11 ms·

Bitcoin Is Being Monitored by an Increasingly Wary U.S. Government

109 points by em3rgent0rdr 10y ago

wheelerwj 10y ago
In 2013, HSBC was fined for failing to appropriately monitor nearly $700B(B as in BILLION) in transactions between Mexico and the US alone. [1] Yet we're supposed to be more worried about digital currency because of $600 (dollars, not millions or billions, just dollars) worth of bitcoin found its way to the Gaza strip? [2] The only interesting part of this article is that post publication, the bitcoin numbers were updated by a source from the Dept. of Treasury. This article is just FUD and nonsense during a slow news cycle. Banks and wire transfers will continue to be the primary vehicle for money laundering and terrorism financing for the foreseeable future. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge-approves-1-9b-drug-money https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-02/hsbc-judg... [2] https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column/private-sector/new-frontier-terror-fundraising-bitcoin-1089 https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column/private-sector/new-fro...
- rebuilder 10y ago
  The article specifically says Bitcoin is thought to be too transparent for terrorists to use seriously, and that the gov't is more worried about the possibility of new, les traceable cryptocurrencies being developed.
  - verroq 10y ago
    Like zcash?
    - ericb 10y ago
      Monero is a more likely candidate for the winner in this category.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    Or are they worried about the idea of a future where their spending is transparent?
    - mark_l_watson 10y ago
      Excellent point. Here in the US, we have payoffs to government officials on the local, state, and national levels. I like the idea of a Bitcoin like currency with 100% transparency in universal use. Privacy is important to me, but if everyone on earth had access to all financial transactions that would help stop corruption. Use case: turning my personal software agent to free to evaluate candidates in upcoming elections, not invest in companies if I dislike who they do business with, etc.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        There are many ways to evade such a system already. For example, one of our ex-PMs didn't get any money from a certain company; they just paid €25M to another guy, who was such a friend that he paid for the ex-PM's home, hired his wife and driver, bought thousands of copies of his book, etc.
        kahnpro 10y ago
        Wow, he sounds like a really great guy! Everyone needs a friend like that.
- Bombthecat 10y ago
  And it will work.
- MylesHildebrand 10y ago
  It's because those 600$ are helping Palestinians, Jews' natural enemy. And we all know the U.S. government is controlled by Jews.
- riprowan 10y ago
  I think the fact that HSBC laundered $700B and got away with a slap on the wrist, while the government wants to crack down on $600 in Bitcoin, is an extremely important and telling factoid.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  Don't disagree with you that Bitcoin's current role is small potatoes. Don't disagree that Newsweek (and this author) aren't especially great sources of information. That being said, writing it off as FUD is premature. The fact that it is getting written tells you where media and possibly government focus is now. We can either write that focus off or consider the implications. Terrorist and criminal organizations are some of the most effective users of new media in the world. ISIS produces some of the most slickly-produced videos you'll ever see. They know and harness Telegram and other apps. If they are not stupid - and they aren't, they're looking for whatever advantages they can get. We can acknowledge this without a bias for or against cryptos. The Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community has since birth by and large been about speculation and making stacks of cash. That's been it's reason for existence and adoption practically - otherwise it would just make for really cool tech that we all talk about on HN. It's been running straight ahead with fully anonymous protocols which while great have the most natural application in black market purchases, and early adopters/users that while they have a right to use them, practically don't need to - their actions are tracked via hundreds of other unrelated means. The cryptocurrency community has done really poor job of policing itself. It's done a really excellent job of attracting attention through exchange after exchange being hacked and/or scams. Maybe it can't and shouldn't try to restraining itself or police itself, but the natural result of that is someone else is going to police it or shut it down. Instead of just saying it's FUD, this article is probably ahead of the curve. This is going to become a bigger and bigger issue. Either Bitcoin advocates find out effective arguments or means or it's going to get shutdown. If they really worried about $600 in the Gaza strip, what happens when that turns to $600k and then $6 million? Because that will happen as the technology advances. Does that give governments the right to intervene? No, but it makes a bigger and bigger target. There might not be an effective solution, but it's the canary in the coal mine. The US government was never just going to let this stuff happen unhindered. The fact that they are paying attention when there's not much to pay attention to is all you need to know. Just wait until there's a sizable sum a politician can make a media campaign out of...
