Sam and Shaan dive into the HBO documentary that claims to have unmasked Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s anonymous creator. Shaan walks through the full Bitcoin origin story — the double-spend problem, the 2008 white paper, early forum posts, and why Satoshi disappeared — before breaking down the documentary’s case for Peter Todd as Satoshi. The conversation then broadens into Bitcoin as a savings technology, the shift of politicians and Wall Street firms to pro-crypto positions, the FTX/SBF story, and other crypto crime narratives.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
The HBO Documentary That Thinks It Found Satoshi [00:00:00]
Shaan: Okay, so maybe they found Satoshi Nakamoto. Which is exciting — one of my favorite mysteries. It’s an intoxicating story.
Sam: 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: So the documentary is not amazing — I’ll 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 says stuff that feels unprofessional. Like, he’ll be talking and he’ll say “and then they made NFTs, whatever the hell those are” — and it’s like, 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: Yeah, tell me the story.
The Bitcoin Origin Story [00:02:00]
Shaan: Okay. The whole story is this. In 2008, the Bitcoin white paper gets released. Some guy posts on a forum saying he thinks he solved the double-spend problem.
A lot of people in the past had tried to make a virtual currency — a digital gold. There was e-gold, there was Hashcash, there were all these different things that were tried, and they all failed for different reasons. E-gold, for example, started to get really popular — had like two billion dollars in volume. But the guy who created it created it as a company. He was the founder and CEO, and he lived in Canada or something. As it hits two billion in transaction volume, the website says “this is a digital currency backed by actual gold, we’ll be around today, tomorrow, and forever” — and actually, knock knock, the government knocks on his door, comes in, raids them, puts him in jail.
So problem one with digital currencies: you can’t be the guy behind it. Because as soon as this thing gets popular, you have too much power, and the nation-states who control the currency supply — they’re not going to like you. They’re going to do character attacks to discredit the currency.
Satoshi solved that problem by launching it under this pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto. Nobody knows who it is. The anonymity of the whole thing. And then he disappears.
Sam: Okay.
Shaan: So the second thing was, other people tried to do it with Hashcash and other things, but to get the cryptography to work — to get the currency to work — you had to make sure that nobody could double-spend the money. When you swipe your credit card today, that transaction goes to a bank, the bank says “yes, this person has the money and it’s not already been spent,” it sends that message back to the register, the register says approved. The bank takes its 3% fee because it’s verifying that the person has the money, the card doesn’t appear to be stolen, and that money hasn’t already been spent in another shop ten minutes ago.
What Bitcoin did — what Satoshi did — was release his white paper saying “I think I’ve solved that problem. I’ve created a decentralized way to make money, meaning money that can be trusted even though there’s no central party like a bank or a government verifying all the transactions.” That’s the breakthrough that happens in 2008. They’re discussing it, and then in 2009 the first Bitcoin block happened.
Sam: Did this person actually code something? You used the phrase “white paper.”
Shaan: It starts as a white paper, which is just an explanation of a system. It’s an idea written out — like a business plan but the technical variant. “Here’s the technical plan of how we could create a decentralized currency.” But it’s not coded yet. Then he codes it.
And by the way — when people have looked at the code, they say this is not done by a super sophisticated programmer. There are things in the code where, when you look at the elegance of it, the styling, the level of technical proficiency — people think it’s either done by an academic type, someone technical enough but whose big contribution was really the conceptual leap, or that it might be somebody young. Like “it works, but the wires are messy.”
Sam: Exactly.
Shaan: And the sequence of events — I’m doing this off the top of my head so I might get some dates wrong — is that after the 2008 financial crisis, which people believe was the stimulus for why Satoshi felt this needed to happen: the banks got super greedy, Lehman Brothers fails, other banks start to fail, the US government steps in and buys $700 billion worth of bad debt, basically bails out the banks, prints more money, tries to paper over the problems.
People who want a hard currency — something you can’t just print a whole bunch more of and devalue — they didn’t like that. And in general, this idea that it’s “too big to fail” and the government controls it — people didn’t like that. You know that he feels this way because he’s blogging every day. There are references to why there’s a need for this in the white paper, in his forum posts.
Sam: What message board forum?
Shaan: Originally it was a cryptographers’ mailing list, but then he created a forum of his own called Bitcoin Talk. So Satoshi creates Bitcoin Talk, his username is “Satoshi” — which is a very important point for how the documentary guy thinks he found him in the end.
