A New York Times Investigation Named Its Satoshi
On April 8, 2026, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou published a major investigation in the New York Times arguing that British cryptographer Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. The piece ran across multiple formats, a 7,000-word feature, a condensed summary, and an accompanying video, and landed with the weight the Times typically commands. It also landed with significant skepticism from within the crypto community, where Adam Back has long been considered an important figure in Bitcoin’s intellectual prehistory but not its author.
Eleven days later, a different answer arrives.
Finding Satoshi, directed by Matthew Miele and Tucker Tooley, presents the conclusion of a four-year investigation that predates and reaches beyond what previous investigations have done.
The film was built by a team tailor-made for the task. William D. Cohan, a New York Times bestselling author with a long career at the Wall Street Journal, and Tyler Maroney, a private investigator whose firm Quest Research & Investigations has worked on some of the most prominent cases in recent American criminal and civil history. Together, they spent four years conducting original research, forensic analysis, and on-record interviews with more than twenty subjects before arriving at their conclusion.
** 
**
Bitcoin did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a specific intellectual tradition, one rooted in the cypherpunk movement of the 1980s and 1990s, in the early development of digital privacy cryptography, and in the predecessor technologies that laid the groundwork for the white paper.
Speaking with some of the pioneers themselves, the film traces how an idea born in response to systemic financial failure became one of the most consequential technologies of the modern era, reshaping conversations around money, power, and trust at a global scale. Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP encryption, appears in the film. So does Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent, whose work on decentralized systems represents a direct line to Bitcoin’s architecture. Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, offers perspective on the technical foundations.
That intellectual history matters because Finding Satoshi intentionally treats Bitcoin as an expression of philosophy and ideals, not an amalgamation of code. Understanding who built Bitcoin requires understanding what kind of person would have built it, what they believed, what they were responding to, and why disappearing afterward was consistent with those beliefs.
** 
**
In the film, Kathleen Puckett, the former FBI behavioral analyst whose work helped identify the Unabomber, applies that kind of analytical lens to the Satoshi question. Her contribution represents one of several methodological angles the film deploys that prior investigations have not.
Additional interviewees include Michael Saylor, Fred Ehrsam, Joseph Lubin, Gary Gensler, Bill Gates, Kara Swisher, and Gillian Tett of the Financial Times.
** 
**
It’s no surprise that Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, described Finding Satoshi as the most thoughtful treatment of the Satoshi question he had encountered.
While Finding Satoshi opens exclusively at FindingSatoshi.com on April 22 and is available nowhere else, Coinbase users receive early access beginning April 21, 2026.
:::tip
This story was distributed as a release by Jon Stojan under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program.
:::
