Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Exactly 15 years ago on Halloween day in 2008, an unknown man named Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper that has affected countless people’s lives. That’s the same year as the Great Recession that followed the Wall Street crash and bailout. The paper was an elegant mathematical treatise outlining BitCoin, a parallel, person-to-person crypto-currency that functions without any bank, credit corporation or national government at its helm. Satoshi Nakamoto released his design of a blockchain database for anyone to use. But a few years later, in 2011, he disappeared leaving Bitcoins now worth as much as $70 billion. Who was he? Where did he go? Why did he disappear? And is Satoshi still alive?

Searching for Satoshi: The Mysterious Disappearance of the Bitcoin Creator is a new documentary  that looks at the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto and who he (or she?) really was. The film tracks down some of the people rumoured to be him, and tries to see whether he’s still alive. It’s the work of multi-award-winning Toronto documentarian Paul Kemp. I’ve spoken about his work many times on this show. I interviewed Drew Hayden Taylor about the series Going Native and the doc The Pretendians that Paul Kemp directed and produced, and talked about Transformer with Michael del Monte and trans bodybuilder Janae Marie Kroczaleski which Kemp produced.

Searching for Satoshi premiered earlier this week on The Passionate Eye and is currently streaming on CBC Gem. 

I spoke to Paul Kemp in Toronto via ZOOM.