When an article begins like this, you know it's probably going to be worth it:

This week, we meet a man with a ritual humiliation kink - Craig S. Wright - and Bodog founder Calvin Ayre, who has for a full decade funded Wright’s psychosexual obsession with being the biggest loser on the face of the planet.

Ayre has also used copyright strikes and other threats to try and suppress my coverage specifically since 2023, when I referred to the CoinGeek website as having “the same self-dealing editorial ethos as the Taco Bell Blog.”

And since that is how it begins, I'm going to post the rest of it here for your reading entertainment:

I’m just one man, so sometimes a really important story slips past me for a bit. In this case, it’s the story of Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi, a new film that brings together a truly bizarre collection of characters and trends: a low-rent Bitcoin fraudster and Hollywood royalty, including Ben Affleck and The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman.

The film is also notable because it is almost entirely AI-generated, shot on a grey and empty soundstage later filled in with AI-generated environments. It appears that the real purpose of the film, for Liman and others, is to serve as proof-of-concept for bigger AI film deals. The film showed at Cannes in May, and secured international distribution, but no U.S. deal has been announced.

Killing Satoshi is a heavily fictionalized version of the story of Craig Wright, who is played by Casey Affleck as a kind of heroic cyberpunk rebel.

In reality, Wright from 2016 to 2024 pretended to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, in a long-term effort, primarily, to seize control of tens of billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin mined by the system’s still-unkown creator.

This effort, and the related “Bitcoin BSV” grift, have been bankrolled almost exclusively by Calvin Ayre, multiply-disgraced, maybe-still-a-billionaire founder of the Bodog online gambling empire. Ayre is apparently played in the film by Pete Davidson, and was a driving force and major funder of the film’s creation. The project apparently began life as a documentary before morphing, after serious legal losses by Wright, into a fictionalized thriller.

Killing Satoshi apparently paints Wright as a hero, when in fact he is by all evidence a psychopath, hapless moron, habitual liar, and one of human history’s biggest losers. For example, again and again he has put forward obviously fake documents as part of his case to be Satoshi. He has repeatedly, embarrassingly, publicly demonstrated that he doesn’t even know how to code with the C++ language Bitcoin was written in.

(The film’s title has shifted over time, but I’ll refer to it as Killing Satoshi for simplicity.)

For years, Wright engaged in legal nuisance suits against anyone who questioned his claims. These were consistently catastrophic for Wright, while also threatening the very Bitcoin system he claimed to have created. That finally led to serious pushback: a U.K. court in 2024 decreed that Wright has been lying, and ordered him both to stop claiming he was Satoshi, and pay his opponents’ legal fees.

In short, Wright is an embarrassing mess. Which makes it all the more baffling that his story wound up in the hands of a serious director, even one as slightly down on his luck as Liman is in 2026. It seems very likely that the A-listers involved don’t know the true story of Craig Wright, and maybe they don’t much care.

But the film they’ve made seems to be very dangerous propaganda, which will be further weaponized by Wright and Ayre to trick the last few true believers in Wright’s chicanery out of their Social Security checks.

Doug Liman and the Affleck brothers will be morally culpable in that further scamming. They may be more materially on the hook for defamation.

There is a brief history of Craig Wright section which, while humorous, is probably already known by this audience. So I'm skipping it here.

A Faketoshi TaleA Faketoshi Tale

The synopsis of Killing Satoshi reads like Wright’s delusional fantasy of his heroic nature, in total contradiction to reality. Ayre’s initial propagandistic impulse seems to have survived all the way through production.

Killing Satoshi, according to producers, “is the true story [pause] of one man’s quest to prove that he is, in fact, the creator of Bitcoin — a claim that puts his life in peril and sets off a global firestorm and a wild, high-stakes race between the who’s who of tech billionaires and world leaders, with the fate of the world’s entire financial system hanging in the balance, all leading to the question, “Why do the world’s most powerful people want to erase one man, and why would they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do it?”

In addition to other A-listers, Gal Gadot plays a fictional investigative reporter recruited by Calvin Ayre to investigate Craig Wright. This is a fascinating reversal of reality, in which Ayre heard Wright’s insane claims and subsequently** spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars amplifying them, not investigating them.

