PANews reported on May 31 that, according to Bitcoin.com, the search for Satoshi Nakamoto has never ceased. Between October 2024 and April 2026, three investigations—an HBO documentary, a New York Times in-depth report, and a feature film—pointed to different individuals or groups, accusing them of being the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. However, none of these investigations have provided conclusive evidence or cryptographic proof sufficient to close the mystery.
On October 8, 2024, HBO released a documentary, "Money, Electricity: The Bitcoin Mystery," directed by Cullen Hoback. The film claimed that Peter Todd, the Canadian Bitcoin Core developer, was Satoshi Nakamoto. Todd immediately and unequivocally refuted this claim, calling the idea "absurd."
On April 8, 2026, The New York Times published a detailed investigative report by John Carreyrou. This article, titled "My Journey into the Bitcoin Mystery," was the culmination of nearly a year of research by Carreyrou. Using linguistic screening methods, he examined decades of archived cypherpunk mailing lists, ultimately narrowing down the suspect to Adam Back, the British cryptographer and CEO of Blockstream. Back denied the allegations. He stated that similarities between cypherpunks were not surprising, and that these overlaps were products of a shared intellectual culture rather than a shared identity.
Two weeks after the New York Times article was published, an independent documentary offered a completely different argument. Titled "Searching for Satoshi Nakamoto," the documentary argues that Satoshi Nakamoto was not one person, but two. The film suggests that Hal Finney, the software engineer who received the first Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto on January 12, 2009, was responsible for writing the core code, while Len Sassaman, a PhD candidate at KU Leuven and a cypherpunk privacy expert, was responsible for writing the white paper and managing external communications. Both are deceased.
When taken together, these three investigations contradict each other on key points, with each investigation excluding candidates supported by the other two; to date, no cryptographic evidence has been provided, no signature information from Satoshi Nakamoto's known keys to confirm identity, and no records of cryptocurrency transfers.
