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The Man Behind Crypto Is Worth Billions. Who Is He? · Triple Da Money

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Which again is how Warren Buffett, the dead queen, and my old gym teacher all ended up on the same murder board.
0:07
SPEAKER_02: Somewhere out there right now is a stranger who's worth more than entire countries.
0:11
SPEAKER_02: Nobody's ever seen his face, nobody knows his real name.
0:14
SPEAKER_02: He could be dead, he could be in prison, he could be your Uber driver.
0:18
SPEAKER_02: We'll never know.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: Sounds made up.
0:19
SPEAKER_02: It's not made up, it's the biggest unsolved mystery in the history of money.
0:24
SPEAKER_02: And today we're solving it.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Let me guess.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: Crypto?
0:27
SPEAKER_02: Crypto.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: I already know everything about crypto.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing behind it.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: I've said this on the show before, and I'll say it again in the future.
0:34
SPEAKER_02: And let's see if your opinion survives an actual investigation.
0:38
SPEAKER_02: Somebody invented this thing, used a fake name, vanished.
0:41
SPEAKER_02: And today we have real suspects, real evidence, and we'll vote at the end to figure out who it really is.
0:46
SPEAKER_01: Like Scooby-Doo?
0:48
SPEAKER_02: Exactly like Scooby-Doo.
0:50
SPEAKER_01: Is there a van?
0:51
SPEAKER_02: Uh there's kind of a van.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: We get one of those cool vans?
0:56
SPEAKER_02: Mm.
0:56
SPEAKER_02: It's actually Mom's minivan.
0:58
SPEAKER_02: And there's been a juice box in there since March.
1:01
SPEAKER_02: I am not calling it the mystery machine.
1:03
SPEAKER_01: The mystery machine has a juice box in it.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: Write that down.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: The juice box is not evidence of anything.
1:09
SPEAKER_01: Everything's evidence today, Austin.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: That's the whole show.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: I already know who did it, by the way.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: It was a guy.
1:15
SPEAKER_02: That's not a suspect, Austin.
1:17
SPEAKER_02: That's a species.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm narrowing it down.
1:22
SPEAKER_02: I'm Emily, and we have a mystery to solve.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: And I'm Austin.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: I already solve it.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: It was a guy.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: Case closed.
1:29
SPEAKER_02: Everyone gets one vote at the end of the show.
1:32
SPEAKER_02: Let's get to work.
1:33
SPEAKER_02: So here's everything we actually provably know.
1:37
SPEAKER_02: Clue one.
1:41
SPEAKER_02: A couple years ago, after unleashing this thing on the world, our investor vanished.
1:46
SPEAKER_02: He stopped posting, stopped emailing, and he walked away from a fortune.
1:51
SPEAKER_02: It would make him one of the richest human beings alive.
1:54
SPEAKER_02: And he never spent a centimeter.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: That's my old gym teacher.
1:57
SPEAKER_02: It's not your gym teacher.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: He also disappeared suddenly mid-semester.
2:02
SPEAKER_02: He got a different job at a different school, Austin.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: Noting it regardless.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: So they were asleep?
2:32
SPEAKER_02: At the exact hours someone living in London would be asleep.
2:35
SPEAKER_02: If they were in Japan, that would literally happen mid-afternoon.
2:39
SPEAKER_01: British.
2:39
SPEAKER_01: I got it.
2:40
SPEAKER_02: Clue three.
2:44
SPEAKER_02: They spelt things the British way in their own writings.
2:48
SPEAKER_02: And they hid an actual London headline in the very first piece of their system.
2:53
SPEAKER_02: Just like a signature.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: British, nocturnal, loaded, never spends it.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking it's the Queen.
2:59
SPEAKER_02: The Queen is dead, Brandon.
3:00
SPEAKER_01: We don't know that for certain.
3:02
SPEAKER_02: We absolutely know that for certain.
3:04
SPEAKER_02: That's the profile.
3:05
SPEAKER_02: Let's meet the suspects.
3:09
SPEAKER_02: Suspect one.
3:10
SPEAKER_02: Years before this currency existed, a computer scientist named Nick Sosbo invented something almost identical.