On January 3rd, there’s a message embedded in the first ever Bitcoin block that says: “The Times, 03 Jan 2009, Chancellor on the Brink of Second Bailout for Banks.” So in the very first block, Satoshi — who mined the Genesis block — is basically putting in a statement: pointing out why we need something like this in the first place.
Sam: This is so — you know in high school when you read literature and they want you to dive deep, and they’re like “did you notice on page 200 he killed someone? But did you notice on page 50 he alluded to it — he said he loved red?” Like this is exactly that.
Shaan: It definitely has big away message energy. It definitely has that vibe. Like “when I’m in the bathroom, I just want you to know.”
Sam: Yeah, what does he mean? Who was trying to get poetic in the bathroom stall?
Shaan: That was Satoshi, on the first block. Alright. So he posts there. Now let’s fast forward a few years. Bitcoin is at like one cent, 30 cents — nothing like what it is today. But the community is interested and they’re talking about it.
Wikileaks, the Hornet’s Nest, and Satoshi’s Disappearance [00:10:00]
Shaan: Something happens where Satoshi posts one day, and then the Wikileaks leak happens. He posts and says “I’m afraid that they’ve kicked the hornet’s nest, and this is going to cause a lot of unwanted attention. It’s too young to deal with the government coming after us to try to shut this down, because Wikileaks is saying ‘we can use Bitcoin,’ and the government hates Wikileaks — therefore they’re going to try to choke Wikileaks by killing the Bitcoin system.”
Sam: Isn’t that intoxicating? You’re just dorking around on a message board, playing with concepts, and you’re like “the government is after us” — this big national security threat is bad news for us. It’s like, by the way, this is so early on when nobody — Bitcoin might have had 200 eyeballs at the time. 200 people on Earth knew about Bitcoin. But the foresight to say “I’m going to be Satoshi, I’m going to keep this all anonymized”…
Shaan: And people like Hal Finney go in there very early and reply “well, if this actually became adopted as the world’s reserve currency, that would make every Bitcoin worth like $2 million” or something — and Bitcoin’s not even worth $1. That’s just a ridiculous thing to type out.
Sam: Absolutely ridiculous. But that’s the Visionary foresight.
Shaan: And by the way, that guy Hal Finney — a lot of people think Hal is Satoshi. The case for Hal is brilliant. Cryptography mind. He was the first recipient of Bitcoin, so the first transaction was Satoshi sending to Hal. If you’re a programmer, it’s like: “Did you send to yourself?” That’s usually how programmers start things. Although that might also be the case against — if this guy’s 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 and dies. And Satoshi essentially disappears at the same time Hal’s last message appears. And if the fact that this person has resisted the temptation to move to claim credit or touch their — you know, $700 billion fortune sitting there, not a single coin ever used from that fortune — maybe it’s because the guy’s dead. Maybe that’s the only way to explain somebody who has the resistance to it.
Sam: Which is also related to this current suspect’s case.
Shaan: Exactly. So let’s carry on.
People think it’s Hal Finney. People think it might be this guy Adam Back, who created Hashcash and definitely traded emails early on with Satoshi, and never has released those emails. He runs Blockstream, a company associated with Bitcoin. People don’t know who it is. They think it might be this mysterious Asian guy, Wei Dai — he’s a brilliant cryptographer, nobody knows who he is, there are no photos of this guy on the internet. He claims this, they’re like “maybe that’s Satoshi.” People just don’t know.
The Block Size War and Satoshi’s Final Post [00:17:00]
Shaan: In 2014, 2015, there’s a big debate in Bitcoin about transaction speeds. Some people say “we have to make the block size bigger — that’ll let more transactions go through.” Other people say “no, you can’t change something as fundamental as the block size. We should do this other more complicated thing that’ll take years, but the reason we should is that if we change anything about the Bitcoin protocol it undermines it. If you can change that, then can’t you change the 21 million supply limit? You lose the core credibility.”
There are two sides to this debate. On one side is this guy Roger Ver, who calls himself Bitcoin Jesus. He made a huge bet on Bitcoin early, became a billionaire off it. His side is saying: look, we need to get this thing adopted now, we need the quick and dirty solution, just double the block size. They end up on the wrong side of history. The community goes against them. They create their own thing called Bitcoin Cash, which has low reputation.
