Unmasking the Creator of Bitcoin

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroff. This is The Daily. It's been one of the world's biggest mysteries and best kept secrets. Who is the inventor of Bitcoin? This is a person who's been known only by an alias, Satoshi Nakamoto. And despite many attempts to unmask him, he's remained anonymous for seventeen years even as his creation spawned a whole system of cryptocurrency, revolutionized finance, and minted a powerful new class of billionaires, including Satoshi himself. Today, we talked to our colleague, John Carreyrou, who says he thinks he found Satoshi. And then we talk directly to that person. It's Thursday, April 9. Hi, John. Welcome to the studio. Thanks for having me. John, you've just finished this truly extraordinary investigation, and I am obsessed with it. I can't stop thinking about it. It is incredible. Thank you. So I wanna start with a really basic question. What percent convinced are you that you have identified Satoshi Nakamoto? Somewhere between 99.5% and a 100%. Okay. That's pretty good. So say why that matters. The inventor of Bitcoin, known as Satoshi Nakamoto, has been unmasked after all these years. Well, I think Bitcoin, it's fair to say, is one of the greatest financial innovations of the past few decades. It's created this new currency. It's made the concept of a decentralized currency on the Internet that is available all over the world that can bypass governments and banks possible. It spawned a 2,400,000,000,000 industry. Woah. And I think it's in the public interest to know who is behind this. Who is this person who has upended our financial landscape? What was motivating him? What caused him to create this decentralized electronic currency? I wanna know. And just talk about Satoshi, the alias of the founder of Bitcoin and the long history of these efforts to identify who he is. Satoshi Nakamoto appeared on the Internet in late two thousand eight when he announced his white paper, which is this nine page academic like document that outlines how Bitcoin works. He then stuck around for two and a half years under that pseudonym to improve upon the software and perfect it with a group of early adopters. And then suddenly, in April 2011, he disappeared. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? And shortly thereafter, efforts began to figure out who he was. The so called founders of decision that could be behind the The Ben Bernanke of Bitcoin. No one actually knows who that is, whether it's a man or a woman or even a group of people. Who is Satoshi? People have spent not just journalists, but academics, Internet sleuths have spent the past seventeen years trying to unmask this guy. We know that the real Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't want to be found. So if he is And no one had succeeded. What made you decide to pick this up and spend a year plus on this? I've been fascinated with this for a long time, for probably more than …