You’re in a crowd of tens of thousands of fellow fans. The band starts playing your favorite song. Everyone screams. You will never, ever forget this moment.

Seeing a musician you adore live can be a transcendent experience. But getting to that moment has become a nightmare because getting tickets that won’t completely bankrupt you now requires weaving through an obstacle course. Tickets to a popular show dropping means pandemonium. You might get errors when you try to purchase tickets, and can spend hours waiting in a virtual line to grab any available tickets you can. Then the entire ticketing site crashes, apparently due to too many bots trying to access the site.

On resale sites, tickets are already exponentially costlier than what you were prepared to pay. But you’ve been waiting years for the chance to see them up close — so you shell out the money. In 2024, that can mean hundreds of dollars, even thousands, for the best available seats. The very best tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, as of last year, were sold on resale sites for as much as $200,000 — enough to pay for a four-year private college with no financial aid.

It’s no wonder music fans are disheartened and furious. Of course, the fact that the biggest music promoter and ticketing service is one single, giant company that has a lot of control over how tickets are bought and sold definitely doesn’t help matters. The Department of Justice is set to file an antitrust lawsuit against that company — Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster — accusing it of using exclusive ticketing contracts, among other things, to maintain a monopoly. But while it’s easy to blame just one party for the chaos and the cost, the reality is that there’s a complicated concoction of reasons why obtaining tickets to a major concert has gotten so dire, and dealing with so much demand isn’t easy, either. Millions of fans want to attend a Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, or Harry Styles concert — and there are only so many shows and seats. Who should get to go?  

How concerts got so pricey

The fact is, concerts have steadily gotten more expensive even on the primary market — the place where someone can originally buy tickets, like Ticketmaster — before any scalper upcharge is added. According to the live music trade publication Pollstar, the average ticket price of the top 100 music tours last year was $122.84. In 2019 it was $91.86 — a rise that outpaced inflation by a good margin. Back in 2000, it was $40.74. For the top 10 grossing tours in 2023, the average price was even higher: $152.97.

Though there are a number of factors involved in this price creep (including high fees, which a 2018 Government Accountability Office report says make up an average of 27 percent of the ticket’s total cost), the heart of the matter is simple: demand. People all over the world are clamoring to go to just a handful of the most popular artists’ concerts. Live Nation reported that 145 million people attended one of its shows in 2023, compared to 98 million in 2019. The momentum doesn’t appear to be slowing, with ticket sales in the first quarter of 2024 higher than they were this time last year. 

One big thing that artists and promoters could do is open up more tickets to their fans. A significant chunk of a venue’s capacity is often held back for presales that only a certain exclusive group may even get access to — VIP guests, music industry managers and agents, corporate sponsors, the media, and more. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report noted that between 10 to 30 percent of tickets for big concerts were sold through presales rather than general sales; for major artists at huge venues, that number could rise as high as 65 percent. In 2009, an investigation by Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 found that, after presales and other holds, just 1,591 tickets for a Taylor Swift show were on sale to the public for a venue that could hold 13,330 people. In 2019, Live Nation even admitted that it kept tens of thousands of tickets for a Metallica tour from being sold at face value by putting them directly on resale sites.

Pascal Courty, an economist at the University of Victoria, contends that lack of transparency is a huge issue. “It’s very rare that the public knows how many tickets are actually sold,” he tells Vox. While it’s true that there’s stratospheric demand for pop superstars, the practice of withholding so many tickets from the public — gating them behind credit cards, for example — certainly doesn’t help. 

Elizabeth Alume, 27, spent several thousand dollars flying from Seattle to Las Vegas and Los Angeles to see the K-pop group BTS (she’s far from alone in traveling to see a favorite act; a StubHub report last year revealed an 80 percent rise in 2023 of US-based customers buying tickets to international events on the platform). While the travel and tickets were onerous, she knew the clock was ticking on the band’s compulsory service in the South Korean military. But while the flights and hotels were several hundred dollars each, the main expense was buying resale tickets to see them over multiple days — $2,200 in Vegas, $1,600 in LA. 

