A day ago, while taking a break from my ongoing project (hopefully, it will turn into something good one day), I went on YouTube as I do pretty much every time nowadays (social media bubbles of sorts are getting narrower and narrower), when I need to refresh my head from heavy academic stuff (guilty pleasure turns not to be that guilt-able anymore).

I was rewarded: LEMMiNo uploaded a new (of course, in high demand as usual) video, which I binge-watched fairly quickly, and then smart bots from YouTube recommended me another channel, which, I guess, could be regarded as similar to LEMMiNo’s area of interest.

The channel is called Barely Sociable (gives me a bit of teen-rioting vibes—Barely Sociable is BS in short—but never mind: it caught my attention, so, seemingly, it worked), and, unlike the rest of the commenting channels focused primarily on discussing Creepy Pasta and true crime mysteries from Reddit, Barely Sociable does the job of discussing amusing topics in LEMMiNo’s manner, i.e. from a distanced and more or less objective point of view (although, the difference with LEMMiNo is that Barely Sociable is more emotionally invested into researching the material and is more engaged with his audience).

Long story short: I was glued to the screen for another hour or so (procrastination you bad!), when watching Barely Sociable’s three-part docu-series about the flamboyant and still (presumably) anonymous figure of Satoshi Nakamoto, the alleged inventor of Bitcoin. Ok, I know that there are at least three or even more solid conspiracies about who exactly stands behind the whole thing, including the article and also a podcast on the LRB, “The Satoshi Affair” by Andrew O’Hagan (Vol. 38 No. 13 · 30 June 2016), but let me tell you.

Man, the rabbit hole of the Satoshi Nakamoto phenomenon, as narrated by Barely Sociable, is scary, fascinating and exceptionally addictive: as a person who basically knows nothing about the early days of the Internet (Usenet and such), I was stunned by the amount of exquisitely done ‘negotiations’ between the core intellectuals about the future of the web per se: they were called Cypherpunks, who, despite having the most elusive identities, formed their mailing list, where they exchanged information that later would build what we know as the modern Internet today,* and had the most intricate and complicated crypto-battle one could ever imagine. Most likely, Satoshi (or, rather, “Satoshi”) was one of them.

Yes, but what exactly about Satoshi Nakamoto himself? Well, again, I do need to give the narrator credit for revealing his identity in the last part of the series (spoiler alert: the person who allegedly is behind Satoshi, denied all possible involvement, yet in a way which makes it a bit unclear if this denial is truly sincere). I’d say that the amount of digging the author has done, gives the audience the right to call him a highly skilled investigative journalist, and I am not exactly sure whether he’s even an amateur—who knows?

Hopefully, you will also find it as enjoyable and interesting as I did.

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* I apologise in advance to my highly-skilled computer pro-friends, who have known all that for ages: I do understand that for them what I am saying sounds cringy at best, but I hope they will forgive me my incompetence.