Finding Satoshi

The question has circulated for seventeen years without a verified answer. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Who wrote the Bitcoin white paper, launched the network, corresponded with early developers for roughly two years, and then disappeared without a trace in 2011? Whoever it was holds over a million Bitcoin, has never sold a single coin, and has never surfaced publicly. The silence has been total, and the mystery has only grown.

Attempts to answer that question have been honorable, but, for the most part, inconclusive. Journalists have named candidates who denied it. Academics have built elaborate linguistic analyses that pointed in multiple directions. Self-proclaimed Satoshis have appeared and failed to prove their claims.

Finding Satoshi
Kathleen Puckett, Former FBI Agent & Behavioral Analyst. Courtesy of FINDING SATOSHI

On April 22, 2026, Finding Satoshi, a new documentary directed by Matthew Miele and Tucker Tooley, attempts to answer this question definitively. While the debate may still rage on, the documentary reaches its own conclusion after a four-year investigation built on original reporting, forensic analysis of previously unseen evidence, and on-record interviews with more than twenty subjects.

The reporting was led by William D. Cohan, a New York Times bestselling author and longtime Wall Street Journal contributor with decades of experience in financial investigative journalism, and the investigation was led by Tyler Maroney, a private investigator at Quest Research & Investigations whose background includes some of the most complex cases in recent American criminal and civil history.

Finding Satoshi
Private Investigator, Tyler Maroney and investigative journalist, William D. Cohan. Courtesy of FINDING SATOSHI

Understanding who Satoshi is requires understanding what Satoshi built and why. Finding Satoshi traces Bitcoin's full intellectual lineage, from the cypherpunk movement and the development of early digital privacy cryptography through the predecessor technologies that laid the groundwork for the white paper. The film does justice to the philosophies regarding financial institutions and individual sovereignty that underpin Bitcoin. That framing shapes the entire investigation, because understanding Satoshi as a human being with motivations, beliefs, and a specific intellectual history is a necessary prerequisite to identify them.

Finding Satoshi
Michael Saylor - Chairman & Co-Founder, MicroStrategy. Courtesy of FINDING SATOSHI

Interviewees include Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP encryption; Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent; Michael Saylor; Fred Ehrsam; Joseph Lubin; Bill Gates; Gary Gensler; Kara Swisher; Gillian Tett; and Kathleen Puckett, the former FBI behavioral analyst whose work helped identify the Unabomber. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, is on the record stating the film had reached the right answer, calling it the most thoughtful treatment of the subject he had seen.

On April 22, 2026 the public can see for themselves. Finding Satoshi opens exclusively at FindingSatoshi.com. Coinbase users receive 24-hour early access beginning April 21.