3:17
SPEAKER_02: He called his version BitGold.
3:19
SPEAKER_02: And researchers who studied his writing say his writing is a near perfect match for our secret inventor.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: So it's him?
3:25
SPEAKER_02: He's denied it repeatedly, directly, and on record.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: Sounds exactly like something the real guy would say.
3:32
SPEAKER_02: That's not evidence, Austin.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: Noting it regardless.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: That's not evidence, Austin.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: You don't get to do that bit too.
3:40
SPEAKER_02: Suspect 2.
3:41
SPEAKER_02: A cryptographer named Hal Finney was the very first person on earth to ever receive a payment from our inventor.
3:48
SPEAKER_02: And he also happened to live a few blocks from someone who, and I'm not making this up, was named Satoshi Nakamoto.
3:55
SPEAKER_01: There's a real guy with that name?
3:57
SPEAKER_02: A completely different, unrelated guy.
3:59
SPEAKER_02: So hold that thought.
4:00
SPEAKER_02: It gets worse.
4:01
SPEAKER_02: Either this is the most suspicious coincidence in tech history, or it's the greatest plan ever devised.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: Suspicious.
4:09
SPEAKER_02: Very suspicious.
4:10
SPEAKER_02: Except journalists who dug through his private records concluded that he probably wasn't our inventor.
4:17
SPEAKER_02: And he passed in 2014, so we genuinely can't even ask him the question ourselves.
4:22
SPEAKER_01: Rest in peace, suspect 2.
4:24
SPEAKER_01: Too suspicious to live.
4:25
SPEAKER_02: That's not what happened, Austin.
4:29
SPEAKER_02: Suspect 3.
4:30
SPEAKER_02: Years earlier, an inventor named Adam Back invented something called hash cash.
4:35
SPEAKER_02: Proof that someone did real computer work before the system even trusted them.
4:38
SPEAKER_02: So people couldn't spam it for free.
4:40
SPEAKER_02: That idea is credited by name in the original document that introduced this whole currency.
4:45
SPEAKER_02: He was also one of the first two people that our inventor personally emailed.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: So the inventor reached out to him, specifically?
4:52
SPEAKER_02: Which either means that he is the inventor or that the inventor respected him enough to seek him out and ask him questions.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: They all denied it.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what a criminal would do.
5:01
SPEAKER_02: Or what literally anyone falsely accused of being a secret billionaire would do.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: Exactly what a criminal would say.
5:07
SPEAKER_02: I'm ending this line of questioning.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: I've connected all three of them to your gym teacher.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: How?
5:26
SPEAKER_01: Wait, that's the name?
5:27
SPEAKER_01: That sounds made up.
5:28
SPEAKER_02: It is made up.
5:29
SPEAKER_02: That's the whole show.
5:30
SPEAKER_02: A magazine once ran a cover story claiming they found him.
5:34
SPEAKER_02: An actual man in California whose real legal name just happened to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
5:39
SPEAKER_01: Another one?
5:40
SPEAKER_02: A different, unrelated one, he denied it.
5:43
SPEAKER_02: And our inventor's dormant account came back online for the first time in years just to say that they had the wrong man and then went silent.
5:50
SPEAKER_02: Forever.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: He broke a five year silence just to clear his name and then he never spoke again.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: The biggest mic drop in computer history.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: Alleged.
5:59
SPEAKER_02: Okay, second false lead.
6:01
SPEAKER_02: A man spent almost a decade saying he was the real inventor, and he started suing people for saying otherwise.
6:07
SPEAKER_02: A court finally reviewed all the evidence and concluded that he forged all the documents that he used to back up the story.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: So he lied, an actual court, about being a secret billionaire.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: I bet he got all the girls.
6:18
SPEAKER_02: For years.
6:19
SPEAKER_01: Adding him to the board as the guy who tried too hard.
6:22
SPEAKER_02: Two false leads down, which brings us to Me.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: It brings us to me.
6:26
SPEAKER_02: Go ahead.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: Suspect 4.
6:29
SPEAKER_01: Ooh, Ronald McDonald.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: Go on.
6:33
SPEAKER_01: Think about it.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: He's already been running his own currency for decades.