The ticket resale market — where hoarded supply meets unprecedented demand — might be the biggest issue facing fans today.

How resellers beat out the fans

These days, buying a ticket for a major concert takes preparation. At a minimum, you need a calendar alert with the ticketing site ready on both your phone and laptop. For the most popular shows, it might mean signing up for the sale ahead of time — like with Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan system, which requires users to register before the sale begins with a phone number and email address. The company then “uses algorithms and unique data analysis” to separate the bots from the real people. (Proving that you’re human is no guarantee you’ll get the chance to buy tickets, though. For the hottest shows, Verified Fans are placed in a lottery, and only those who are selected receive an access code for the sale; others are shunted to a waitlist.)

Ticketmaster places all these hurdles on the way to a purchase with an eye toward stopping professional resellers — the networks of scalpers who snap up tickets with the goal of reselling for a profit. The precise metrics Ticketmaster uses to check that someone isn’t a professional reseller are a secret, but there are some clues. “It seems like if you’ve seen the artists in the past, you have a better chance of being selected,” says Jason Koebler, a co-founder of the tech site 404 Media who has reported extensively on ticket scalping. “If your credit card and your registered address with Ticketmaster is near the city that you’re trying to see the show in, you have a better chance. If your Ticketmaster account is older, you have a better chance.”

The problem is that determined professionals can still jump these hurdles.

Today, according to Koebler, there exists an entire black market where people sell Ticketmaster accounts, including ones that have been “aged” to look more legit. Ticket brokering — what disgruntled fans often call “scalping” — is a longstanding, professionalized industry. (In Ancient Rome, scalpers would hawk tickets to the best seats in the Colosseum for gladiator fights.) They hold conventions and lobby for favorable legislation. The amateur reseller might not have the money to buy up heaps of Ticketmaster accounts, but what Koebler calls “industrial-scale” resellers certainly do.

“Let’s say I want to see Taylor Swift in LA,” he explains. “As a normal fan, I enter the lottery one time with my one Ticketmaster account. Then you have a ticket broker who enters the Verified Fan lottery 20,000 times with 20,000 Ticketmaster accounts.”

This same unevenness of resources and dedication is true of pretty much any method of buying hot concert tickets. A presale offered as part of a credit card’s reward program? Serious brokers won’t just have one card with such entertainment perks, as a fan might, but all of them. A presale intended for an artist’s official fan club? Trivial for scalpers to pay the membership fee and also join. There are also places online where scalpers can buy presale access codes, skipping credit card sign-ups. Ticketmaster has made attempts to tamp down on bots, but the software sophisticated resellers use continues to evolve. Scalpers invest a pretty penny into buying professional-grade tools that make them faster and allow them to buy more tickets than one sluggish human could, like subscription-based web browsers where each tab acts like a brand-new user waiting in a virtual line. They have troves of burner phones and credit cards on hand. Stopping these resellers is a constant cat-and-mouse game. While ticket resale isn’t illegal — only a few states have restrictions capping resale prices — using bots is. But enforcement against the resellers who use them has been lax.

This means that, in practice, attempts to crack down on scalpers have made it a lot more cumbersome for everyone — including real fans — to buy tickets. The disastrous initial rollout of tickets to Swift’s tour last year left many fans unable to buy tickets at all. Going head-to-head against a scalper, you’re not likely to win out. “You’re competing against people whose livelihoods depend on being able to buy and sell these tickets,” says Koebler. 

Flipping concert tickets is basically a way to print money for the adroit reseller, which is why the scalping industry is a thing in the first place. Non-VIP tickets for Swift’s North American tour stops last year ranged from $49 to $449, while resale tickets for these shows sold at an average of $3,801, according to a Pitchfork analysis. Tickets to her shows were so valuable that even regular people got in on the game: StubHub noted that the overwhelming majority of Eras Tour tickets for sale on its site last year were from new accounts — which indicated that they weren’t professional ticket brokers, but fans who decided they’d rather make a small fortune than attend. Scalpers are a big problem making the concert-going experience worse — but at the root of the chaos is unmanageable, roof-shattering demand that has warped beyond recognition what people are willing to pay for a show.