  - bitCromwell 10y ago
    this is thoughtful and quite careful to avoid controversy, would love to see an explanation from your downvoters
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
divbit 10y ago
I wonder if donation through anonymous currencies could be protected under the first amendment through religious freedom (e.g. Bible: Matthew 6:3 )
moeadham 10y ago
Not sure what is going on at Newsweek, but if they are publishing this, it can't be good.
blorgle 10y ago
This is some serious FUD, pretty standard for Newsweeks bitcoin reporting, which included harassment of Dorian Nakomoto. This is probably an unpopular opinion on HN, but let's face it, P2P protocols like bitcoin are relatively easy to disrupt for nation state actors, especially the US! For a relatively small cost, the blockchain could be flooded with bogus junk to DoS. The bootstrap mechanism could easily be MITMd to netsplit new nodes. Those are just technological mechanisms off the top of my head, which assume a perfect hypothetical cryptocurrency with none of the teething problems that all of the actual cryptocurrencies have. ISIS could come up with "Terrorcoin" (which is the underlying vague threat of the article) but without any mechanism to transfer those coins to a fungible real world currency, it's useless anyway. Go home Newsweek, you're drunk.
- drvdevd 10y ago
  Yeah I wondered about all these points as well. I think the real danger would appear only if people in the real world started actually accepting or desiring payment in these anonymous forms in lieu of actual money...? [edit] like especially normal people and not just Terrorists or Criminals
  - emp_zealoth 10y ago
    With more and more negative interest rates, or attempts to lock down on how money is used (total removal of cash for example) on the horizon I think governments are quite right to fear bitcoins or any other currency that would let people get out of the attempts to "walled garden" finances
    - drvdevd 10y ago
      I think this is probably correct, actually. That and the mass adoption of cheap, handheld, and powerful computers with easy user interfaces and lots of short range wireless peripherals... Imagine being able to pay your bar/coffee/restaurant/hotel tab with NFC or something, exchanging whatever virtual currency units, as an expected social norm.
rwallace 10y ago
Leah McGrath Goodman, I could almost swear I've seen that name before somewhere. Google... oh yeah, she was the one who did that story about that Japanese-American guy being the inventor of Bitcoin, the one that turned out to be a rather irresponsible fabrication. Looking at this story, the first couple of paragraphs talk about a nonvirtual currency created by a bunch of racists. Why? Does that have anything to do with Bitcoin? As far as I can tell, no, it's just an attempt to smear by insinuation. Then it starts into "but terrorists". Stopped reading at that point. I'm not saying Bitcoin doesn't have flaws. By all means let them be discussed fairly and with intellectual honesty. I don't think this article is the place to look for that discussion.
- mr_spothawk 10y ago
  clearly, this is fluff. the trouble for me is evaluating whether this fluff is a float: 'we will outlaw zcash', or a flop: 'the authorities should outlaw zcash'.
anondon 10y ago
The main point of the article seems to be that anonymous cryptocurrencies pose a threat to US national security since the US Governmeent can't just cut off access to funding for terrorists which supposedly was very effective so far. Ignoring all the BS in the article, is this argument valid?
- tajen 10y ago
  Wasn't middle-East terrorism funded by US and Europe in the first place? Isn't Newsweek posing a threat to the CIA (and NSA) by arguing for the ban of cryptocurrencies for illegal operations? If they want to continue their illegal things, they do need smuggling currencies, and it's the role of the American citizen to enable them to do it.
  - throw2016 10y ago
    The Saudis are the principal funders and ideological exporters of terrorism and our closest friends in the region so it doesn't take genius to figure out what is happening. Its nearly impossible for terrorists organizations and certainly not anything like ISIS to exist without state support. Its now well know they are being funded by Turkey, Saudis and the US intelligence forces. So we are funding terrorism on one hand and then spending billions of dollars on to build a surveillance state to protect ourselves from our own actions, both of which benefit the state, intelligence agencies and defence contractors. I think things are now are farce level and democracy is near meaningless if these state actors are allowed to do whatever they want.