6:37
SPEAKER_01: Little peel-off game pieces that make you feel like you're a millionaire but are worth absolutely nothing except at one restaurant.
6:45
SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's a decent comparison.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
6:47
SPEAKER_02: McDonald's money is not evidence he invented Bitcoin.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: Same energy though.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: Suspect five.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: The Monopoly guy.
7:00
SPEAKER_02: He's a board game piece.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: A board game piece that spent 90 years selling people fake money for a made-up economy.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: Where a hotel on the street where nobody has ever heard of is worth$400.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: And everyone just agrees to believe it while the game is happening.
7:17
SPEAKER_02: That is unsettlingly close to something Warren Buffett's about to say to us.
7:21
SPEAKER_01: I've been paying attention.
7:22
SPEAKER_02: That one's not actually bad.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: Suspect 6.
7:26
SPEAKER_01: Dream.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: Alright, for real.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm dropping it.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: Hi.
7:32
SPEAKER_01: Why not?
7:33
SPEAKER_01: Dream's a very famous guy that makes Minecraft videos and he wears a mask.
7:37
SPEAKER_01: And his entire career before any of this was about mining.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: Mining like the mask puzzle mining?
7:44
SPEAKER_02: We are not accusing a real person of a felony just because he plays video games.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: I never said felony, I said founder.
7:51
SPEAKER_01: Very different energy.
7:53
SPEAKER_02: We're voting soon.
7:54
SPEAKER_02: Everybody needs to calm down.
7:55
SPEAKER_02: Since apparently we cannot move on until we cover the pizzas.
7:58
SPEAKER_02: May 22nd, 2010.
8:00
SPEAKER_02: A programmer posts online offering 10,000 units to anyone who'll bring him two pizzas.
8:05
SPEAKER_02: Somebody takes the deal.
8:07
SPEAKER_01: How much would that be worth today?
8:09
SPEAKER_02: Let's just say if you did the math out loud, you would need to sit down first.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: I'm already sitting down.
8:14
SPEAKER_02: Sit down further.
8:15
SPEAKER_02: It fluctuates, but sometimes those pizzas could be worth 1.2 billion dollars.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: For two pizzas?
8:21
SPEAKER_02: For two pizzas.
8:23
SPEAKER_01: Were they at least good pizzas?
8:25
SPEAKER_02: Nobody's asked that question once in 15 years, and you're asking that now?
8:29
SPEAKER_01: Somebody had to.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: This has to be the most expensive lunch in human history.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: This is now the most important suspect on the board.
8:37
SPEAKER_02: The pizza's not a suspect.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: The pizza was the only witness there, Emily.
8:42
SPEAKER_02: May 22nd is an actual holiday on internet culture now.
8:45
SPEAKER_02: People call it Bitcoin Pizza Day.
8:47
SPEAKER_01: Never trade your Bitcoin for pizza.
8:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, unless the pizza is really good.
8:52
SPEAKER_01: Then maybe reconsider reconsidering.
8:54
SPEAKER_02: That's the opposite of the lesson, Brandon.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: It's a lesson.
8:58
SPEAKER_02: Before we get to what this thing actually is, let's call our next witness.
9:02
SPEAKER_02: The greatest investor alive.
9:04
SPEAKER_01: Is it the Monopoly guy?
9:06
SPEAKER_02: It's Warren Buffett.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: Close enough.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: Same energy.
9:09
SPEAKER_02: Eight years ago, a reporter asked him about what he thought about cryptocurrency.
9:12
SPEAKER_02: And you know what he said?
9:13
SPEAKER_02: He called it rat poison squared.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: Rat poison squared.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: Why squared?
9:18
SPEAKER_00: Regular rat poison wasn't insulting enough for him?
9:20
SPEAKER_02: Here's his real argument, and it's a good one.
9:23
SPEAKER_02: Back in 2011, he told shareholders that if you melted down all the gold on Earth, the whole thing would form a cube about 68 feet on one side.
9:31
SPEAKER_01: A cube of gold, the size of what?
9:33
SPEAKER_01: A house?
9:34
SPEAKER_02: Small enough to fit inside a baseball infield.
