This attempt to discover the identity of the cryptocurrency’s originator is clearly a labour of love. But all the information is old and it’s so padded out it’s the TV equivalent of a Zoom call that could have been an email

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? It’s a mystery that has vexed the internet since long before crypto went mainstream, via Silicon Valley bros and that weird period where celebrities got really into NFTs. Finding out the identity of the person who designed bitcoin – the decentralised, multitrillion-dollar currency – would be a big (and potentially dangerous) deal. Think WikiLeaks, if Julian Assange was also a potential kidnapping target with a handsome digital ransom fee. It is also – you may be unsurprised to hear – a mystery that this digital two-parter from Channel 4 does not get to the bottom of. At the outset, its journalist host, Gabriel Gatehouse (known for the BBC’s Trump podcast, The Coming Storm), warns viewers that: “The film you’re about to watch – in fact, this whole series – consists almost entirely of middle-aged white guys talking about tech”, as their middle-aged, white-guy faces flash up on screen. That wouldn’t be so much of an issue if any of these “cypherpunk” pioneers – or Gatehouse himself – had anything to say that hadn’t already been debunked on Reddit.

It’s not the interviewees’ fault. Gatehouse blames a possible omertà code for their silence, but with Satoshi potentially a target for all manner of cartels, criminals and governments, why would any of these computer scientists – namely fellow Briton Adam Back, who ducks and dives away from Gatehouse at a conference in Miami – give anything away? In lieu of revelations, we get an Adam Curtis-inspired visual treatment to distract us – all film noir clips juxtaposed with old cartoons and animations of faceless automatons marching in lockstep.