- tdkl 10y ago
  Manufacturing machetes pose a threat to US national security at some point.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  I think it's a pretty valid argument if you are talking about the US government having some people that understand cryptocurriencies. There's lots of situations where they need investigative capabilities (or to just understand where effort would be fruitless). It's a stretch as a justification for things like acts of war against some other country (say some country in South America decided to back an anonymous digital currency...) or even just legislation banning crytocurrencies.
davidgerard 10y ago
This was written by the same journalist who claimed Dorian Nakamoto was Satoshi. You can make Bitcoin literally unusable with about $1000 worth of transaction spam. The same applies to any non-hypothetical blockchain-based currency I can think of, including the fancy new ones. If only the International Bankers had $1000 spare on hand! I mean, I think Bitcoin is garbage, but this is a relentlessly terrible and incompetent article.
- ryanlol 10y ago
  > You can make Bitcoin literally unusable with about $1000 worth of transaction spam. Heh, not quite. You can increase the fees a little with about $1000 worth of transaction spam.
- nullc 10y ago
  You spend too much time in the r/buttcoin echo chamber. You're getting sloppy with the facts. :) $1000 worth of transaction "spam" would have basically no effect today-- that is only about two blocks worth of transaction fees. Meaning your costly 'disruption' would be unnoticeable against normal block finding variance. [Come on-- do you really want to be part of the Wikipedia Review of Bitcoin skepticism? I think Bitcoin deserves better critics than that.]
cesarb 10y ago
I don't know if it's just me, but this article seems to give a creepy "the USA is the only that matters" vibe. For instance, the sentence "[...] while this may be handy for privacy-savvy Americans, it can make it much harder for the government and law enforcement to fight terrorists and criminals [...]" sounds as if only privacy-savvy USA citizens matter, while privacy-savvy people from the rest of the world can get lost. Also, the idea of a foreign country being able to disrupt transactions all over the world, with the people having no recourse other than appealing to said foreign country, is creepy. If someone in Austria wants to send money to Brazil, that should be a matter only between Austria and Brazil (or perhaps the rest of the Eurozone, since their currency is shared), and a third-party country shouldn't be able to arbitrarily interfere on a whim.
- kahnpro 10y ago
  That's because this is a propaganda piece from a propaganda rag.
panarky 10y ago
Rand’s research into the dangers of virtual currencies is not meant as an attack on bitcoin, Baron said. He believes the currency’s publicly visible ledger of transactions is too transparent to attract terrorists, criminals or enemies of the state. “I do not see bitcoin as the go-to currency for terrorists,” he says. “As it stands, it does not offer enough anonymity.”
shitgoose 10y ago
"white supremacists town in south africa, terrorism, human trafficking, money-laundering and many other types of criminal activity. Putin's cronies and Iran's money launderers." he forgot child pornography. journos like this one are a disgrace to humanity. utter contempt for reader's intelligence.
edblarney 10y ago
It's worth mentioning, that in many areas wherein there are not many Tor users, the mere use of Tor can flag authorities as to who might be 'up to something'. The guy who bombed the boston marathon I believe was caught in this manner: they knew someone in the building was doing something nefarious, and they looked to see who downloaded Tor. Bingo. Or something like that. I'm not against Bitcoin and understand it's principles - that said - it's the most obvious use case is perhaps for situations in which people want to get around the law. It wouldn't surprise me at all if anyone using bitcoin is flagged somewhere in an NSA database.
- hiddencost 10y ago
  You're thinking of the fake Harvard bomb threat. He was the only tor user during the time the email was sent.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    Yes, correct, sorry, I felt I was off on something when I wrote that.
sowbug 10y ago
The U.S. needs an explicit constitutional right to privacy.
appleflaxen 10y ago
first they ignore you then they make fun of you then they fight you and then you win
imagist 10y ago
> [V]irtual currencies could undermine America’s long-standing ability to disrupt the financial networks of its foes and even permanently upend parts of the global financial system. This is one of the most compelling reasons we should adopt Bitcoin. The nationalism that tells us that we should be concerned about this is appalling.
gnipgnip 10y ago
Perhaps they should worry about "goods" the "terrorists" are allegedly exchanging it for.
Grangar 10y ago
Remember, this is the same website that named Dorian Nakamoto as Satoshi, a man who hadn't even heard of Bitcoin before.