Could the solution to soaring resale prices be … higher ticket prices?

To deal with white-hot demand, artists can try to play more shows at the biggest venues. If that’s still not enough, artists and Ticketmaster often opt to hold a lottery where at least everyone has a fair shot at attending. 

Unfortunately, “fair” lotteries for popular tickets don’t have a great track record because the profit motive is too heady. Courty, the University of Victoria economist, calls this the “fair price ticketing curse.” If you don’t want scalpers to take advantage of lotteries, there needs to be follow-through on ensuring they don’t end up grabbing a bunch of tickets. But Courty says that’s complicated. “You have to start to audit all the sales accounts, you have to look at who the buyers were, who the resellers were — and they could often be out of jurisdiction,” he says.

The secret third option to pour some water on fiery demand is not exactly popular, but it is simple: Make the tickets more expensive on the primary market. 

It’s easy to see why artists are reluctant to set their prices to what a ticket would sell for on, say, StubHub. Fans would rightfully complain, and many musicians do want to give all fans the chance to come to their shows. But one surefire way to deter scalpers would be to raise prices and narrow the margin that a reseller could make by flipping a ticket. (Theoretically, there’s a ceiling on what people would pay for concert tickets, and surpassing it would quench demand.) There’s a logic to doing so for artists: If a ticket sells for $100 on the resale market compared to $50 on the primary market, “the scalper’s making more than you are from your art and your labor,” notes Koebler.

Courty’s proposed solution for an actually fair concert lottery is making the experience more like booking flights. The ticket is tied to your name, and if you have to cancel, the ticket is returned to the original issuer, who then offers it to the next person in line. The problem is that, obviously, resellers would likely fight any such measure, and there’s a bigger operational cost for ticket providers and venues since they would have to confirm that the initial buyer’s identity matched the person who shows up at the venue. 

As long as there isn’t legislation making scalping impossible, and there remains a huge gulf between what artists are charging and what people are willing to pay, resellers are going to be very motivated to ruin the concert ticket-buying experience.

The race to snag a spot is so cutthroat that some fans advocate for a system based on merit — well, what they consider merit — rather than luck. The most devoted fans, who have streamed the most hours of someone’s music, who have bought the most albums, vinyls, and merch, should be given priority. But it’s not clear that this is more fair. Time is also a luxury, as is having the financial means to buy merch. The discourse points to the level of resentment generated by lopsided supply and demand: Who truly deserves to be front row at a Taylor Swift concert? If you have the most money to spend? The most time to dedicate? If you’re busy with work when a concert sale drops, do you just resign yourself to missing the show?

Huge pop stars are already trying their best to book the highest-capacity stadiums, or adding extra shows to ease some of the demand. But for a select few, like Taylor Swift, fans’ desire to see them feels insatiable, and there’s a physical limit to the number of shows we can expect an artist to perform.

“What we’re talking about is access to a human being, more or less,” says Koebler. “The space is limited. The time is limited.” 

Update, February 12, 10:40 am ET: This piece was first published on May 23, 2024, and has been updated with a new lead image.

Vox reader Jen Hawse asks: Why do hotels pump in very strongly smelling perfume into their lobbies and sometimes their guest rooms?

What we think of as a “nice” hotel often comes down to a certain je ne sais quoi. Sure, it has all the amenities — a luxe restaurant and bar on the premises, hotel room beds with soft Egyptian cotton sheets, perhaps a decadent spa — but beyond all that, it should have an ineffable ambience that’s both welcoming and sensual, cozy and yet exotic.

Scent can be what helps clinch this vibe. You might have noticed an alluring aroma wafting through the air as you enter a hotel lobby, or even a hotel room; this is likely a custom fragrance that hotels diffuse into the air. While some use mass-market scents available to consumers, many use their own signature scent developed by a master perfumer.