The people who said “no, we’ve got to stay true to Satoshi’s vision” — Adam Back, Peter Todd, and a handful of others — they said: “The thing with Bitcoin is it’s got to be pristine. You can’t just arbitrarily change the rules.” It’s like people who follow the Constitution. It’s actually sort of better for the collective that you don’t change it, because once you change an amendment, now everything’s up for grabs. And you could say the same is true for religion and holy texts — someone wrote this and tens of billions of people have dedicated their lives to it. That’s a really fascinating concept.
Sam: And Bitcoin is very much like that. The people who follow it are very religious about it.
Shaan: Satoshi weighs in one last time, saying “small block size is what we should do.” And it goes the way of Adam Back and Peter Todd. That’s the last anyone hears from Satoshi.
They’ve tried to find him. They don’t know how to find him. So this documentary…
The Documentary’s Method and Peter Todd [00:21:00]
Shaan: The documentary guy goes to all the OG bitcoiners and tells them he’s doing a documentary — he doesn’t tell them he’s trying to find Satoshi. He tells them it’s more along the lines of “I want to tell the Bitcoin story.” A lot of them agree to do taped interviews, which is pretty rare for them.
Along the way as he’s making this documentary, he’s slipping in questions about Satoshi: “Who is Satoshi? Are you Satoshi? Why do people think you are? What’s your claim to not be? Do you think that guy is credible?” He’s slipping these in. The documentary is basically him filtering out 80 or 90% of their conversation and keeping the 10% about trying to figure out the Satoshi stuff.
In the end, he puts it on this guy Peter Todd. Peter Todd seems like an unlikely character for a bunch of reasons. Number one, when the Bitcoin paper was released, Peter Todd would have only been something like 23 years old — kind of like a kid. Number two, he’s joked around saying “yeah, I am Satoshi.” Which — the real Satoshi is probably pretty paranoid. On the other hand, some people say the meta-game would be to jokingly say you are Satoshi to throw suspicion off yourself.
There’s not a lot of direct evidence tying him to this. They’re like: okay, I guess it could be Peter Todd, but why not Hal Finney, who got the first transaction? Why not Adam Back, who was one of the first people ever to talk to Satoshi, never released those emails, and was the inventor of Hashcash? That guy seems more sophisticated. Why is it not a group? Why is it not the FBI? The case against him is: it’s not that he can’t be it, it’s more of “why him when there are so many other more likely people?”
The biggest case against him is he was really young, and he kind of jokes around with this. He’s also very opinionated about other things — Russia, Ukraine, a whole bunch of stuff like that — and people don’t like him in general. He’s not a very well-liked figure. So it doesn’t jive with the Bitcoin community that this is their fearless leader. It’s like: wait, we kind of think this guy’s kind of a prick? Satoshi has this stoic mentality, this writing that is “us versus the world,” a very Visionary attitude. And you’re describing someone who may not have George Washington vibes.
Sam: The funniest tweet I saw on this — I was trying to see the community’s reaction — the guy goes: “Peter Todd. That’s the most average-ass name I’ve ever heard. This guy looks like the most average-ass guy I’ve ever seen.” I’m looking at him — disappointed. Like, if that was Satoshi, I would be disappointed. It’s just this white dude who has these other opinions that I kind of disagree with. The veneer of Satoshi goes away.
Whereas if you Google Hal Finney — he looks like a person who just studies all day. Then he dies tragically, and it’s sort of like he went down with the ship. He never revealed. 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. That has an aura.
Shaan: Okay. So let me give you the evidence. Why does the documentary guy claim it’s Peter Todd?
The Key Evidence Against Peter Todd [00:28:00]
Shaan: The evidence is basically this. Back when the Wikileaks thing happened and Satoshi posted and disappeared — everybody thinks it’s because of the Wikileaks thing that he got paranoid and decided to bounce. There was one other thing that happened around that same time.
Satoshi posted about how the transaction mechanism works. The first reply, an hour and a half later, is from Peter Todd. But it looks like a continuation of the thought. In the original post, Satoshi says “the inputs and the outputs would match.” Then the Peter Todd 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 comment — no formality, just immediately correcting someone’s post. That happens all the time on the internet.
Another lens you could look at it through: Satoshi writes this thing, comes back to clarify, forgets to switch back to his alt account. And that post has been up there and it’s been left up there for a very long time.
