Revision history · Transcript
Transcript: My Quest to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery | Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces Episode 3
1 revision · first seen 2026-08-12 · last edited 2026-08-12 · 0 by Henry 1 by a human
- bugle-ingest[bot] 2026-08-12 Ingest: 0 new episode(s) — raw sources + transcripts 32a9a2b
Show changes
diff --git a/wiki/transcripts/my-quest-to-solve-bitcoins-great-mystery-pleb-slop-pulitzer-prize-pieces-episode-3.md b/wiki/transcripts/my-quest-to-solve-bitcoins-great-mystery-pleb-slop-pulitzer-prize-pieces-episode-3.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d5a367ec @@ -0,0 +1,83 @@ +--- +title: "Transcript: My Quest to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery | Pleb Slop Pulitzer Prize Pieces Episode 3" +type: transcript +episode: my-quest-to-solve-bitcoins-great-mystery-pleb-slop-pulitzer-prize-pieces-episode-3 +generated: true +date: 2026-04-10 +audio: "https://feeds.fountain.fm/R8scBF2Wiykm0YVldsHQ/items/Shoj88hASVOKVrx8iy8y/files/AUDIO---DEFAULT---b34634ad-76fa-4b38-9c79-f5a6ed0548de.mp3" +duration: "14:59" +sources: + - raw/episodes/my-quest-to-solve-bitcoins-great-mystery-pleb-slop-pulitzer-prize-pieces-episode-3/bundle.json +--- + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-0">0:00</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-0" data-t="0">Hey, folks. This is Rudy Dazleworth coming back to you with another Plebslop Pulitzer price piece. This time, our piece comes from the New York Times.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-9" data-t="9">My quest to solve Bitcoin's great mystery.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-12" data-t="12">Bitcoin's creator has hidden behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto for seventeen years.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-19" data-t="19">But a trail of clues buried deep in crypto lore led to a 55 year old computer scientist named Adam Back</span> <span class="cue" id="t-26" data-t="26">by John Carrie Rowe. With Dylan Friedman,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-30" data-t="30">John Carrie Rowe spent a year digging through thousands of decades old Internet postings in search of Bitcoin's creator.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-37">0:37</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-37" data-t="37">04/08/2026.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-40" data-t="40">One evening in the fall of twenty twenty four, my wife and I were sitting in traffic on the Long Island Expressway,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-46" data-t="46">when, tired of listening to the jazz funk station I often played on our drives, she switched to a podcast.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-53" data-t="53">It was Hard Fork, the New York Times tech show, and the hosts were discussing a new HBO documentary claiming to have unmasked Bitcoin's pseudonymous inventor,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-63" data-t="63">Satoshi Nakamoto.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-65" data-t="65">I was instantly riveted.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-67">1:07</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-67" data-t="67">I had long considered the question of Satoshi's true identity</span> <span class="cue" id="t-71" data-t="71">one of our age's great enigmas, and had poked at it before without success.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-76" data-t="76">Two years earlier, I had even spent several months researching a book on the subject.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-81" data-t="81">But I soon realized I was out of my depth and reluctantly gave up.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-85" data-t="85">Hearing that someone else might have finally identified the shadowy figure who had revolutionized</span> <span class="cue" id="t-91" data-t="91">finance,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-92">1:32</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-92" data-t="92">spawned a $2,400,000,000,000</span> <span class="cue" id="t-95" data-t="95">industry, and amassed one of the world's biggest</span> <span class="cue" id="t-98" data-t="98">fortunes in one stroke of staggering genius</span> <span class="cue" id="t-101" data-t="101">aroused in me a mixture of admiration</span> <span class="cue" id="t-104" data-t="104">and envy.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-105" data-t="105">I couldn't wait to watch the film.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-108">1:48</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-108" data-t="108">As soon as we got home that night, I logged into the HBO Max app and pressed play.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-114" data-t="114">In the end, I found the conclusion of Money Electric, the Bitcoin Mystery,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-119" data-t="119">unconvincing.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-120" data-t="120">HBO singled out a Canadian software developer,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-124" data-t="124">based on what seemed like very thin evidence.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-128" data-t="128">But as I watched what was an otherwise entertaining romp through the world of crypto,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-133">2:13</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-133" data-t="133">one scene caught my attention.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-135" data-t="135">Adam Back, a British cryptographer and leading figure in the Bitcoin movement,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-139" data-t="139">sat on a park bench in Riga, Latvia,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-142" data-t="142">his shirt untucked under a brown coat.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-145" data-t="145">The filmmaker casually rattled off the names of several Satoshi suspects.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-150" data-t="150">At the mention of his own name, mister Bach tensed up, strenuously denied he was Satoshi, and asked that the conversation be kept off the record.