Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal upgrades his odds that Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto after re-reading the NYT investigation

thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Sorry. Great to see you, guys. Appreciate it. Always helpful. We'll talk to you soon.

Uh up next, we have Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg and Odd Lots. Uh here to break down the New York Times analysis of the strongest Satoshi Nakamoto candidate. Joe, how are you doing?

Look at that.

I'm good. Uh

look at that sweater.

Yeah. What do you think?

You look fantastic. I love the green. You think the green works green here? The green is great and the color coming out the top.

That's actually what I meant. I when I said what do you think? I was like oh actually I'm wearing TVPN green for you guys.

Yes. Glad you guys noticed the gesture.

Well, welcome back. Nice to see you guys. Congratulations.

Is the New York Times the most underrated company in the world?

Yeah, of course. It's the It's the most Yeah, of course. It's the most underrated tech company and the most underrated news company. the number of haters that the new and undererated.

The thing though is to be fair that's the hater comment like that's just a gaming company.

But look like it's extraordinary juggernaut both tech and news and so many people have some sort of criticism of it or whatever and find a reason to hate it and everyone can find good reasons to complain about the media.

But it keeps on winning in ways that I've certainly been uh very surprised about. So um I was really excited. I know the topic at hand. I This is one of my f Satoshiology is like one of my favorite topics. I was super excited to see that they took a stab at finding out who it is.

Did you have a candidate in mind before this piece dropped? Had you watched the HBO documentary that actually pointed to a different suspect?

Yeah, I've read a lot. I actually didn't watch the HBO documentary in in part, I guess, because it was just so heavily criticized, etc. that I like maybe I don't need to watch it. I had often often found the um the Nick Zabbo, he's one of the candidates. I had always found that one to be fairly compelling. Yeah, me too.

And you know, in my first read of the New York Times piece yesterday, I thought it was I about Adam back like I knew he had been in the mix. Y

it struck me that most you know the piece didn't have a smoking gun, right? And that's sort of what we're all waiting for. We want that smoking gun whether it's some sort of digital signature or an email. It didn't have that. It was sort of lingu a lot of it was sort of linguistics like oh it he makes it's and it's wrong or hyphens wrong. I make those same mistakes too. I don't know everyone everyone makes those mistakes. So I wasn't totally convinced but then I read it a couple of more times over the last you know 24 hours. I read it again right before I came on this cuz I wanted to be prepared to chat with you guys and I'm like I've been like upgrading my odds that um that it is Adam John Keru has correctly has correctly identified him.

Yeah. What what have you worked with any journalists like uh John Keroo before? It feels like such a lost art and it's so delightful when someone has a chance to I it seems like this was reported for a year or more. Like he really he had the space and the breathing room. No, I I love it and I like I said whether this was right or wrong is one of my favorite topics and it is one of these things where like over the years you know a handful of journalists have like I can be the one to crack this which actually like brings to my mind one of the more fascinating aspects of Bitcoin period.

Yeah.

Which is it's amazing to think that like okay here is this thing it's kind of like a digital gold and so forth. That's a new kind of money and whoever Satoshi is he or her group of people whatever maybe it is Adam back maybe it's not but the opse I mean can you even fathom being online for several years in a way that could not be traced back to you definitively like I wouldn't even know where to begin I wouldn't even know where to begin how to like interact online in a way that like I could ensure my anonymity and I think one of the fascinating things about Bitcoin is that it does have like this

founder creat creator myth. This sort of um this sort of uh the divine the divine birth by this entity that left no earth almost no earthly trace is as much as a fascinating part of the story almost as Bitcoin itself as a technical accomplishment.

Yeah. And also just the fact that then Satoshi even like it wasn't an effort to remain anonymous in perpetuity. It was like then Satoshi went dark and and nothing's moved on the wallet and it's just been this like uh you know that's obviously fueled the theory that uh that potentially Satoshi passed away or something.

Yeah. So the question so here's a question that I have. So one of the stronger arguments or one of the pieces of evidence that the article in the New York Times points out is that Adam Bag it's well known he has a long history with the cipher punks. had been interested in privacy and digital money for a long time going back to at least like the mid90s etc.

He had invented hash which was uh you know which basically laid the foundation for proof of work which of course is elemental to mining. So he was like right there. Now one of the arguments that the piece makes is um Adam back like disappeared didn't have much of a digital trace of those first couple of years when Bitcoin was taking off. So maybe that was when he had slipped into Satoshi mode. On the other hand,

there was no way that anyone in 2008 or 2009 or 2007 could have known really what a gigantic phenomenon Bitcoin was going to be.