So the documentary guy is reading this like: “Are we dumb? Have we missed this? Doesn’t this look like a continuation of the thought? A clarification?” And for this guy who claims to not have been interested in Bitcoin until years later — claims he was busy in school — for him to come in at 1:30 in the morning and make a super specific clarification of how the Bitcoin mechanism works? That doesn’t line up with a guy who wasn’t interested and was just a kid at the time.
Sam: By the way, this is how they caught Ross Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road — he posted on a forum logged into the wrong username. And this is how they got Timothy McVey from the Oklahoma City bombing — one of his tail lights was out. There are lots of examples of big shot criminals being busted over minor things. Just clerical errors.
Shaan: Right. And people on Twitter right now are saying: “You think Satoshi, who’s been flawless with his opsec, would just stupidly log into the wrong account and leave the message there?” And it’s like — yeah, actually, that kind of thing happens all the time. That’s a pretty common pattern. If I said what’s the most likely way we find him, it’s either that or the email he registered his Satoshi account with getting leaked somehow. It fits the stereotype of like — you think of the brilliant scientist, you think of Einstein with mismatched socks. This is the internet equivalent of that.
Shaan: Then there are a few secondary things. There’s the language — he writes “colour” with the O-U-R, British or Canadian English spelling. This guy was going to school in Toronto at the time.
But a lot of people are like: is this guy brilliant enough to be Satoshi? He was so young at the time. Is it even possible?
They go find a message from him on the cryptography forums from eight years before Bitcoin came out. He’s 15 or 16 years old, hanging out in the cypherpunk community, and he basically writes: “Yeah, Hashcash had that, but it would have to be something more than proof of work to solve the effing double-spend problem.” That’s the snippet. At 15 or 16, you’re obviously brilliant and thinking about this exact problem eight years prior.
His mom taught him about cryptography. His dad was an economist. The two skills you would need to be Satoshi — the brilliance on the encryption and cryptography side, and the ethos on the economics side: what is a currency, what is hard money, how does the world work — that’s this kid’s background.
Sam: How old is he now?
Shaan: Mid to late 30s. He works for Blockstream and is very close to Adam Back — who would have been the person he collaborated with after creating this.
The Confrontation Scene [00:35:00]
Shaan: The documentary confronts him on camera. And imagine being 39 and having this documentary come out accusing you of being the richest person in the world, accusing you of inventing this amazing thing. There’s one part of you that’s like “I want the credit, I want all of this.” But then — if you’re not it, should you say you are? And there’s also a very irresponsible part of this. Let’s say the documentary is wrong. You just ruined a guy’s life. If people believe you’re Satoshi, your life is immediately in danger. Every government agency wants to take you to the back room and talk to you. Sometimes worse.
Sam: So if he is Satoshi, I think it’s a very bad thing for him. I almost feel bad bringing it up, but it’s out there now, so tell me what you think.
Shaan: So basically it’s a tall nerdy guy with his hands in his pockets. He’s doing exactly what I’m accused of doing when I’m nervous — rocking back and forth. Shifty eyes. Immediately looking at the friend he’s in on it with. That friend — Adam Back — is standing silent the entire time, frozen, because the director sort of sprung this on them. They didn’t come out there to talk about that.
Sam: I had to officiate a wedding last week, and Sarah was like “I could tell you were nervous — no one else knew, but I knew.” I was like “how?” She goes “you were rocking back and forth.” I do it all the time. This guy is doing that exact same thing.
Shaan: He’s very clearly uncomfortable. He’s got a very awkward smile. But you could also chalk that up to every bitcoiner — they’re just awkward in social situations. They can’t make eye contact. That’s why they’re amazing. You can’t be Satoshi and also have good eye contact. You can’t have both.
Sam: So what do you think? Is this the guy?
Shaan: I don’t know if this is the guy. But it is probably the most compelling new theory. It’s funny how much it’s being discredited by the community. Either I’m missing something — which is entirely possible — or it’s wishful thinking, because it’s much better for everyone if he’s not Satoshi. I don’t think the evidence is super strong. But it’s a very compelling theory.
This guy who was clearly brilliant at 15 or 16, thinking specifically about the double-spend problem. This forum post where the timing is very interesting — the way it’s written, right when it happened. The guy disappears and then this guy also disappeared from the Bitcoin forums for two years, and he’s like “oh, I was busy, I was a student, I just wasn’t that interested.” And when he comes back, he actually does this thing called “replace by fee” — basically a mechanism where you can pay a little extra to get your transaction done faster — which is one of the useful patches to Bitcoin. So he comes back and contributes a useful patch afterwards.