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-159">2:39</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-159" data-t="159">Having encountered my share of liars and developed something of an expertise</span> <span class="cue" id="t-163" data-t="163">in their tells,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-164" data-t="164">mister Bak's demeanor,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-166" data-t="166">his shifty eyes, his awkward chuckle, the jerky movement of his left hand,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-171" data-t="171">struck me as fishy.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-173" data-t="173">When the credits rolled up, I replayed the sequence several times on my TV</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-177">2:57</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-177" data-t="177">image.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-178" data-t="178">While I pondered mister Bak's reaction,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-181" data-t="181">another thought occurred to me. An Australian imposter had been sued for falsely claiming he was Satoshi.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-187" data-t="187">What if the evidence disclosed in that court case, which had been tried in London a few months earlier, could help me unravel the mystery?</span> <span class="cue" id="t-195" data-t="195">As anyone steeped in Bitcoin lore will tell you, Satoshi was a master at the art of maintaining</span> <span class="cue" id="t-201" data-t="201">anonymity on the Internet,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-203">3:23</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-203" data-t="203">leaving few, if any, digital footprints behind.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-207" data-t="207">But Satoshi did leave behind a corpus of texts, including a nine page white paper outlining his invention and his many posts on the BitcoinTalk</span> <span class="cue" id="t-216" data-t="216">forum,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-217" data-t="217">an online message board where users gathered to discuss the digital currency's software,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-222" data-t="222">economics,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-223" data-t="223">and philosophy.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-225">3:45</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-225" data-t="225">And that corpus, it turned out, had expanded significantly</span> <span class="cue" id="t-229" data-t="229">during the impostor's civil trial,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-231" data-t="231">when Marti Maumie,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-233" data-t="233">a Finnish programmer who collaborated with Satoshi in Bitcoin's early days, released a trove of hundreds of emails he had exchanged with him.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-242" data-t="242">Emails Satoshi sent to other early Bitcoin adopters had surfaced before,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-247" data-t="247">but none came close in volume to the mommy dump.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-250">4:10</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-250" data-t="250">If Satoshi was ever going to be found, I was convinced the key lay somewhere in these texts.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-256" data-t="256">Then again,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-257" data-t="257">others must have gone down this road before me. Journalists,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-261" data-t="261">academics, and Internet sleuths had been trying to identify Satoshi</span> <span class="cue" id="t-265" data-t="265">for sixteen years.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-267" data-t="267">During that span, more than 100 names had been put forward, including those of an Irish cryptography</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-274">4:34</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-274" data-t="274">student,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-275" data-t="275">an unemployed Japanese American engineer,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-278" data-t="278">a South African criminal mastermind,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-281" data-t="281">and the mathematician</span> <span class="cue" id="t-282" data-t="282">portrayed in the movie, A Beautiful Mind.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-286" data-t="286">The most alluring theories had focused on coincidences</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-290">4:50</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-290" data-t="290">that aligned with what little was known about Satoshi,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-293" data-t="293">a particular code writing style,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-296" data-t="296">a mysterious</span> <span class="cue" id="t-297" data-t="297">work history,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-298" data-t="298">an expertise in Bitcoin's key technical concepts,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-302" data-t="302">an anti government world view.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-304">5:04</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-304" data-t="304">But they had run aground under the weight of an alibi or some other piece of inconsistent or contrary evidence.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-311" data-t="311">Each failure had been met with glee by many members of the Bitcoin community.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-317" data-t="317">As they like to point out, only Satoshi could definitively prove his identity by moving some of his coins. Any evidence short of that would be circumstantial.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-326" data-t="326">It seemed foolish to think that I could somehow crack a case that had confounded so many others,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-332" data-t="332">but I crave the thrill of a big challenging story. So I decided to try once more to unmask Bitcoin's mysterious creator.