Nick Martell

You can actually read it today, besties, if you go to bitcoin.org slash bitcoin.pdf.

Here was the first sentence of that white paper.

What was it, Jake?

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash.

would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

That is the genesis of Bitcoin, literally.

Today, the Bitcoin that this nine-page PDF birthed is worth $1.45 trillion.

And yet, Jack, for 18 years, the author, Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained anonymous until now.

Because John Carreyrou, the guy who busted Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes as a fraud, says he is 99.5% sure that Bitcoin was invented by Adam Back.

Why don't you sprinkle on some context for us?

Well, John Carreyrou knows a liar when he sees one.

Yeah.

And watching HBO Max last year, he spotted a liar.

Yes, he did, because HBO Max had a documentary that claimed to know who Satoshi was, although the answer was kind of unconvincing.

But one person interviewed in the documentary was Adam Back.

And he was kind of flinching and looking awkward throughout the documentary.

He's a cryptographer who made subtle tells of a liar in denying that he was Satoshi, and only John Carreyrou noticed those tells.

So this classically trained journalist did what he does best.

He dug up more information on this figure, Adam Back.

That's right, he started analyzing Adam's writing to understand his philosophies.