“Finding Satoshi”—How a Private Investigator Solved the Mystery of Bitcoin’s Creator | Bill Cohan & Tyler Maroney

Bankless

Tech News, Technology, News

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2026

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Spoiler alert: This episode contains spoilers for the documentary Finding Satoshi. Bill Cohan and Tyler Maroney unpack their new documentary Finding Satoshi, a four-year investigation into the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. They explore why Satoshi’s identity still matters, the cypherpunk roots of Bitcoin, the public interest behind the mystery, and what the search reveals about privacy, money, power, and the mythology at the heart of crypto. ------ 🔎 FINDING SATOSHI | USE CODE: BANKLESS (20% OFF) https://www.findingsatoshi.com/bankless 🎬 DEBRIEF | RYAN & DAVID BREAKDOWN THE EPSIODE https://www.bankless.com/podcast/debrief-finding-satoshi-how-a-private-investigator-solved-the-mystery-of-bitcoins-creator ------ 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🟦 COINBASE ONE | GET 20% OFF https://bankless.cc/coinbase-one 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix 💰NEXO | Get your 30-day access to Wealth Club Premier https://bankless.cc/nexo ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:17 Did We Find Him? 6:32 Why Find Satoshi? 11:54 Why OGs Didn’t Care 14:57 How Hard was the Investigation? 18:20 Talking to the Early Cypherpunks 19:58 Public Interest 26:08 Cypherpunk’s Ideology 39:07 Spoiler Alert: The Aha Moment 51:30 Satoshi’s Death 1:00:59 Bitcoin as a Public Good 1:05:23 Will Satoshi Come Back? 1:10:39 Was it All Planned? 1:11:52 Quantum Treasure Hunt 1:14:00 What would Satoshi think of Bitcoin Today? 1:17:09 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES William D. Cohan https://x.com/WilliamCohan Tyler Maroney https://x.com/tydamar ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Transcript

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0:00.0	what if Hal planned this all along?
0:02.4	Okay.
0:02.8	And so he has a 12-word seed phrase in his cryogenically preserved brain.
0:09.0	And at some point in time, the technology will catch up.
0:11.7	And his whole plot was like, how do I hold value across decades, maybe centuries that
0:17.1	will take humanity to restore my body?
0:19.2	He's actually a huge fan of wealth and money.
0:23.6	Exactly. It was all a trick. Ryan, I think you have a novel.
0:30.9	Bankless Nation, very excited to introduce you to our next guest. Bill Cohen is a best-selling
0:36.3	author. He's a financial journalist. We also have
0:38.6	Tyler Maroney. He's a private investigator. So we've got the journalist plus investigator combo on the
0:44.9	show today. Gentlemen, I wanted to congratulate you on making what I think, and David has agreed
0:50.9	with me. We've talked about this in depth, the best Bitcoin documentary that I've
0:56.6	ever seen. That's probably ever been produced. Well done. Thank you. Wow. That means a lot.
1:01.6	Thank you. Four years of work, it better be okay, right? Yeah, no. You guys put in the work and it shows,
1:08.4	let's say, and you got many of the themes that I think we value very much in
1:13.0	the crypto community. You've expressed those. You told the story in marvelous detail.
1:17.1	I want to kind of split this into two parts, because at the end of this, we're going to include
1:21.5	a link in the show notes, of course, to the documentary, finding Satoshi. And so the call to action
1:27.4	is really for bankless listeners to go watch this documentary.
1:30.3	It'll get you fired up on crypto again.
1:32.6	It'll help you remember why you came here in the first place and why you choose to go bankless.
	...

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