109 points by em3rgent0rdr 10y ago

In 2013, HSBC was fined for failing to appropriately monitor nearly $700B(B as in BILLION) in transactions between Mexico and the US alone. [1] Yet we're supposed to be more worried about digital currency because of $600 (dollars, not millions or billions, just dollars) worth of bitcoin found its way to the Gaza strip? [2] The only interesting part of this article is that post publication, the bitcoin numbers were updated by a source from the Dept. of Treasury. This article is just FUD and nonsense during a slow news cycle. Banks and wire transfers will continue to be the primary vehicle for money laundering and terrorism financing for the foreseeable future. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge-approves-1-9b-drug-money https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-02/hsbc-judg... [2] https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column/private-sector/new-frontier-terror-fundraising-bitcoin-1089 https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column/private-sector/new-fro...

rebuilder 10y ago
The article specifically says Bitcoin is thought to be too transparent for terrorists to use seriously, and that the gov't is more worried about the possibility of new, les traceable cryptocurrencies being developed.
- verroq 10y ago
  Like zcash?
  - ericb 10y ago
    Monero is a more likely candidate for the winner in this category.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  Or are they worried about the idea of a future where their spending is transparent?
  - mark_l_watson 10y ago
    Excellent point. Here in the US, we have payoffs to government officials on the local, state, and national levels. I like the idea of a Bitcoin like currency with 100% transparency in universal use. Privacy is important to me, but if everyone on earth had access to all financial transactions that would help stop corruption. Use case: turning my personal software agent to free to evaluate candidates in upcoming elections, not invest in companies if I dislike who they do business with, etc.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      There are many ways to evade such a system already. For example, one of our ex-PMs didn't get any money from a certain company; they just paid €25M to another guy, who was such a friend that he paid for the ex-PM's home, hired his wife and driver, bought thousands of copies of his book, etc.
      - kahnpro 10y ago
        Wow, he sounds like a really great guy! Everyone needs a friend like that.
Bombthecat 10y ago
And it will work.
MylesHildebrand 10y ago
It's because those 600$ are helping Palestinians, Jews' natural enemy. And we all know the U.S. government is controlled by Jews.
riprowan 10y ago
I think the fact that HSBC laundered $700B and got away with a slap on the wrist, while the government wants to crack down on $600 in Bitcoin, is an extremely important and telling factoid.
aaron-lebo 10y ago
Don't disagree with you that Bitcoin's current role is small potatoes. Don't disagree that Newsweek (and this author) aren't especially great sources of information. That being said, writing it off as FUD is premature. The fact that it is getting written tells you where media and possibly government focus is now. We can either write that focus off or consider the implications. Terrorist and criminal organizations are some of the most effective users of new media in the world. ISIS produces some of the most slickly-produced videos you'll ever see. They know and harness Telegram and other apps. If they are not stupid - and they aren't, they're looking for whatever advantages they can get. We can acknowledge this without a bias for or against cryptos. The Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community has since birth by and large been about speculation and making stacks of cash. That's been it's reason for existence and adoption practically - otherwise it would just make for really cool tech that we all talk about on HN. It's been running straight ahead with fully anonymous protocols which while great have the most natural application in black market purchases, and early adopters/users that while they have a right to use them, practically don't need to - their actions are tracked via hundreds of other unrelated means. The cryptocurrency community has done really poor job of policing itself. It's done a really excellent job of attracting attention through exchange after exchange being hacked and/or scams. Maybe it can't and shouldn't try to restraining itself or police itself, but the natural result of that is someone else is going to police it or shut it down. Instead of just saying it's FUD, this article is probably ahead of the curve. This is going to become a bigger and bigger issue. Either Bitcoin advocates find out effective arguments or means or it's going to get shutdown. If they really worried about $600 in the Gaza strip, what happens when that turns to $600k and then $6 million? Because that will happen as the technology advances. Does that give governments the right to intervene? No, but it makes a bigger and bigger target. There might not be an effective solution, but it's the canary in the coal mine. The US government was never just going to let this stuff happen unhindered. The fact that they are paying attention when there's not much to pay attention to is all you need to know. Just wait until there's a sizable sum a politician can make a media campaign out of...
- bitCromwell 10y ago
  this is thoughtful and quite careful to avoid controversy, would love to see an explanation from your downvoters
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

divbit 10y ago

I wonder if donation through anonymous currencies could be protected under the first amendment through religious freedom (e.g. Bible: Matthew 6:3 )

moeadham 10y ago

Not sure what is going on at Newsweek, but if they are publishing this, it can't be good.

