Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? It’s a mystery that has vexed the internet since long before crypto went mainstream, via Silicon Valley bros and that weird period where celebrities got really into NFTs. Finding out the identity of the person who designed bitcoin – the decentralised, multitrillion-dollar currency – would be a big (and potentially dangerous) deal. Think WikiLeaks, if Julian Assange was also a potential kidnapping target with a handsome digital ransom fee. It is also – you may be unsurprised to hear – a mystery that this digital two-parter from Channel 4 does not get to the bottom of. At the outset, its journalist host, Gabriel Gatehouse (known for the BBC’s Trump podcast, The Coming Storm), warns viewers that: “The film you’re about to watch – in fact, this whole series – consists almost entirely of middle-aged white guys talking about tech”, as their middle-aged, white-guy faces flash up on screen. That wouldn’t be so much of an issue if any of these “cypherpunk” pioneers – or Gatehouse himself – had anything to say that hadn’t already been debunked on Reddit.
It’s not the interviewees’ fault. Gatehouse blames a possible omertà code for their silence, but with Satoshi potentially a target for all manner of cartels, criminals and governments, why would any of these computer scientists – namely fellow Briton Adam Back, who ducks and dives away from Gatehouse at a conference in Miami – give anything away? In lieu of revelations, we get an Adam Curtis-inspired visual treatment to distract us – all film noir clips juxtaposed with old cartoons and animations of faceless automatons marching in lockstep.
Satoshi isn’t interesting because he invented a new type of money, says Gatehouse, but because of what he was trying to do with it. We don’t exactly nail down what that is, either, but we do get lots of tangents into transhumanism, and the Bryan Johnson-esque bros fuelled by gene therapy injections, who want to run countries like private businesses. Manbunned nepo baby Patri Friedman – grandson of Milton, the Nobel prize-winning economist – is one such bro, who thinks humans should live for 80 to 160 years, and says that anyone who thinks otherwise is “advocating for mass murder”. He meets Gatehouse at a libertarian city powered by bitcoin and populated by “international frontier tech entrepreneurs”, off the coast of Honduras. There’s a story about how they got there – via a corrupt, drug-pushing president – that sounds enticing, but it’s one Gatehouse doesn’t dwell on.
But hold on – what’s all this got to do with Satoshi? It’s not until halfway through the second episode that we get back to that big mystery: just who is the bitcoin creator, and could Satoshi even be a collective of tech nerds who banded together to further obfuscate their identities? There’s another suspect, Len Sassaman, but – like many of the people mentioned in this series – he’s already dead and, er, was unlikely to have the technical nous to pull it off. The trail runs cold again.
Gatehouse seems like a lovely man, and it brings me no pleasure to lay into a show he has clearly laboured over. But Seeking Satoshi is unmistakably thin, the TV equivalent of a Zoom call that could have been an email. At one point, Gatehouse even recruits his mum to give him a pep talk. She, too, seems lovely. But she is not Satoshi. Not only has a lot of this material been raked over by the internet, but unluckily for Gatehouse it was also raked over very recently by HBO. Its bitcoin documentary, Money Electric, wasn’t much better, but it at least illuminated a key question those of us coming to the topic with limited knowledge might appreciate: namely, how does bitcoin actually work? Here, the technical explanations feel tacked on, neglected in lieu of pursuing another reluctant interviewee on a travelator.
As the second episode ends, we circle back to that search for immortality, with a visit to a cryonics facility where the frozen head of one of the suspects, Hal Finney – who died in 2014 – is preserved in liquid nitrogen. I was worried that Gatehouse was going to ask to unfreeze Finney for an interview, but thankfully he stopped short of that. Instead, we are treated to another tangent about the wild things the wealthy will do for eternal life. As we close with stock footage of Trump and Elon Musk and a warning that “the future belongs to them” (that is, the cypherpunks, who are also increasingly influential in the world of politics), it feels less of a gripping hunt and more a depressing bump back down to earth.