9:37
SPEAKER_02: And his point was that the entire cube, worth trillions, just sits there.
9:41
SPEAKER_02: Doesn't grow anything, doesn't run a business, doesn't pay you a dime.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: He calls that a non-productive asset.
9:46
SPEAKER_02: You only make money on it if someone agrees to pay more for it than you did.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: And crypto is the same deal?
9:52
SPEAKER_02: Same deal.
9:52
SPEAKER_02: No gold, no cube, just numbers on a screen that only means something if the next person believes they mean something.
9:58
SPEAKER_01: So the gold cube is just vibes?
10:00
SPEAKER_02: Buffett would say yes, actually.
10:02
SPEAKER_02: He's not a huge gold guy either.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: Rat poison squared, but for shiny rocks too?
10:06
SPEAKER_01: Kind of like a board game piece selling made up property values.
10:10
SPEAKER_02: That is the exact comparison you made two minutes ago, and I don't like that it's holding up.
10:15
SPEAKER_01: Adding Warren Buffett to the suspect wall.
10:17
SPEAKER_02: He's not a suspect, he's a witness.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: A witness with a motive, Emily.
10:22
SPEAKER_01: He hates this stuff.
10:23
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't make him Satoshi, it makes him a guy with opinions.
10:26
SPEAKER_01: Noted.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: Adding him to the board regardless.
10:29
SPEAKER_01: Wait, hold up.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: I've been nodding along to this ever since the episode started, but uh I don't actually know what this thing is.
10:36
SPEAKER_01: Can you explain it to me like I'm 10?
10:38
SPEAKER_02: Like you're 10?
10:39
SPEAKER_01: I contain multitudes.
10:41
SPEAKER_02: Fine.
10:41
SPEAKER_02: You know how when in a group chat, if somebody says, I'll pay you back, everybody in the group chat sees that?
10:46
SPEAKER_02: And nobody can go back and delete it later because everybody saw the original message.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
10:51
SPEAKER_02: Now imagine that group isn't about lunch money, it's about all the money that everybody uses.
10:56
SPEAKER_02: Thousands of computers all around the planet keep a copy of the same running notebook.
11:01
SPEAKER_02: Every time money moves, every copy updates all at once.
11:04
SPEAKER_02: No one's the admin, no one can quietly edit their own copy after the fact.
11:08
SPEAKER_02: Because thousands of other copies would instantly disagree with them.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: So there's no bank?
11:12
SPEAKER_02: No bank, no government, just an enormous group chat that nobody can lie in.
11:17
SPEAKER_01: Okay, that part's actually kind of cool.
11:19
SPEAKER_02: There's one more piece.
11:20
SPEAKER_02: There will only ever be 21 million of these.
11:24
SPEAKER_02: Forever.
11:24
SPEAKER_02: Like if a trading card company printed 21 million versions of the same card and then shut the factory down forever.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: So nobody can make more whenever they want?
11:32
SPEAKER_02: Nobody.
11:33
SPEAKER_02: Not a president, not a company, nobody.
11:35
SPEAKER_02: Now, here's the part that makes it genuinely wild.
11:38
SPEAKER_02: The thing doesn't go up and down like a savings account.
11:41
SPEAKER_02: It swings hard.
11:43
SPEAKER_02: One year it dropped by 80% in a year.
11:46
SPEAKER_02: Years later, it practically did the same thing again.
11:48
SPEAKER_02: It dropped down 75% in 12 months.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: 80% of everything?
11:53
SPEAKER_02: Everything.
11:54
SPEAKER_02: Then it claws back up over the next couple of years.
11:56
SPEAKER_02: Then eventually it does the same thing again.
11:59
SPEAKER_01: So it's not a roller coaster.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: It's a roller coaster that occasionally catches fire.
12:03
SPEAKER_02: And then somehow people still get back in line for another ride.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: Why would anyone want money that does that?
12:09
SPEAKER_02: Some people think the wild swings are an appeal, but other people think that that's why you don't want to put your rent money in it.
12:15
SPEAKER_02: Both of these people exist allowedly at the same volume, at the same time, all over the internet.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: Adding mood swings as a clue for the coin and my uncle.