blorgle 10y ago

This is some serious FUD, pretty standard for Newsweeks bitcoin reporting, which included harassment of Dorian Nakomoto. This is probably an unpopular opinion on HN, but let's face it, P2P protocols like bitcoin are relatively easy to disrupt for nation state actors, especially the US! For a relatively small cost, the blockchain could be flooded with bogus junk to DoS. The bootstrap mechanism could easily be MITMd to netsplit new nodes. Those are just technological mechanisms off the top of my head, which assume a perfect hypothetical cryptocurrency with none of the teething problems that all of the actual cryptocurrencies have. ISIS could come up with "Terrorcoin" (which is the underlying vague threat of the article) but without any mechanism to transfer those coins to a fungible real world currency, it's useless anyway. Go home Newsweek, you're drunk.

drvdevd 10y ago
Yeah I wondered about all these points as well. I think the real danger would appear only if people in the real world started actually accepting or desiring payment in these anonymous forms in lieu of actual money...? [edit] like especially normal people and not just Terrorists or Criminals
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  With more and more negative interest rates, or attempts to lock down on how money is used (total removal of cash for example) on the horizon I think governments are quite right to fear bitcoins or any other currency that would let people get out of the attempts to "walled garden" finances
  - drvdevd 10y ago
    I think this is probably correct, actually. That and the mass adoption of cheap, handheld, and powerful computers with easy user interfaces and lots of short range wireless peripherals... Imagine being able to pay your bar/coffee/restaurant/hotel tab with NFC or something, exchanging whatever virtual currency units, as an expected social norm.

rwallace 10y ago

Leah McGrath Goodman, I could almost swear I've seen that name before somewhere. Google... oh yeah, she was the one who did that story about that Japanese-American guy being the inventor of Bitcoin, the one that turned out to be a rather irresponsible fabrication. Looking at this story, the first couple of paragraphs talk about a nonvirtual currency created by a bunch of racists. Why? Does that have anything to do with Bitcoin? As far as I can tell, no, it's just an attempt to smear by insinuation. Then it starts into "but terrorists". Stopped reading at that point. I'm not saying Bitcoin doesn't have flaws. By all means let them be discussed fairly and with intellectual honesty. I don't think this article is the place to look for that discussion.

mr_spothawk 10y ago
clearly, this is fluff. the trouble for me is evaluating whether this fluff is a float: 'we will outlaw zcash', or a flop: 'the authorities should outlaw zcash'.

anondon 10y ago

The main point of the article seems to be that anonymous cryptocurrencies pose a threat to US national security since the US Governmeent can't just cut off access to funding for terrorists which supposedly was very effective so far. Ignoring all the BS in the article, is this argument valid?

tajen 10y ago
Wasn't middle-East terrorism funded by US and Europe in the first place? Isn't Newsweek posing a threat to the CIA (and NSA) by arguing for the ban of cryptocurrencies for illegal operations? If they want to continue their illegal things, they do need smuggling currencies, and it's the role of the American citizen to enable them to do it.
- throw2016 10y ago
  The Saudis are the principal funders and ideological exporters of terrorism and our closest friends in the region so it doesn't take genius to figure out what is happening. Its nearly impossible for terrorists organizations and certainly not anything like ISIS to exist without state support. Its now well know they are being funded by Turkey, Saudis and the US intelligence forces. So we are funding terrorism on one hand and then spending billions of dollars on to build a surveillance state to protect ourselves from our own actions, both of which benefit the state, intelligence agencies and defence contractors. I think things are now are farce level and democracy is near meaningless if these state actors are allowed to do whatever they want.
tdkl 10y ago
Manufacturing machetes pose a threat to US national security at some point.
maxerickson 10y ago
I think it's a pretty valid argument if you are talking about the US government having some people that understand cryptocurriencies. There's lots of situations where they need investigative capabilities (or to just understand where effort would be fruitless). It's a stretch as a justification for things like acts of war against some other country (say some country in South America decided to back an anonymous digital currency...) or even just legislation banning crytocurrencies.

