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Active debate continues around the newly released Finding Satoshi documentary. While some viewers describe the film as the most convincing investigation into the mystery of Bitcoin’s creator, Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream and one of the industry’s long-standing figures, has criticized the documentary’s conclusions, arguing that they contain logical contradictions.
The documentary, directed by Tucker Tooley and Matthew Miele and developed over more than four years, advances the hypothesis that the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto did not refer to a single person, but instead to a duo of prominent cypherpunks: Hal Finney and Len Sassaman.
In the film’s account, Hal Finney (who died in 2014) is portrayed as responsible for writing the program code, while Len Sassaman (who died in 2011) is described as providing the theoretical foundation and authoring the text of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
The documentary’s case is based on circumstantial evidence, including linguistic analysis—specifically Sassaman’s British English—along with their joint work on PGP and details of their online activity.
Adam Back, whom The New York Times earlier in April described as the most likely candidate for the role of Satoshi (a characterization Back denies), called the documentary’s theory “strange” and self-contradictory. His main arguments against the “Sassaman-Finney theory” focus on time zones and geography.
Back argues that the timing of Satoshi’s forum posts does not align with Sassaman’s European schedule during the period of active Bitcoin development. He notes that Sassaman lived in Belgium, working on a doctoral dissertation at KU Leuven.
“the documentary ruled out very early anyone in europe given the time of forum posts. and len was ... in europe, at KU Leuven, Belgium doing a PhD from 2004 until he died in 2011. so how does it make sense for that last minute ‘patch’ if Len was doing the writing.”
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