Why, you know, like Adam Beck clearly was very comfortable talking about many of his projects under his own name. He talked about hash. All of these people had been talking about their work in applied cryptography for years under their own name.

Yeah.

So have not having been able to know how big of a deal Bitcoin was going to be. Why would this particular project suddenly oh he would like have the foresight to like oh I have to be pseudonmous for this particular project. I don't totally understand why someone who had like talked about digital money, digital money for years under his real name would have had reason to think, okay, with this project I'm going to have to talk pseudonmously or anonymously. That is not entirely obvious to me.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh

like again in retrospect like sure like in 2026 we could look back yes it makes a lot of sense that this person would have like the pseudonym aspect but when it's just a bunch of people

part of the community trying to solve the problem of petope payments who have been using their names why suddenly like when this these pieces come together this way would the creator feel impelled to be private in a way that they didn't feel impelled to be private with all the other Bcash hash digital gold etc That's not totally obvious to me.

Well, the way that I mean obviously the way you're talking about it is I'm becoming more suspect that it was in fact you

behind.

No.

Well, so here so this is a Yeah. Wait, John, it sounds like you you don't find this component.

No, I Yeah. I I I just uh I I feel like after watching a number of projects sort of sputter where they did have a specific founder that could be uh just not even attacked but just like the the motivations of that individual could be questioned and and there's so much like risk tied to like a single person. It doesn't strike me as that cra I mean clearly someone went anonymous, right?

Yeah. One one exercise is like is there a person that if if if it came out and we could determine that it was act entirely factual that this one person

who who's the kind of person that that would make the Bitcoin sort of trade up in value, right? Because there's like I can't really think of anyone. I can think a lot of different groups that it would trade down dramatically. It comes out oh some government entity, you know, uh you know that that that goes down uh dramatically. Um, and so there's not there's not a lot of like ROI for anyone on a personal level if they're if they're

one of the funny things so one of the funny things about Adam specifically if you go to like his Twitter profile it says you know it lists his accomplishments and it says he is the inventor of hash hash in parenthesis Bitcoin mining and it what's funny is many people over the years have actually accused Adam of overstating ing what his claim there. It's like yes, there is clearly a lot of overlap between hash and the notion of proof of work that was elemental to how Bitcoin mining worked, but hash itself is not Bitcoin mining. It is a sort of a thing that preceded it was one of the antecedants or the preced whatever to Bitcoin mining a similar technique the whole proof of work concept. So there's been this claim that actually one of his issues is that he overstated his invention or role in the creation of Bitcoin which is very funny like if if it turns out it's him that for a long time the accusation was that he over overplayed his role. And then the other thing that's strange is that like since you know he's had like so and this ca this is mentioned in the New York Times piece he was one of the guys who last year or whatever launched it one of these Bitcoin treasury companies right like a micro strategy like entity that was just going to hold a lot of Bitcoin and does that sound like something Satoshi and Nakamoto would do in my opinion not really but then the flip side is well that's like the best OBSE in the world do a bunch stuff that feels a little bit scammy, feels a little bit cheesy, feels a little bit like um opportunity.

This guy is definitely broke. There's no way. There's no way. There's no way he's got, you know, the the tens of billions of dollars.

Yeah,

that's what I'm saying. So, it's like on the first pass, I was like, "No, like Satoshi is not going to like launch a little like mini me micro strategy company. This does not seem very likely." But then the flip side is, man, if you were someone who like maybe some suspect of being Satoshi, what would be the thing that would be the least Satoshi like thing to do and throw people like maybe it would be like create a Bitcoin treasury company?

Or if you were Satoshi, but you lost the keys in some sort of silly mishap, then you would want to get back in the game because you're still a believer, but you don't have access.

Anyway, last question. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

Yeah. Last question on the on the Bitcoin thing. Did you ever go down the Paul Laroo route? And did you ever were you ever a Paul Laroo believer? I was really convinced.

Paul Laroo guy. Which one was that?

So he he uh was a former criminal cartel boss informant to the US uh drug enforcement agency. He created TrueCrypt and was really early in uh basically spamming like the classic email spam of like uh you know mail enhancement. He would spam that out, scam everyone. He became so deeply entrenched that at one point he didn't just own a uh like domain name and he would switch the URL. He owned a tldd or like a registar so that no one could kick him off and he could create unlimited new websites.

That's pretty funny.

So he would just create a new website every day and so the Gmail filters would get confused because well we've never seen this one before.