And in this confrontation his nervous answer is basically: “What, me? Oh yeah, that’s crazy. You’re going to look really stupid if you release this.” And it’s like — those are things I do when I’m trapped in a lie. Maybe I’m projecting.
Sam: You alluded to something about the name Satoshi Nakamoto — did he imply something earlier in his career about liking that name?
Shaan: No, there’s no evidence on that. The combination of evidence was: that forum post, the timing of both of their disappearances, when he’s 15 or 16 on the forums, his kind of writing style, even how he punctuates — two spaces after a period, O-U-R things. A lot of people do these, but they do all fit with this guy.
Sam: Did Hal Finney write like Satoshi?
Shaan: They’ve looked at Hal’s code versus Satoshi’s code, but there’s an answer for everything: “Oh, he’s so brilliant he knew to modify his coding style to a different style.” Like all conspiracies, it’s sort of what you choose to believe or not believe.
I actually think — because when I used to write fake blog posts under pseudonyms all the time, I remember trying to change how I was writing and thinking “this is really challenging, everyone’s going to know this is me.” So the writing style thing is actually a pretty compelling piece of evidence to me.
Shaan: I want to be super clear — I don’t know the answer. I’m not saying I believe this or don’t. I’m saying this is the most interesting new theory on Satoshi in a few years. There have been many theories over the years, including when the New York Post chased down that guy Dorian Nakamoto and was like “it’s him” — and he basically had his life ruined for 48 hours.
But as somebody who’s just fascinated by the story, I badly want to know. And I also understand it would be much better for all of us to never know. Whoever it is had a great contribution to the world, and their wish was to be anonymous — I think that should be respected.
And whoever Satoshi is, they’re in extreme danger once it gets outed. In terms of the Hall of Fame of stories — JFK is up there — I think this story is on par with that.
Sam: Yeah, exactly. The word you used is intoxicating. These rabbit holes just make you wonder. You keep going back to them. Aliens, certain assassinations — and then there’s this one. It kind of keeps me up at night, and I don’t even give a damn about Bitcoin. But I think it’s rooted in how one person had such an impact and was so brilliant.
American Kingpin, Silk Road, and the Anti-Hero Archetype [00:44:00]
Sam: If you read American Kingpin about Ross Ulbricht — he had that same exact style. Very romantic. Very “I want to get behind you.” Us versus the world, we are on a path to greatness. And even though he did a lot of really bad stuff, you kind of want to get behind it. You’re like, “yeah, that’s just the price we paid to be James Bond. We kill bad guys.” Except Ross might have been the bad guy.
Shaan: He was. He did a lot. I think he should be in jail for a long period of time because he tried to — it’s Breaking Bad, where you’re rooting for Walt even though you’re like “wait, this guy’s a drug kingpin who’s killing people.” Or Tony Soprano. You love this guy, but dude — you’re a bad husband and you kill people. Just because you’re funny doesn’t mean you’re a good person.
Sam: Can I make a one-minute Bitcoin case right now?
Shaan: Are you back? I mean, were you ever… not here?
Sam: You haven’t been here. Your interest has ebbed and flowed.
Shaan: The conviction hasn’t. It’s like: how much new information is there to pay attention to? In the same way I’m not like “oh my God, the internet is amazing” anymore. Yeah, I kind of know the internet’s amazing. I made that decision a long time ago and I just use it.
The One-Minute Bitcoin Case [00:46:30]
Sam: Okay, the one-minute case. Bitcoin is a savings technology. People think Bitcoin is gonna make them rich — actually, the true purpose of Bitcoin is a store of value. It’s meant to keep you rich.
If your great-grandparent, 100 years ago, had left you a million-dollar fortune, it would be worth only about 3% of what they left — maybe $30,000 today. In just 100 years, in the United States, at the targeted inflation — the actual inflation — your money gets cut roughly in half every 30 years.
Shaan: If you left it in cash, yeah.
Sam: Correct. The US dollar in a bank account is like a bowl of ice cream that’s melting by design. On average, roughly 3% a year it gets devalued. The target inflation is 2 or 3% — sometimes higher — but the goal is to inflate it 2 or 3% a year. Which means by design, in 30 years, you have roughly half of what you started with. One generation.