Scent marketing, as the practice is called, isn’t just limited to the hospitality scene, but pervades the retail sector. Just think of the thick miasma of cologne that used to radiate from every Abercrombie & Fitch store. It’s (usually) a more subtle marketing tool than a giant light-up billboard, calling back to happy memories and altering your mood so you feel more satisfied in a space — which, in turn, can nudge you to stay there longer, spend more money, book a room again, and recommend the experience to someone else. Some companies are even spritzing smells in the office to make the return-to-office more pleasant. In so many of the places we spend time in, an appeal is being made to your nose.

What’s the psychology behind scent marketing?

Scent marketing has been around for decades, with Las Vegas casinos being some of the earliest pioneers to use it. In the 1990s and early 2000s, though, its purpose wasn’t just to invite a pleasant aroma to an otherwise neutral space — it was to counteract a lingering, distasteful odor.

“There was a while there where most resorts were drawn to environmental scenting because they wanted to do something about the cigarette smoke,” Jim Reding, CEO of the environmental scenting company Aroma Retail, says. 

A growing number of companies outside hospitality are developing ambient scents for their retail spaces, says Caroline Fabrigas, CEO of Scent Marketing Inc. Recently, Fabrigas’s firm helped create a custom scent for Wayfair’s new Chicago store that smells like linen and fresh-cut grass. 

In food and drink establishments, focusing on smell makes immediate sense: You smell pizza, you think of pizza, you crave pizza. Starbucks works hard to keep its coffee aroma from being sullied by food and other smells in its stores — employees aren’t even allowed to wear fragrances.

For other spaces, the basic theory is that a distinctive smell becomes something customers immediately associate with a brand — our sense of smell is connected to the part of the brain related to memory, like a certain laundry detergent taking you straight back to being wrapped up in blankets when you were home sick from school. Using an ambient scent can cement brand recognition, and improve how well customers remember aspects of a product or service.

A nice smell also puts you in a good mood. A 2021 study by researchers from the Barcelona School of Tourism, Hospitality, and Gastronomy conducted a trial in a four-star hotel by comparing guest experiences in rooms scented with lavender and rooms without any scent; guests who stayed in scented rooms appeared to show higher happiness levels when in the room than those in the neutral room. Studies have also shown that a scented environment can make customers stay longer in a restaurant (while underestimating the length of their visit), thus spending more money — time flies when you’re enjoying yourself. An experiment an automaker conducted in the early ’90s even tried to determine if spraying certain scents on salespeople would make them more likely to be perceived as trustworthy, though it’s unclear what the outcome of this trial was. 

How do hotels decide on a “signature scent”?

Hotels and resorts spend a lot of time matching up their brand image to a signature scent, especially today. (Although it might be very similar to a popular fragrance.) One of the trends in hotel design right now is to play up how distinct a space feels.

“Everything has become hyper-local now,” says Lori Mukoyama, a global leader of hospitality practice at the architecture and design firm Gensler. “Gone are the days where we’re stamping out the same brand, exactly the same, in 50 different cities across the world.” Having a tailor-made scent is key to building the feel of a personalized hotel lobby, according to Mukoyama.

“I totally feel like it’s a logo in the air,” says Fabrigas, whose company develops ambient scents for businesses. “It’s a backdrop against which all else plays.” 

For some brands, having one signature scent isn’t enough. The now-closed Mirage hotel in Las Vegas, for example, used two separate fragrances for two separate spaces. In the lobby, it used a buttery coconut vanilla scent, Reding says, to evoke a tropical theme that matched the giant aquarium behind the front desk. “It gives us a feeling of warmth and safety,” he says. But then the casino used something more energizing — a “tropical cocoa mango” — to give it a party-feel that might encourage exciting risk-taking rather than relaxation.

One reason why environmental scenting is so commonplace in hotels is that it’s a place where the perception of cleanliness is sacrosanct. Reding says hotels often tell him they want something that smells fresh and clean, but tend to eschew anything that might remind people of cleaning products. It goes back to how we associate smells with certain contexts — a whiff of lemony Pine Sol is going to make you think of a bathroom, or a mop, rather than the luxurious, crisp cleanliness that hotels strive for.