davidgerard 10y ago

This was written by the same journalist who claimed Dorian Nakamoto was Satoshi. You can make Bitcoin literally unusable with about $1000 worth of transaction spam. The same applies to any non-hypothetical blockchain-based currency I can think of, including the fancy new ones. If only the International Bankers had $1000 spare on hand! I mean, I think Bitcoin is garbage, but this is a relentlessly terrible and incompetent article.

ryanlol 10y ago
> You can make Bitcoin literally unusable with about $1000 worth of transaction spam. Heh, not quite. You can increase the fees a little with about $1000 worth of transaction spam.
nullc 10y ago
You spend too much time in the r/buttcoin echo chamber. You're getting sloppy with the facts. :) $1000 worth of transaction "spam" would have basically no effect today-- that is only about two blocks worth of transaction fees. Meaning your costly 'disruption' would be unnoticeable against normal block finding variance. [Come on-- do you really want to be part of the Wikipedia Review of Bitcoin skepticism? I think Bitcoin deserves better critics than that.]

cesarb 10y ago

I don't know if it's just me, but this article seems to give a creepy "the USA is the only that matters" vibe. For instance, the sentence "[...] while this may be handy for privacy-savvy Americans, it can make it much harder for the government and law enforcement to fight terrorists and criminals [...]" sounds as if only privacy-savvy USA citizens matter, while privacy-savvy people from the rest of the world can get lost. Also, the idea of a foreign country being able to disrupt transactions all over the world, with the people having no recourse other than appealing to said foreign country, is creepy. If someone in Austria wants to send money to Brazil, that should be a matter only between Austria and Brazil (or perhaps the rest of the Eurozone, since their currency is shared), and a third-party country shouldn't be able to arbitrarily interfere on a whim.

kahnpro 10y ago
That's because this is a propaganda piece from a propaganda rag.

panarky 10y ago

Rand’s research into the dangers of virtual currencies is not meant as an attack on bitcoin, Baron said. He believes the currency’s publicly visible ledger of transactions is too transparent to attract terrorists, criminals or enemies of the state. “I do not see bitcoin as the go-to currency for terrorists,” he says. “As it stands, it does not offer enough anonymity.”

shitgoose 10y ago

"white supremacists town in south africa, terrorism, human trafficking, money-laundering and many other types of criminal activity. Putin's cronies and Iran's money launderers." he forgot child pornography. journos like this one are a disgrace to humanity. utter contempt for reader's intelligence.

edblarney 10y ago

It's worth mentioning, that in many areas wherein there are not many Tor users, the mere use of Tor can flag authorities as to who might be 'up to something'. The guy who bombed the boston marathon I believe was caught in this manner: they knew someone in the building was doing something nefarious, and they looked to see who downloaded Tor. Bingo. Or something like that. I'm not against Bitcoin and understand it's principles - that said - it's the most obvious use case is perhaps for situations in which people want to get around the law. It wouldn't surprise me at all if anyone using bitcoin is flagged somewhere in an NSA database.

hiddencost 10y ago
You're thinking of the fake Harvard bomb threat. He was the only tor user during the time the email was sent.
- edblarney 10y ago
  Yes, correct, sorry, I felt I was off on something when I wrote that.

sowbug 10y ago

The U.S. needs an explicit constitutional right to privacy.

appleflaxen 10y ago

first they ignore you then they make fun of you then they fight you and then you win

imagist 10y ago

> [V]irtual currencies could undermine America’s long-standing ability to disrupt the financial networks of its foes and even permanently upend parts of the global financial system. This is one of the most compelling reasons we should adopt Bitcoin. The nationalism that tells us that we should be concerned about this is appalling.

gnipgnip 10y ago

Perhaps they should worry about "goods" the "terrorists" are allegedly exchanging it for.

Grangar 10y ago

Remember, this is the same website that named Dorian Nakamoto as Satoshi, a man who hadn't even heard of Bitcoin before.