Right now, a digital wallet holds roughly 135 billion dollars. Anyone can see the balance, but nobody can touch it, and the owner vanished 15 years ago without spending a single coin. It is the greatest mystery of the digital age, and the suspects are a wild cast of cypherpunks, hoaxers, and accidental victims.

This episode pieces together the digital breadcrumbs left by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. We explain the breakthrough that made the technology possible, trace the chronology of the disappearance, and weigh the candidates, before asking whether the identity even matters.

• Bitcoin solved the double-spend problem by making the network itself the ledger keeper, like an indestructible group chat of receipts that rejects any lie.
• Satoshi embedded a Times of London headline about bank bailouts into the genesis block, a pointed political statement during the 2008 financial crisis.
• Clues point away from Japan: flawless British spellings, a forum sleep schedule matching the Americas or UK, and an obscure fake birthday tied to US gold law.
• Suspects include Hal Finney, who received the first transaction and lived blocks from the wrongly doxxed Dorian Nakamoto, plus Adam Back, whose Hashcash powers Bitcoin mining.
• Craig Wright was ruled definitively not Satoshi by a UK court in 2024 after forging documents with fonts that did not exist in 2008.