So once you believe there’s merit to “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 there’s still a leap of faith: will this be a thing? Currency only matters if enough people believe in it. That’s the only question mark. Is Bitcoin a currency?
Shaan: Of course it’s a currency. Money has three jobs. One — store of value: I have to believe that if I go out and work hard every day and get paid in this thing, this thing is going to be valuable tomorrow. That requires collective buy-in.
That’s the first stage. After it’s already accepted by many people as valuable — the way gold is — then it can be used as a medium of exchange. People trade it back and forth because they all believe it’s valuable and know the next person will too. That part hasn’t fully happened yet with Bitcoin.
Then the final stage is: once everyone’s using it as a medium of exchange, we price things in it — that’s called the unit of account. Those are the three phases of something becoming a true currency.
Today, Bitcoin is basically completing stage one. The majority of the world has flipped to believe Bitcoin is valuable. You can see that in the price — $60,000 a coin. You can see it in who owns it — individual wealthy folks. Active wallets are in the hundreds of millions of people.
Sam: Okay, so once you believe there’s merit to hard currency…
The Government Risk Is Gone [00:52:00]
Shaan: From the beginning with Bitcoin, there’ve always been these big risks and question marks. The first risk was: the government’s just going to shut this down. The smart-guy case was: “Look, you might be right that this is better than gold. It’s easier to transport, it’s more programmable money. I get all that. But the government’s not going 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.”
For a while it looked like that — China tried to ban it, India tried to ban it. But Bitcoin was pretty resilient.
Now in this last election, both candidates are pro-crypto. Donald Trump is very pro-crypto. Kamala realized it’s political suicide to be anti-crypto. They’re both on the circuit.
Sam: That’s wild. Trump speaking at the Bitcoin conference. Kamala stopped saying she’s gonna kill crypto.
Shaan: I talked to a mutual friend who owns a crypto-related media business, and 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.” Trump has literally said — in very Trump fashion — “maybe we’ll buy some bitcoins and that’ll pay off the debt.”
The government is now pro-crypto. They’ve realized it’s political suicide to be anti-crypto, because there are too many Americans who have wealth in it. If you say we’re going to ban or confiscate this, that means something to too many people. So now you can’t politically be in the “we’re gonna kill crypto” camp. That’s a huge thing that changed from five or eight years ago.
And I feel like nobody’s really giving that enough credit. One of the biggest risks was “the US government is never going to go for this.” Now they’re pro-crypto. That’s crazy.
BlackRock, Wall Street, and the ETF [00:57:00]
Shaan: The second big shift: all these clips of Jamie Dimon and BlackRock just talking shit about Bitcoin — calling it the dumbest thing, “you’re idiots if you want to lose your money” — and now they’re the biggest custodians and salesmen of Bitcoin.
Sam: Aren’t they so full of it? I mean, everyone deserves the right to change their opinion when they get new information, but the consequences were very big.
Shaan: A week ago, BlackRock released a presentation about why Bitcoin is better than gold. It’s literally the same slides that the crypto anarchists were using 10 years ago. “Here’s Bitcoin compared to gold — gold you can’t carry easily, you can’t easily divide it, gold’s not actually that scarce, we can always find more. Bitcoin has a fixed supply.” All the old arguments, now on a road show to wealthy people and financial advisers. They’re basically training financial advisers that a healthy portfolio has 1 to 5% Bitcoin in it.
And so they’re recommending it as the wise move. They’re on a road show because they make a bunch of money — it’s the fastest growing ETF product in the world.
Sam: Why do you need a Bitcoin ETF?
Shaan: One of the other big counterpoints was: “This is too complicated. My mom and dad are never gonna download a wallet and figure out their private key — they’re afraid to lose it.” So the reason an ETF matters is that now everybody who’s got an account with Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, Nationwide — whoever — they can just push one button and own Bitcoin without ever having to deal with custodian issues, private keys, their wallet, losing their hard drive — any of that.
Yes, it’s lame. It’s not cool and edgy and alt anymore. But the whole point is it goes through this adoption phase, and now it’s going more mainstream.