For some, hotel fragrances are an olfactory delight they want to recreate in their own homes. Several online retailers sell hotel and resort scents for consumers — or at least, an approximation of their bespoke scent — and Reding says this is the bulk of his business today. But not everyone is a fan of scent marketing. What’s a good or bad smell is highly subjective, and people with sensitive noses in particular might bemoan not being able to escape a headache-inducing fragrance.

“That’s what really makes it tricky — that you’re diffusing in public spaces without the public’s consent,” Reding says.

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It’s a question that has bedeviled all too many of us: how to deal with loved ones who just keep giving us bad gifts. 

The National Retail Federation estimates that last winter, about $966 billion worth of merchandise was sold over the holiday period — and about $148 billion of that likely returned. A survey from consumer research firm CivicScience showed that 28 percent of people had returned or exchanged a gift last year. According to Statista, the most wanted Christmas gift among US consumers is cold hard cash. The second most popular? Gift cards. The message seems to be: Thanks for the thought, but let me just choose what I want.

Over a single year, let alone an entire lifetime, you might amass a pile of stuff you won’t ever use, taking up valuable space in your home. Do you harden your heart and simply give all of it away? Do you attempt to return every unwanted item as soon as you receive it? What about the things that don’t spark joy, per se, but do have some sentimental value?

Standard etiquette advises us to remain gracious even in the face of laughably bad gifts, but research in the social psychology of gift-giving suggests we might be granting bad gift-givers too much benefit of the doubt. Sometimes, an ill-fitting gift is ill-fitting on purpose; it’s not mere miscommunication, but negative, even resentful communication. At the heart of solving this perennial problem is taking a good hard look at what motivates us to confer gifts unto others in the first place. 

How to politely deal with well-meaning – but unwanted – gifts

The question of what to do with gifts you won’t use is a popular etiquette question “in a world of more and more consumer goods,” according to Daniel Post Senning, an etiquette expert at the Emily Post Institute. Generally, “gifts should be received in the same spirit of generosity that they’re given in,” Senning says. “If you don’t particularly appreciate the gift itself, the expectation is that you thank [them] for the effort or thought that went into it.”

With that in mind, Senning says that it’s not an etiquette cardinal sin to regift something if you know you can’t use it — for example, if you already happen to have the item. But you should avoid regifting anything handmade or personalized. “Beyond that, it’s about being upfront, ethical, honest” with the original gifter, if they ask, and the new recipient, Senning tells Vox. After all, a gift should be freely given with no obligations, and that includes the recipient having some choice in what they decide to do with the gift. (This is also a reminder to include a gift receipt whenever possible.) 

Even after the etiquette issue is resolved, it can be tricky figuring out which gifts you’ll no longer keep. “It’s usually easier to begin with items that have less sentimental value,” Juliet Landau-Pope, a productivity coach who has written about decluttering your home of unwanted gifts, tells Vox in an email. Larger items that take up a lot of space might be prime candidates for the initial decluttering, whether they’re going to be regifted or donated. 

If there’s someone in your life who would appreciate a regift, you should ideally let them know that you were given something you can’t use for insert-reason-here but would love to give them. Clothes — a common but often miscalculated gift — jewelry, and household goods can all go to a Goodwill location or a local family shelter. Furniture, appliances, and other household items can also be donated to Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore program.   

“One of my core beliefs is that everything comes into your life for a reason, but that doesn’t mean you need to keep it forever,” Landau-Pope says. Take the example of greeting and holiday cards, which may be piling up in your drawer or taking over your fridge. Landau-Pope’s policy is to keep handmade cards from her children, while displaying the others for a set period of time, taking a picture of the display, and then recycling them. 

Why so many of us get bad gifts

In the ideal gift exchange scenario, we probably want to grace the people in our lives with gifts that will be met with undeniable enthusiasm. So why is it that we so often end up saddled with bad ones? 

It might be an expectations mismatch: As Julian Givi, a marketing professor at West Virginia University, explains, “Whenever we’re gift-givers, we really focus on making people happy the moment that they’re opening the gift.” In order words, we prioritize the drama of a big reveal, as opposed to whether the gift is useful and valuable years down the road. 