Key to the plot is also that “Dr. Craig Wright (Affleck) … has survived myriad assassination attempts as a result” of his claims to be Satoshi. This is straight out of Wright’s paranoid delusions - for many years now he has claimed that his inability to prove he is Satoshi is the product of a conspiracy.

The synopsis concludes with the “central question”: “If Craig Wright didn’t invent Bitcoin, why is a coalition controlling trillions in global wealth spending hundreds of millions and risking everything to destroy him?” This coalition, supposedly attempting to murder Wright, is a reference to the real-life COPA coalition. It’s unclear whether this term is explicitly used in the film, but if so, it would open the entire production up to serious risk of defamation charges. While the film is technically “fictionalized,” remember the promo quote above referring to it as a “true story.” That’s a legal risk.

Because the villianization of COPA is a truly wild distortion of reality - a case study in projection. Nobody spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to “destroy” Craig Wright. Quite to the contrary, Craig Wright was so bad at lying that he himself had to pay the bill for the court case that finally ruled that he was not Satoshi.

InceptionInception

The obvious question is, how the hell did this bizarre piece of propaganda, mythologizing a proven fraud and liar, wind up as a semi-notable Hollywood project?

Thankfully, we have an invaluable rundown of the evolution of the project’s history from Arthur Van Pelt, a longtime and serious crypto watchdog who also recently traced the links between Calvin Ayre, Wirecard, and the Craig Wright Con.

The short version is that the project began life in 2020 as a documentary about Craig Wright to be funded by Calvin Ayre. It was shelved for a time before Ayre met Ryan Kavanaugh, a Hollywood money man, and pitched the project as a fictional film called “Killing Satoshi.”

Kavanaugh and Ayre brought in Nick Schenk to write the project. Schenk is another successful and lauded figure on the project, having written multiple films for Clint Eastwood. But Schenk also worked for Bodog on a TV show back in 2007, so he had a pre-existing relationship with Ayre. That may have made him amenable to ignoring the reality behind the “true story” he was tasked with telling. Kavanaugh (who spoke at one of the notorious CoinGeek summits in 2023, then hired Liman to direct.

In emails about the project leaked by CoinGeek/nChain dissident Christian Agar-Hansen, the nature of the project is made clear.

“This is Hollywood,” Ayre writes to Craig Wright. “The details do not need to be accurate, its [sic] got to be entertaining … the point for us is to have millions and millions of fans empathize with what you have gone through and become part of our movement … This must be kept top secret.”

The AI AngleThe AI Angle

So yeah, it’s an explicit propaganda project for Craig Wright.

But it’s also a propaganda project for AI, and that’s the real reason it got made.

The hosts of Trashfuture recently poined out that Killing Satoshi is mainly a hype reel for the multiple “AI film studios” with their names on them, mostly owned by participants in the production.

Above all, Kavanaugh’s Acme AI & FX is the lead producer on the film, backed up by Liman’s 30 Ninjas. Given the huge recent $587 million exit achieved by Ben Affleck’s AI startup, using Killing Satoshi as proof of concept is clearly about asset-flipping more than filmmaking.

On that note, Kavanaugh has claimed that the story would have cost $300 million to shoot, before AI took the cost down to ~$90m. This seems extremely suspect: the “true story” behind Killing Satoshi took place in courtrooms and offices, and even a fictionalized thriller based on it would mostly involve urban environments that can be shot without building sets or doing fancy VFX.

So the budget claim seems entirely intended to convey cost-saving potential to studios or other potential acquirers.

The Sad Fate of ArtThe Sad Fate of Art

Liman is no stranger to mercenary work - in a 2008 New York profile, he described The Bourne Identity as part of a “sellout trilogy” also including Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Jumper. The profile depicts Liman as a kind of occluded genius diverted by these trivialities, possibly because of his origins as a dreaded nepo baby. Liman’s father was a renowned entertainment lawyer, and even introduced a young Liman to Steven Spielberg.

At the very least, that makes Liman’s current project considerably sadder. Nearly twenty years later, he never even got to return to the heights of Bourne, much less ascend to some higher Spielbergian plane.

His most recent major project was the generally regrettable 2024 Road House remake. And now he’s a guy using his once-respected name to run one grift for his own benefit, while carelessly legitimizing outright liars in the process.