I love that. Uh,

you know, the thing is I've always thought like that I I don't know if any of you have ever read it, but there's an amazing book uh by an NYU professor Finn Bruntton called I think it's called Digital Money. Okay. And it's about the prehistory of Bitcoin. So, it's about this community of the cipher punks in the '9s and ' 80s and actually even going back to the 1970s. Yeah. where people were talking about this fact that as the world was going to go online, it would be very difficult for me to send you a payment without the need for like a third-party database. The idea of like we need something that's cashlike, a bearer instrument on the internet. Yeah. And I think this is like a really important thing to know is that there have been there was a small group of people that basically for three decades or more before Bitcoin had been trying to solve this problem. And so like in the the New York Times piece the it points out that back had been talking about all of these things that Satoshi had been talking about. And my first response is yes.

Of course they did because this was this core group of people who for years understood that in the online context if if payments were ever going to be a thing we would need a third party. And if there was a third party they can block a transaction they can reverse a transaction. They can penalize you for making a bad transaction etc. And so this was understood by some people from day one of the, you know, pre- internet that this would become an issue. And so I'm not surprised that they were all using roughly the same analogies and so forth.

Yeah. The book is digital cash, the unknown history of anarchist, utopian, technologists who created cryptocurrency. And I will recommend a book to you about Paul Laru, about Paul Laroo. I think it's called The Mastermind. Uh, and I believe it was optioned into a movie. I'm not sure. I think uh Michael Man was going to do it and that would that sounded really good. But uh the book is fantastic. Anyway, is that was really fun.

Has this been like a like a nice reprieve for you from covering the war? How have you been processing the the constant girrations in the oil market and the broader financial market? Uh it it feels like such a hard uh thing to cover, but obviously you've been doing a great job with OddLots and beyond.

Thank you. The stakes are I mean it is a hard thing to cover. It's an awful thing to cover, right? It's a war and wars are awful and the stakes are so, you know, there are so many ways that wars can get more, as catastrophic as they are, get even more and more catastrophic. So, it's like, you know, it's but it but it's also like an extraordinary story for the things that we like to cover, which is like understanding the real flows of the economy. And you know, prior to this war, I had not fully appreciated essentially just like how I mean, I knew about for oil, I was aware that the straight of Hormuz was a very big deal. Yeah.

But like the degree to the fallout, whether we're talking about like fertilizer, whether we're talking about um not

real estate in real estate in Dubai, you guys had a great

real estate in Dubai, of course, which real estate in Dubai, which you know, we probably you guys probably know more people than myself. elevated to camping out to Dubai for the low taxes and stability and then suddenly you know you're like oh this could be

honestly credit credit to Americans like Dubai has just not been that popular.

I think it's different it's very much yeah European thing when when I was out there I mean it very much is like a melting pot. I've been there a couple times and

very limited number of Americans and the American the Americans that are there for the most part aside from on like you know scheduled you know

fundraising trips are not really in the same type of like business community that that you and I are in.

Yeah, it does seem like a more of like a British thing specifically in terms like oh going there for the low taxes or the stability etc. But yeah, like all of these things getting upended or the specific not just oil and gas that yes that goes out of the straight of Hormuz obviously, but then like this specific acuity then pain points that are being felt in Asia specifically and how they're already having to go into sort of like a 1970s rationing mode where you see these headlines about if you have, you know, if your license plate ends with an odd number then you can drive on this date. I mean the economic reverberation, it was clearly the biggest sort of global econ story since co

Yeah. I was reading this article in the in the economist this weekend uh in Buttonwood about how it feels like the market is not actually able to process what a 20% decrease in in uh in oil rates is. And it feels like I don't know if that's just like hope that there will be a taco that there will be a quick resolution but uh the the the key stat that they were latching on to was that even if the everything was world peace tomorrow just bringing resources and infrastructure back online just starting the flow and moving the ships again takes you know three months, six months. And so you will see reverberations through the economy for for months if not years even if you know we get a good outcome immediately which is what we're all hoping for.

Yeah. Some sort of benign outcome. But like but this is the weird thing to and you're spot on and this is the weird thing which is that if you talk to the commodity guys they're like this is unbelievable. This is like a scenario that we couldn't even really have contemplated. And then you look at the stock market and you know oil is up a lot. It's not like oil markets are not registering. It's up a lot, but um but then you look at the stock market and it's flat on the year like as of the time I w or it's like down.3%.

