dormant. Um, now the interesting thing here that shows up in the investigation is I thought it was kind of funny is that um, when um, the New York Times approaches Adam Back, um for a second time in an interview, he is about to launch a Bitcoin Treasury company, which is yet to go public, but it but is in the process of going public. And because of security laws, you know, because of non-public information, he can’t say anything like if he were to be Satoshi Nakamoto, that would be extremely material information.

04:00 Speaker A

Yes.

04:00 David Hollerith

Um so he was nervous about that, understandably. Uh and not to say that he was or wasn’t, but just even the implication that he might be. Um so that was kind of a little funny side take and and you know, they had uh they’ve been doing the investigation for about 18 months and they just weren’t aware that that had happened because the whole uh Bitcoin Treasury phenomenon had been going on for, you know, less time than that.

04:22 Speaker A

Uh David, so we still don’t know. That’s the bottom line here. Uh still worth the read uh for anybody out there. I suggest it. But do you think we ever find definitive proof of Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity?

04:29 David Hollerith

It’s a good question. I would I would honestly say that this uh might be the most definitive yet. Um so this is

04:36 Speaker A

As far as uh the weight of evidence goes, everything everybody’s found so far, it does point to back here.

04:38 David Hollerith

I I I think so. Um but it’s maybe not enough to prove him.

04:41 Speaker A

Okay. All right, thank you for that, David.