12:25
SPEAKER_02: And now, just like the cartoon promised, we open every box.
12:30
SPEAKER_01: That's deeply unsatisfying.
12:33
SPEAKER_02: That's the actual true answer.
12:35
SPEAKER_02: Nobody knows.
12:36
SPEAKER_02: Some of the smartest researchers and journalists alive have spent over 15 years on this.
12:41
SPEAKER_02: And it's still a question mark.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: But we don't solve it today?
12:44
SPEAKER_02: Nobody solves it, probably ever.
12:46
SPEAKER_02: That's what makes it the biggest unsolved mystery in modern history.
12:49
SPEAKER_02: But we said we'd vote.
12:51
SPEAKER_02: Austin.
12:53
SPEAKER_02: You had three real suspects with actual documented evidence, and you chose the guy who just teaches at a different middle school?
13:00
SPEAKER_00: My gym teacher.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: I stand by it.
13:02
SPEAKER_02: And I assume you're voting for the clown, the game piece, or dream.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: Actually, let me get this straight.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: Some guy, nobody's ever met him, invents a currency out of literally nothing.
13:14
SPEAKER_01: It's not backed by a government, it's not backed by gold, it's not backed by literally anything.
13:19
SPEAKER_01: And people put their life savings into it anyway.
13:22
SPEAKER_01: And I'm the unreasonable one for thinking it might be Ronald McDonald.
13:26
SPEAKER_02: Okay, when you put it like that.
13:27
SPEAKER_02: He's not wrong.
13:28
SPEAKER_02: He's not right either.
13:30
SPEAKER_01: I'll take not wrong.
13:31
SPEAKER_01: I'm framing that.
13:33
SPEAKER_02: If I had to actually guess, I'd bet on suspect one.
13:36
SPEAKER_02: The writing match is the closest thing to evidence we've ever got, but who's to say?
13:40
SPEAKER_01: Final answer is the juice box.
13:42
SPEAKER_02: The juice box from the minivan?
13:45
SPEAKER_01: It's been suspiciously quiet the entire episode.
13:48
SPEAKER_01: Never once a theory, never once a comment.
13:51
SPEAKER_01: That's not innocence, Emily.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: That's discipline.
13:54
SPEAKER_02: It's fruit punch, Brandon.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what Fruit Punch would want you to think.
14:00
SPEAKER_02: So a stranger built an untraceable digital money, used a fake name, disappeared, and then left the internet scrambling to figure out who they were.
14:08
SPEAKER_02: A digital coin with a limit of 21 million and price swings hard enough to make grown adults panic.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: And I said there was nothing.
14:15
SPEAKER_02: You did say that.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: It's not nothing.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: It's just not something I'd be willing to bet my life savings on.
14:21
SPEAKER_02: That's the takeaway, and since we've spent the whole episode being weird about it, here's the real takeaway instead of just vibes.
14:27
SPEAKER_02: BlackRock, one of the biggest investment firms on the planet, put out some real advice about this.
14:32
SPEAKER_02: If you want any crypto exposure at all, their suggestion is to keep it to 1 to 2% of your portfolio.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: That's it?
14:40
SPEAKER_00: 2%?
14:40
SPEAKER_02: That's it because this stuff swings so much harder than anything else in a normal portfolio.
14:44
SPEAKER_02: Even a small slice punches way above its weight.
14:47
SPEAKER_02: Think of it like hot sauce.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: I love hot sauce.
14:50
SPEAKER_02: A few drops, season the whole plate.
14:52
SPEAKER_02: Dump in the entire bottle, and you've ruined the whole dinner.
14:55
SPEAKER_02: Same idea here.
14:56
SPEAKER_02: A little bit can season a smart portfolio, but too much, and the whole thing is ruined.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: So don't marinate your whole life savings in the hot sauce.
15:04
SPEAKER_02: Don't marinate your whole life savings in the hot sauce.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: And if anyone ever offers you a life changing amount of anything for two pizzas, get a second opinion first.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: From someone other than your gym teacher.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: We don't know that for certain.
15:18
SPEAKER_02: Now, to everyone watching, if you think you actually know who Nakamoto is, put your suggestion in the comments.