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-341" data-t="341">One. A series of clues,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-343">5:43</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-343" data-t="343">too thin leads.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-345" data-t="345">I started by looking for ways to narrow the field.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-348" data-t="348">One thing that jumped out in Satoshi's emails to mister Maumee, and in his other writings, was that he mixed British spelling and idioms with American expressions.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-357" data-t="357">Since many Satoshi suspects are American,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-361" data-t="361">some have speculated that he disguised his prose with British isms.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-365" data-t="365">But I never bought that theory because of a clue Satoshi left us.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-370">6:10</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-370" data-t="370">In Bitcoin's first block of transactions,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-372" data-t="372">Satoshi embedded text from a newspaper headline,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-376" data-t="376">The Times 03/01/2009</span> <span class="cue" id="t-378" data-t="378">chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-381" data-t="381">The headline in question appeared in The Times of London's British print edition.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-386" data-t="386">This felt like a sign that Satoshi really was British.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-389">6:29</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-389" data-t="389">Satoshi was also very likely a member of the cypherpunks,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-393" data-t="393">a group of anarchists formed in the early nineteen nineties who wanted to use cryptography,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-399" data-t="399">the art of securing communications through code</span> <span class="cue" id="t-402" data-t="402">to free individuals from government surveillance and censorship.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-406" data-t="406">The cypherpunks interacted mostly through something called an Internet mailing list,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-411" data-t="411">ancestors of today's message boards.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-414">6:54</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-414" data-t="414">Mailing lists were large group emails in old typewriter font that subscribers received in their inbox.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-420" data-t="420">To communicate,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-421" data-t="421">respondents replied,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-423" data-t="423">all.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-424" data-t="424">It's hard to picture in the age of Venmo and Apple Pay, but one of the cypherpunks</span> <span class="cue" id="t-429" data-t="429">biggest concerns was the digitization</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-431">7:11</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-431" data-t="431">of financial transactions.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-434" data-t="434">When you hand someone a $20 bill, no one knows where it came from. But when you pay for something with a check or a credit card, banks keep computer records.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-444" data-t="444">Cypherpunks</span> <span class="cue" id="t-445" data-t="445">worried that governments would use those records to track people's lives.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-449" data-t="449">On their mailing list, they brainstormed about how to create electronic cash,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-454" data-t="454">digital money that would preserve the anonymity of physical currency.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-459">7:39</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-459" data-t="459">Some even came up with their own electronic cash systems, but none caught on</span> <span class="cue" id="t-465" data-t="465">until Bitcoin.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-466" data-t="466">Besides their shared interest in digital cash, there were other indications Satoshi belonged to the group.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-472" data-t="472">He announced his white paper on an offshoot of the Cypherpunks mailing list called the cryptography</span> <span class="cue" id="t-478" data-t="478">list.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-479" data-t="479">And he seemed familiar with two of the group's members.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-483">8:03</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-483" data-t="483">At its peak in the late nineteen nineties,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-486" data-t="486">the Cypherpunks</span> <span class="cue" id="t-487" data-t="487">counted some 2,000 followers,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-489" data-t="489">so that still left a wide pool of candidates.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-493" data-t="493">Armed with these admittedly</span> <span class="cue" id="t-495" data-t="495">thin leads, I poured over Satoshi's body of writing, especially the emails released by Mr. Maumie, and made a list of words and phrases that stood out to me. It felt like trying to decipher a foreign dialect.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-507">8:27</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-507" data-t="507">More than once, I wondered whether I was engaging in a useless exercise.