Photograph: HBO
By the end of Money Electric’s 100 minutes I understand fractionally more about bitcoin and the blockchain. This is no mean feat. I only downloaded my first app in 2021 and this is no word of a lie. You will, however, have to take my word about my increased knowledge of the digital currency because it is still nowhere near enough to put into words.
Money Electric has plentiful graphics that try to make the abstract tangible enough for the non-cryptographically minded among us to grasp what I still want to call “computer shenanigans” and they do help – but only to the extent that I now feel the sense of the blockchain and its strings and keys and coins and what not.
Beyond the graphics, there is an awful lot more going on. Written, filmed and directed by an experienced documentary-maker and very – gosh, what’s the adjective? Dizzyingly? Fascinatingly? Pathologically? – confident man by the name of Cullen Hoback, this programme is on a mission. Not just to explain how bitcoin works, but why its existence and growth are important, how it affects individuals and societies, what money really is, who controls it and why some people want to decentralise it. It asks whether preserving the untraceability of transactions that cash has always offered is a civil liberties, right-to-privacy issue or a gift to criminal organisations – as well as what breaking the hegemony of the dollar might mean and how far the US might go to protect its status as the world’s reserve currency.
Overall, however, the attention paid to all these profound and intriguing issues is fleeting compared to the question that – though possibly the least answerable and for many viewers I suspect the least interesting – Hoback clearly finds the most intriguing: namely, who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
The anonymous/pseudonymous creator of what is now the 10th most valuable asset in the world has never been identified. In 2008, he (or she, or a team) published a white paper entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. The next year, he released the blockchain software and the first bundle of bitcoins, in what became known as the genesis block. Shortly thereafter, he basically handed off the whole kit and caboodle to someone else and disappeared, but not before amassing a million or so bitcoin (bitcoins? How can I pretend to understand something when I’m not even sure of the grammar?) of his own, which have sat untouched on the blockchain ever since.
If Nakamoto does ever cash in, he/she/they will almost certainly instantly become the richest person or persons in the world, with all the power that carries. There is speculation that Nakamoto has deliberately thrown away the key to this fortune, yet the coins have not been destroyed, as they can be by owners.
A large – too large – part of Money Electric is spent pursuing leads about the inventor’s identity, interviewing suspects (including the uniquely compelling figure of Adam Back, a British super-cryptographer, whose native air of stoic bemusement should be added to the Unesco intangible cultural heritage list as a matter of urgency). It tries to explain niche spats between early adopters and contributors to the technology, and conspiracy theories involving minutely timed ancient message board posts. These bog down the film and make it feel increasingly disjointed. By the end, when Hoback has his main suspects assembled and is putting his evidence before them, it plays more like a cross between a techy Agatha Christie and a playground standoff than any kind of conclusion.
Along the way, as I say, the more complex narratives and philosophical inquiries have been abandoned. We follow “bitcoin ambassador” Samson Mow as he travels the world trying to persuade other countries, particularly those with animus against the US, to follow El Salvador’s lead and adopt bitcoin as their main or exclusive currency, and glance at the various attempts by the US to clamp down on such possibilities – or crowd out bitcoin by introducing its own digital (albeit highly traceable) currency.
But the vision of what happens if one side or the other wins is never fully developed, and you are left with the impression that Hoback got carried away with showing his Nakamoto workings (an admirable amount of research, but lightly worn it is not) instead of following through on anything else. There is a great sense of opportunities missed rather than answers found.
• Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery aired on Sky Documentaries and is available on Now.