I cannot believe — as somebody who’s been watching this thing for literally 10 or 11 years — how much has happened. It was unfathomable 10 years ago to think not only would Bitcoin be $60,000 a coin, but that presidents would use it in their campaigns, talk about having a little bit on the nation’s balance sheet, corporations would own this thing, BlackRock and Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon would have it as their hero SKU, and that you’re going to be able to click a button and buy it as an ETF.
And I feel like people really have not grasped: once you do that, you can’t unwind it. Once everybody owns it in their ETFs or retirement accounts — you can’t rip it out. Its tentacles are too deep.
The Winklevoss Rowing Club Story [01:04:00]
Sam: This is kind of indicative of where Bitcoin is going, and it’s kind of silly. I moved to a small town outside 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 where I live. I was like “where these clothes were designed to be worn” — there are literally polo fields and a rowing club next to my house. Growing up in Missouri, a rowing club is like the richest, yuppiest thing ever. But I was interested, so I go to check it out, and I see a Bitcoin book in the lobby.
A rowing club is basically a gym but instead of weights there are areas to row. I see this Bitcoin book and I’m like “what the hell is this doing here?” And then I start walking around and I see a trophy case of high school people who graduated from the club and did well — won championships — and there’s a picture of these two huge, strapping 18-year-olds. I’m like “you’ve got to be kidding me. Why is there a picture of the Winklevoss twins here?”
They go: “Oh, their father owns this place. When they were young and they were into rowing, he built this club so they could have a place to train.” And I was like, that’s why you have the Bitcoin book. They go: “Yeah, I don’t remember if they wrote it or it was written about them, but the father’s proud, so he just has it in the lobby.”
Shaan: It doesn’t seem like they would totally call their dad “Father.” Oh yeah, definitely. I’m going to demand my kids call me Father. That’s already like 25 prestige points in life.
Sam: I tell my little daughter — whenever we FaceTime Grandma I go “there’s your grandmother.” Yeah, that’s wild.
Sam: So, you live the most preppy life now.
Sam: You know what, embrace it. It’s kind of fun, honestly.
Shaan: So, Bitcoin. I wouldn’t say I’m a hater, but I love poking holes in it — I think that’s just a fun position to have. With all this conversation, though, I want it to be back. I had so much fun hearing these stories. The drama regarding this whole community and this thing is so cool, all-time great. Some dork invented this thing, some nerd called a cypherpunk invented this, and now Fidelity — however many tens of thousands of employees, the most amount of money in the world — is all rallied 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 story lines for it to work. But I’m really excited for something like that. And frankly, I want to go read more books on the topic because every book I’ve read about Bitcoin has been thrilling.
Sam: Yeah. Well, it depends if you want the thriller or the theory.
Shaan: No, no — I just want sex, death, and war. Rebels doing crazy stuff. That’s what I want.
Sam: Fair enough. Then you might actually like this documentary.
The Best Crypto Crime Stories [01:09:00]
Shaan: Actually, the best one of that genre — there’s a documentary about this business called QuadrigaCX. Did you ever see it?
Sam: No. What’s that?
Shaan: It’s the best murder mystery, crazy, insane, scammy crypto movie. The guy died in India, and they’re like “dude, you faked your death.” The Indian doctor — there’s speculation the autopsy was faked. Well, they don’t know that for sure.
Sam: It’s called “Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King.” That’s probably the most thriller version of a crypto movie I’ve seen.
Shaan: I just watched this one about these kids from Long Island who moved to Miami and came up with some ICO scam. They document this guy as he’s telling his story, but coincidentally he’s also still on trial, so you get to see him going through trial and eventually getting acquitted. We talked about this particular guy — he was posting pictures of his abs and his Ferrari on Instagram, and we’re like “dude, if you have abs and perfect teeth and you’re in the crypto community, you can’t be trusted.” Floyd Mayweather and a bunch of these guys backed him. It was a complete scam. He still walked away with potentially tens of millions of dollars and didn’t go to prison.
Sam: I hate them so much that it’s a complete turn-off. I can’t bring myself to watch it. But when it’s like an ideological rebel person — maybe evil, maybe genius, is he just misunderstood or is he playing all of us? That’s the sweet spot for me with the crypto crime stuff.
Crypto could have its own true crime index at this point. There have been so many issues. I don’t like the 18-year-old TikTok NFT scam — that story is just too easy. There’s no art to it.
Shaan: Yeah, no art to it. Whereas the SBF thing is so interesting because he looks the part, but then he doesn’t, and he did something crazy but it’s unclear why. He actually had a business that would have made him a billionaire many times over without the scam.