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-512" data-t="512">My list eventually grew to more than a 100 words and phrases,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-516" data-t="516">taking up several pages in my notebook.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-519" data-t="519">Among those that caught my eye, dang.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-522" data-t="522">Back up, used as a verb in one word. Human friendly.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-526" data-t="526">On principle,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-527">8:47</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-527" data-t="527">burning the money,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-529" data-t="529">abandonware,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-530" data-t="530">hand tuned, and partial pre image.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-533" data-t="533">One phrase,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-534" data-t="534">a menace to the network,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-536" data-t="536">sounded like a line from a science fiction movie. The rest hinted at a weird combination of upper class Brit,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-543">9:03</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-543" data-t="543">American redneck, computer geek, and cryptographer.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-547" data-t="547">Using the advanced search function on the social media platform x, I did a cursory search to see if any of the dozen or so people most often suspected of being Satoshi</span> <span class="cue" id="t-557" data-t="557">used the terms I had highlighted.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-559" data-t="559">Not all Satoshi suspects have x accounts,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-562" data-t="562">so this wasn't meant to be scientific.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-565" data-t="565">But, just as I had hoped, one person was a match for nearly all of my words and phrases,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-571">9:31</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-571" data-t="571">mister Back.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-572" data-t="572">Staring at a long column of check marks I jotted in my notebook under his name, I felt a rush of adrenaline.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-579" data-t="579">My hunch now seemed at least partially founded.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-582" data-t="582">Mr. Back's use of many of the same terms as Satoshi might not prove anything to a community that had been consumed with this topic for many years,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-590" data-t="590">but I doubted it was just chance.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-593" data-t="593">As I took a closer look at Mr. Back, I realized he had several attributes that were consistent with Satoshi.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-599">9:59</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-599" data-t="599">For starters, he was British, and he was a cypherpunk.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-603" data-t="603">More important,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-605" data-t="605">mister Bak had invented Hashcash,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-607" data-t="607">a statistical puzzle solving system that Satoshi borrowed for the mining of Bitcoins.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-613" data-t="613">Satoshi had cited mister Bak and Hashcash in his white paper,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-618" data-t="618">but mister Bak had produced emails during the Australian imposters trial,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-623">10:23</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-623" data-t="623">showing that Satoshi had contacted him in August 2008 before publishing the Bitcoin white paper to check his citation of mister Bak's hashcash paper.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-633" data-t="633">Those emails seem like proof that mister Bak couldn't be Satoshi.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-638" data-t="638">As I thought about it, however, I glimpsed a different possibility.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-642" data-t="642">Mister Back could just as well have sent those emails to himself as a cover story.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-647" data-t="647">Down the cryptography</span> <span class="cue" id="t-649" data-t="649">rabbit hole, with his wire rimmed glasses, thinning gray hair, and goatee, mister Bak, 55,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-656">10:56</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-656" data-t="656">looks like a disheveled mathematician.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-659" data-t="659">Over the past dozen years, he has built a mini empire of Bitcoin related companies and become one of the community's most influential members.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-668" data-t="668">Mister Back has long been among the top Satoshi candidates.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-672" data-t="672">But unlike some other leading suspects, he hasn't been the subject of close journalistic</span> <span class="cue" id="t-678" data-t="678">scrutiny,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-679" data-t="679">other than in a 2020</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-681">11:21</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-681" data-t="681">video by an anonymous YouTuber who goes by the handle Barely Sociable.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-686" data-t="686">A year ago, I flew to Las Vegas to meet him. He was scheduled to speak at the Bitcoin twenty twenty five conference at the Venetian Resort.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-694" data-t="694">I wasn't sure I had the right person, so I wasn't planning on confronting him yet. I just wanted to get to know him and learn more about his background.