“Cat and Mouse”: Cullen Hoback Confronts the Bitcoin Creator Mystery in ‘Money Electric’

Cullen Hoback has developed something of a specialty in chasing elusive cultural figures. In his 2021 HBO miniseries Q: Into the Storm, he examined the QAnon conspiracy theory, structuring the six episodes around an investigation into the identity of “Q,” who stirred up the phenomenon by posting cryptic “leaks” supposedly from within the Trump administration. Hoback does something similar with his new film Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery. A look at the history of the namesake cryptocurrency, it’s also a hunt for “Satoshi Nakamoto,” the original creator of Bitcoin who has managed to remain hidden for more than 15 years. Ahead of the film’s premiere on HBO yesterday evening, we spoke with Hoback over Zoom about his investigation and making all the information legible for viewers. This interview has been edited and condensed for time and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: The film goes a little bit into your early interest in cryptocurrency and how it works. How long had you been keeping an eye on this before deciding to make a film?

CULLEN HOBACK: I really started paying attention to Bitcoin in 2017, and then I looked at crypto more broadly. I thought about making a documentary chronicling the boom-bust cycle, or one of these companies trying to raise $100 million for vaporware. And I think anybody who touches this space gets interested in the Satoshi Nakamoto mystery, but I didn’t have a window into solving it back then, so I put it on a shelf.

Then, just a week or two after the Q series aired on HBO, Adam McKay said to me, “You know what you should do next?” I’m like, “Don’t say Satoshi.” He said, “Satoshi.” And I told him this is an overpitched and under-delivered story, and if we were to do it, I’d really want to be able to solve it, and that’s a lofty goal. But I offered to put together a list of likely suspects and see if we could get access to any of them, then maybe it’d be worth pursuing. It took some time, but I eventually got access to Adam Back, which helped unlock the story.

D: How high would you gauge your confidence that you correctly identified Nakamoto?

CH: I think we present a hell of a case. But my confidence matters less than what a viewer takes away from the evidence presented and how the primary suspect reacts when confronted with that evidence. I think that confrontation speaks volumes.

D: And much of the film is just as much about exploring these characters, and through them seeing the story of Bitcoin.

CH: The film really has three plots. You have the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, you have this battle between governments and Bitcoin as its adoption spreads, and we’re charting the history of what Bitcoin was trying to be and the industry it’s become. We’re trying to balance what could have each probably been their own film into one story and make it as accessible as possible.

That was part of why I wanted to kind of defy expectations of how you visually convey Bitcoin. We shot many of the special effects practically, most of them in my garage. It was a lot of experimenting to communicate this idea of taking something physical, that has this analog property, that’s being digitized. The timeline effects are 3D-rendered, but we initially shot all of them using LED strips, and then emulated how that looked in those effects.

Every shot of the Satoshi Nakamoto bust was practical. I’ve got the statue right here. The colored lights flying around it are LEDs. We had fun trying to create the visual palette for it. We blew up a giant black balloon, glued a bunch of orange LEDs to it, and then spun it around. When “Satoshi’s Stash” blows up, that effect was a composite of popping the balloon and having all the LEDs fly everywhere.

D: If often looks like it’s just you following the characters and interviewing them. Were you often shooting with a small crew?

CH: Yeah. I like to be able to be spontaneous and not overproduce these shoots, and to have this quality of cat and mouse with the subjects. The more people I have on set, the harder that is. For some of these setups, I will have one other person with me so they can film me, like for the final confrontation scene. I think we had three total people for that sequence, including myself, and that’s the most I ever had on a shoot. I’d say it was just me recording for about a third of this film.

D: What’s the conversational negotiation like with these characters? A lot of them are evasive or cagey.

CH: It starts with finding things you agree on. I have a background in digital privacy, having made a film about digital rights, and I think that helped open a lot of conversations with the cypherpunks. And they understand the curiosity about who is behind all of this; it’s a normal pursuit for any journalist investigating Bitcoin. 

I think the challenge is continuing the relationship. A lot of these individuals are used to one-and-done interviews. I had to get them to adjust to this being a prolonged project, that after they talked to me I’d do more research, absorb things they had said, then come back with new questions. That was different for them, certainly for Adam. The cypherpunks are privacy-forward, and coordinating anything with them well in advance is extremely difficult, and in some cases inadvisable. 

The ending sequence was arranged very spontaneously, for instance. It feels like a producing miracle, frankly, that we were able to wrangle the subjects to make that scene work. I don’t think we would’ve been able to present a case this compelling for the audience had we not gotten them where we did that day. In advance, I was running through all the evidence in my head how I was going to prosecute it, and it was unclear how they were going to react. It never goes the way you think it will.

D: Some of the subjects aren’t just evasive but are outright toying with you. There’s a scene where two characters “jokingly” accuse each other of being Nakamoto, tossing out factoids. How do you sort through these kinds of diversions while making sure you don’t lose the audience?

CH: Having had some experience with trolls and people who are trying to obfuscate their trails, it’s always a challenge to find the grains of truth or the intentions behind their actions. They tend to throw so much shit at the wall that nothing sticks, but within all that is some truth, and that’s what they’re trying to hide. The game is finding those pieces and throwing away the rest. The signal and the noise.

So look at a scene like the one that you just described, where Peter Todd is trolling Adam Back about Back supposedly being Satoshi. I’m sitting there and thinking, he’s being tongue-in-cheek, but he enjoys throwing this in Adam’s direction. Maybe he believes it, I don’t really know. But when you go back after another round of research, you see it’s more about throwing shade. You can see in their expressions that Adam wants to say something but can’t, and that changes your understanding of the scene. And Adam doesn’t like people thinking he’s Satoshi. You get that from the scene as well.

D: Why did you decide to develop this as a feature instead of a series, like with Q? Within that more limited time frame, how did you determine what to include and what not to on this subject? There’s not much about the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, for instance.

CH: There was a time when I would’ve liked for it to be a series, to have been able to tease out all of this. There’s so much evidence I had to leave on the cutting room floor, so many subplots and people I interviewed that I had to leave out. 

A feature is what HBO bought from me, and I think that was ultimately the right call. It makes it much more accessible to general audiences. People who are not already engaged with cryptocurrency tend to hesitate to watch anything about it. We wanted to tell a story that would work for those who knew nothing about Bitcoin or crypto, but who wanted to understand this force that is shaping our financial future. And those more immersed in this space can get into the mystery element. You have to touch on all these things and make it as efficient and as much like a clock as possible.

Dan Schindel is a freelance critic and full-time copy editor living in Brooklyn. He has previously worked as the associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic.