Documentary Review :

Money Electric is far from the first journalistic attempt to put an identity to the Nakamoto pseudonym. Previous efforts have not fared well. A widely derided Newsweek story in 2014 claimed a 64-year-old California man named Dorian Nakamoto was the inventor, only for the man to later threaten to sue for allegedly “reckless reporting.” (The magazine updated its stories with his denials.) A year later, both Wired and Gizmodo published stories that pointed to Australian businessman Criag Wright as the bitcoin’s creator, based on a trove of documents and emails that purported to reveal his intimate involvement. Since then, a court in the U.K. found that Wright lied “extensively and repeatedly” about his involvement, including forging documents “on a massive scale,” and he is now facing criminal perjury charges. The New Yorker also appears to have given the mystery a try but didn’t get very far.