I mean it's stunning because you have to remember that even like the last thing we were all talking about prior to the war was like oh every legacy business model in the world is going to zero because AI is getting so good. So that was the first two months of the year. And then the third month of the year is this war that massively shoots up the price of oil. Kind of like takes the prospect of rate cuts um off the table. And we're looking at a market that's flat on the year. Like it's really like you know I try to I'm sort of an EMH guy and so I always think if I'm missing something I just trust the market. It's very strange, you know. It's very strange.

It is very strange. Uh have you have you found any particular corners of the economy that are serving as white pills these days? Because it feels like a year ago things were sort of it was there was there was political chaos. We were talking about the tariffs and whatnot, but uh it felt like in broadly most industries were uh sort of seeing reasonable advances. Things were much less controversial and we're in a much more tumultuous time.

I mean I it's hard to it's hard to disagree with that. I mean I think that there's basically I think most people say there's basically two parts of the economy that are growing and one is anything related to AI and data centers etc obviously and the other is like home healthcare jobs and I don't think much has like changed on that front and unfortunately like okay like again let's just go back to the world of February 26th before the um strikes had begun

you know we the issue was we were already still at that point well above target for the Fed's inflation now reason to think maybe it's trending down, maybe there's some softening, etc.

But even with just essentially two cylinders out of

I don't know if the cylinders analogy is great because I don't know how many cylinders but two cylinders really firing like okay ongoing need to like provide people healthcare and then AI even with that the economy was like under a certain level of like strain with price stress. Yeah. And so then you add in okay now like all forms of commodities are going to be more expensive. They're spending of course wars are very costly from an expenditure perspective. And so where does that leave the rest of the economy that's not AI or healthcare? I have yet to see I don't know I'm certainly not feeling white pill to the extent maybe the the closest is like look I would say there there I there there's still evidence a little bit out there that for example that we're not seeing the evisceration of tech and software jobs the way some people might have anticipated and there continues to be like evidence like oh actually like that sort of like the the economist optimism that maybe AI will create demand for software engineers because there were more things that could be softwareized. I actually think maybe that's looking okay that thesis and so it's white pilling in the sense maybe we don't have like the total evisceration of the sort of the labor market like that part.

Um we actually got a good jobs report last week on um the good Friday report. So like I there are things

and and we trust all the jobs reports now. We we could definitely lean on

the revisions have been a little tumultuous for me.

There have been a lot of revisions. It's very tough to measure the economy, but I um I I salute our brave stat statistitians at the Bureau of Labor Services.

And we did and we did talk to some other folks who were looking at like private market data, payroll data, and and and there were green shoots there as well. So I I I'd be I'm optimistic that that holds. Um yeah, I've heard I've heard the most optimistic take about uh

just uh more companies building more new things. We've built a bunch of internal tools here. uh the actual um like NPS score for most AI apps is actually very high even though AI as a concept pulls very poorly. So there's this there's this difference there.

What does NPS stand for?

Net promoter score or like approvals approval rating. So like people may give chat GBT directly like an 80% approval rating and it has like a lot of it has a lot of good reviews in the app store for example and if you just ask them about that or or what they're building with cloud code they'll say oh they'll tell you an amazing story of some custom software that they built for their business that they would have had to spend a million dollars on a consulting group to do it and it maybe would have been really tricky to get it to math out but then they'll just tell you like oh yeah we needed this dashboard and we just made it in a day or or a couple weeks So people love their specific things they built and but then it's like terrible and they hate Yeah. No, I mean look I mean I think this is actually seems to be a recurring phenomen over the last several years to some extent said this about the economy generally like I'm doing okay. I my financial situation is actually fine but the economy is like really terrible. So it would be kind of interesting like if maybe there was a pattern that we're seeing across domains where you know everything else I was yeah I like AI I like how it's doing I like this thing I built etc. It's all terrible. Maybe that's just sort of like a general disposition that people have towards a lot of things. Yeah, it's the Kylo Scandlin vibe session concept. And

people maybe they're happy in their

maybe they're happy or they're happy in their relationships, but they were like, "Oh, but dating ever for everyone else is a total wasteland. Everyone these days maybe that's actually kind of a thing."

Last question. Any prediction market predictions on your side?

What do you think? We had an episode um I'll take we have an episode out today with Tomas Pedy the founder of IBKR which is also one of the most impressive impressive trading entrepreneur. They're take getting prediction mark they're really getting into prediction markets. So I think u my prediction is that um it's not just going to be like a two entity race for that much longer. I think like um I think as it gets bigger there's probably too much money to be left on the table for it to just be these two companies that most people never heard of up until like a year ago.

Yeah. No, makes a ton of sense. Uh well,