Sam: The scam with FTX wasn’t that the demand and customers were fake. The demand and customers were real. It’s just that he took the customer money and gambled on it — used it for crazy donations to build power, put it in his hedge fund to run up the balance on that side. It was just an unnecessary risk.
The fascinating thing about that one is: why did he even do that? He didn’t need to. He won. He had the real win. And he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
SBF in Prison and the Milk Road Story [01:14:00]
Sam: How about this: if I told you three years ago, when SBF was still considered legit — him and Diddy are in prison together. Isn’t that the craziest turn of events?
Shaan: That’s really insane.
Sam: Have I ever told the SBF/FTX story with Milk Road?
Shaan: What happened — they advertised with you and they were late to pay?
Sam: No, no. We used to do something called “Deep Dives,” which was basically an ad product where if you paid us a ton of money, we would do a report on you. The catch was: we’re going to do the report we actually want to do. You don’t get to say what we say.
With FTX it seemed like a no-brainer. They’re the richest player in the space and there were a bunch of good things to say, so it seemed like a win-win. They told us they were going to pay us a bunch of money. We went and wrote the report, and I remember thinking about the Devil’s Advocate — what doesn’t smell right. Not even just to rip on them, but acknowledging the counterpoint honestly makes the positive points stronger. If we were trying to say a positive thing — that they were super fast-growing, they had this really aggressive marketing strategy that was working — we were like “what’s the counterpoint?”
The counterpoint was: the chief strategy officer we had met was 24 years old. We were like, “Wow, that’s impressive, how did this kid become chief strategy officer of what was like a $20 billion company?” OK, maybe a good thing, maybe a bad thing — Facebook looked that way early on too. And then we were like: “It’s unclear what the connection is between Alameda Research and FTX, and whether there’s a firewall.”
Speculation at the time was that it wasn’t just FTX siphoning money to Alameda to gamble and lose — it was that Alameda had insider info and they were front-running trades. So we wrote that in there. They come back: “We need you to take that out.” We said “No.” They said “Okay, just hold on publishing this.” We said “Cool, but you already paid us. Do you ever want to run this?”
They never replied again. We were like, okay. I remember checking in every few months: “Hey, are you ready to release this yet?” They’d say no. We didn’t think too much of it, moved on.
Then sure enough, that “connection seems unclear, there are some potential issues” thing turned out to be a very big problem. Stage four, not stage one.
Shaan: Is SBF still eating just peanut butter in prison? That’s his whole thing — he only consumes peanut butter. He’s sentenced to 25 years.
Sam: I don’t think he’s going to serve the whole time, but for federal crimes, I think the max it can ever get reduced is like 10%. So if you get sentenced to 20, you’re serving 18. That’s a huge deal. It’s not like a state thing.
And the prison he’s at is not cushy. I know a guy whose uncle served 18 years for a white collar crime. When you say “white collar crime,” you think it’s cushy. And this guy would say “I mean, it was somewhat that, but it’s prison. Bad stuff happens. You’re confined all the time.” It’s really bad.
The Legal System, Elizabeth Holmes, and Wrapping Up [01:20:00]
Sam: Have you ever watched the show The Night Of?
Shaan: No, what’s that?
Sam: Amazing show. I think it’s on Showtime or HBO. One of the things I really liked about it is they showed the actual legal system at work. It’s almost painful to watch the legal and prison system as the story plays out — and they don’t fast forward the way a lot of movies do. Usually it’s one dramatic courtroom speech versus another. This show actually shows: okay, there’s the first hearing. The appeal is going to be in three months. He’s back to jail for three months. Waiting, waiting, waiting, just going through it. Extremely well-made. An awesome show.
Shaan: It takes forever. The stuff takes forever. Which kind of boggles my mind. And then you can push things for a long time. You remember Elizabeth Holmes? I think it was many years after the actual stuff went down that the trial happened. She went on maternity leave from prison, basically — she started having babies back to back and kept pushing it off.
Sam: That’s what happens when you wear Ralph Lauren and look like you live in Connecticut. You can take maternity leave from prison. I think that’s one of the perks she took advantage of.
Shaan: We didn’t mean to make this the Bitcoin episode.
Sam: But once you said the magic word, I was in. I’m happy it became that, to be honest.
Shaan: Alright, that’s it. That’s a wrap.