The years-long mystery over the identity of bitcoin (BTC-USD) creator Satoshi Nakamoto isn’t due to a lack of guesses.
Even the founder of the now-collapsed FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, weighed in on the question during a 2021 interview while speaking with the film crew behind "Finding Satoshi," which premieres Wednesday. The clip was exclusively provided to Yahoo Finance.
In the interview, Sam Bankman-Fried pointed to Paul Le Roux, a Zimbabwean-born programmer, as the likeliest contender to be the creator of the world's largest cryptocurrency.
“He basically had been involved in a lot of predecessors to cryptocurrencies, various e-money type systems, involved in a lot of crime, very technologically sophisticated, very sophisticated in terms of cryptography," Bankman-Fried said of Le Roux.
He added, "It's a plausible guess,” noting he wouldn’t assign more than a 20% probability to any single individual.
In 1999, Le Roux created E4M, or Encryption for the Masses, a free, open-source disk encryption software. The highly skilled programmer later became involved in a series of crimes and was arrested in 2012, after which he became a Drug Enforcement Administration informant. In June 2020, Le Roux was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.
Bankman-Fried gave the interview prior to his arrest nearly four years ago following the collapse of the crypto platform FTX. He was later sentenced to 25 years in prison after being found guilty on seven criminal charges tied to investor fraud.
His recent social media posts favorable to President Donald Trump have sparked speculation that he is angling for a pardon.
The release of "Finding Satoshi," which explores the global hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto, comes on the heels of a New York Times investigation that identified British computer scientist Dr. Adam Back as a possible Satoshi Nakamoto. However, Back has denied the claim.
“I think the most probable situation is that Satoshi is somebody who's not talking to documentary film crews, to investigative journalists, who is not participating in the forums or at conferences with his real name,” Back said in a recent interview with Yahoo Finance last week.
Interest in Satoshi’s identity has been swirling for over a decade, especially as his invention has helped drive the $2.4 trillion crypto market.
“Satoshi was incredibly important with what happened in crypto, but by design Satoshi is not relevant for what happens next in crypto,” Bankman-Fried said in the interview.
He added, “If they were to come out, I do think that would change things, and it would matter enormously who they are."