Who Invented Bitcoin? HBO Documentary ‘Money Electric’ Tries to Solve an Enduring Crypto Mystery

variety.com:

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Who invented Bitcoin? That question has become a captivating mystery for the digital age along the lines of whatever happened to D.B. Cooper or who was Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal. Documentarian Cullen Hoback thinks he has the answer.

His new HBO documentary “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” digs into the rise of crypto currencies and the effort to uncover the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the nom de plume used by the author of the 11-page white paper that set Bitcoin and the broader crypto craze in motion after it was distributed widely online on Oct. 31, 2008. For Hoback, diving into crypto-mania was a natural segue after he probed the netherworld of the internet in his 2021 HBO docuseries “Q: Into the Storm.” That six-episode series posited a theory about the people who are fueling the dangerous and delusional theories peddled under the moniker of QAnon.

Both “Q” and “Money Electric” stemmed from Hoback’s interest in how the digital revolution is changing culture and the social order. The rise of crypto has been fueled by the yearning by many to establish a decentralized financial system — governed by publicly available Blockchain ledgers rather than institutions such as Bank of America or Goldman Sachs — and the growing demand for easier ways to conduct financial transactions online and across borders. “I’ve spent the past 10 years talking about digital rights and digital privacy issues.

So making a film about Bitcoin was something that I had wanted to do for some amount of time,” Hoback tells Variety. “I wanted to discuss what [crypto] was trying to be versus what it became. It was trying to be digital cash.