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-702" data-t="702">If my reporting bore out, I envision cornering him with all of my evidence later in a final dramatic showdown,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-709" data-t="709">like a police detective trying to extract a confession from a murder suspect.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-714" data-t="714">But for now, I wanted to put him at ease and establish a rapport.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-718">11:58</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-718" data-t="718">I approached mister Back after watching him confidently predict on a panel that Bitcoin,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-723" data-t="723">then trading around $108,000,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-726" data-t="726">would reach a million easy in five to ten years.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-730" data-t="730">Fittingly, conference organizers had christened the stage he spoke on the Nakamoto</span> <span class="cue" id="t-735" data-t="735">stage.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-736" data-t="736">He seemed slightly startled even though I had arranged an interview ahead of time.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-740">12:20</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-740" data-t="740">I told mister Back only that I was working on a story about the history of Bitcoin, but he may have suspected what I was really up to because I had already contacted six former colleagues from three companies he had been involved with.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-754" data-t="754">If he did, he didn't show it. He was patient and friendly.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-759" data-t="759">It was hard to fathom that this soft spoken, middle aged nerd, who took no visible security precautions, might be one of the world's richest people.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-768" data-t="768">According to Bitcoin lore,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-770" data-t="770">Satoshi had mined 1,100,000</span> <span class="cue" id="t-773" data-t="773">coins in the digital currency's early days,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-776">12:56</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-776" data-t="776">a hoard worth $118,000,000,000</span> <span class="cue" id="t-780" data-t="780">at the time of the conference.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-782" data-t="782">I found mister Bak talkative when it came to Bitcoin,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-785" data-t="785">but more reticent when I shifted the conversation to his early life.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-790" data-t="790">I eventually elicited the following from him. He was born in London in 1970.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-796" data-t="796">His father was an entrepreneur,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-798">13:18</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-798" data-t="798">and his mother was a legal secretary.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-801" data-t="801">They moved around a lot, and family members had strong opinions and weren't shy about voicing them.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-807" data-t="807">Mister Back said he taught himself how to code on a Timex Sinclair personal computer at age 11</span> <span class="cue" id="t-813" data-t="813">and took interest in cryptography in high school.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-817" data-t="817">That became a passion at the University of Exeter</span> <span class="cue" id="t-820" data-t="820">when a fellow student turned mister Back, who was pursuing a PhD in computer science, onto PGP,</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-827">13:47</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-827" data-t="827">a free encryption program used by anti nuclear activists and human rights groups to shield their files and emails from government surveillance.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-837" data-t="837">Mister Back was so taken with the many potential applications of PGP,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-842" data-t="842">which stands for pretty good privacy,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-845" data-t="845">that he said he spent most of his PhD</span> <span class="cue" id="t-849" data-t="849">diving down the cryptography</span> <span class="cue" id="t-850" data-t="850">rabbit hole.</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-852">14:12</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Richard Greaser</b> <span class="cue" id="t-852" data-t="852">He got so sidetracked, he recalled, that he had to cram his thesis into his last six months at the university,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-859" data-t="859">comparing himself to a pilot crash landing a plane.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-862" data-t="862">I'd learned enough by then to know that PGP relies on public key cryptography.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-867" data-t="867">So does Bitcoin.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-869" data-t="869">A Bitcoin user has two keys,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-872" data-t="872">a public key from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box, and a private key, which is the You have just listened to a preview of Rudy Dazleworth's</span></span></p> + +<p class="cue-p"><a class="cue-t" href="#t-883">14:43</a><span class="cue-body"><b class="cue-who">Rod Palmer</b> <span class="cue" id="t-883" data-t="883">Plebslop Pulitzer Prize Pieces episode three, reading of the New York Times expose speculating that Adam Back is Satoshi.</span> <span class="cue" id="t-891" data-t="891">If you would like to unlock access to the world's most thermodynamically</span> <span class="cue" id="t-894" data-t="894">sound premium podcast content,</span> <span class="cue" id="t-896" data-t="896">subscribe to the Bugle Weekly on the fountain app.</span></span></p>