Then there are all the other unintentional ways we might give a bad gift. We might overestimate how passionate someone is about a hobby, sports team, or something else they once mentioned offhand. We might miss the mark simply because we don’t know enough about the other person; we wouldn’t guess in a million years that they have a bad childhood association with receiving hand-knit sweaters, for example. 

Unfortunately, research shows there are more sinister motives for giving subpar gifts than we’d like to think. For one, some people know exactly what a recipient wants — maybe they have a gift registry — but they buy something else anyway because the options presented are boring to them personally, Givi says. Another selfish motivation his research has discovered: People resist choosing gifts (like, say, a nice pair of sunglasses) that are better than the versions they own, likely to avoid feeling envious.

Deborah Cohn, a marketing professor at the New York Institute of Technology, has identified five broad patterns for how lousy gifts happen. On the more innocuous side is due to ritual and obligation. “You’re going to be at a party, you have to bring somebody something,” Cohn tells Vox. But you don’t know enough about them or just don’t want to expend the mental effort of figuring out what they’d really want, so you grab something perfunctory.

A more aggressive (but all too common) type of bad gift-giving is when the gift is intended to impose a certain identity on the recipient. We’ve all heard stories about parents who only give dolls and dresses to their daughters, and Legos and video games to their sons. It’s not that these givers don’t understand what their individual children’s real preferences are — it’s that they want to foist their own desire upon the recipient.

“This actually happened to me,” Cohn says. “Somebody gave me a book about a religion that I don’t ascribe to.”

Other typical bad gift-giving habits stem from pure self-centeredness, like picking out headphones for your spouse that you intend to use or wanting bragging rights for presenting the splashiest (read: most expensive) gift at the party. These kinds of gift-giving behaviors aren’t mistakes, and they aren’t innocent, Cohn contends. “It’s selfish,” she says. “It’s thinking more about yourself than the recipient, and people can see right through it.” Right now, Cohn is working on further research on whether there’s a correlation between habitually bad gift-giving and narcissism.

How to be a better gift-giver

Individual tastes in gifts can vary greatly, but there are some broad strokes of what people tend to appreciate. According to Givi, sentimental gifts — for example, something handmade or connected to a memory that the two of you share — are often underrated by gift-givers. Another finding in Givi’s research was that people tend to appreciate gifts that are given “out of the blue, as opposed to gifts that we receive on our birthday or any other special occasion.” The fact that it’s not being presented out of any social obligation may emphasize that the thought behind a gift really does count.

Being a good gift-giver also involves imagining ourselves in another’s shoes. It takes conscious effort. You genuinely need to ask yourself what this particular person would want, not what you or some other abstract of a person would want in the same situation. It probably doesn’t help, then, that there’s still some social awkwardness around being explicit about what you want to be gifted and what you’d hate to receive. Maybe to some people, maintaining a regularly updated gift registry is gauche, but if you’re concerned about your pile of unused gifts gathering dust in the closet, taking the surprise out of gift-giving does seem like the preferable option. (According to Senning, it’s perfectly all right for gifters to ask for some direction on what gifts someone would like.)

Cohn recalls the memory of a bad gift she got in childhood: a prank played on her by her father in which every gift box just contained a smaller one, with nothing inside the last. It motivated her to study what gifts mean and how people communicate through them. She told her mother how the prank had made her feel; when Cohn finished her dissertation, her mother gave her another set of nested boxes, this time full of chocolates. “I think that was the best gift I ever got because she wanted to take away my pain. That’s what that gift was meant to do,” she says. 

Despite what a new HBO documentary suggests, the identity of one of the richest people in the world is still unknown.

By now, the story is so famous it’s taken on the aura of a creation myth: One day in early 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the inventor of bitcoin, released the world’s first cryptocurrency. Two years later, Nakamoto vanished seemingly forever. Since then, countless theories on who the real Nakamoto is have been advanced, with no single candidate coming out on top.

Whether Nakamoto’s anonymity is merely an entertaining mystery, a necessity for privacy, or a worrisome concern depends on who you ask. For filmmaker Cullen Hoback, whose documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery premiered on HBO last week, finding the mysterious bitcoin founder is a matter of public interest — and Hoback believes he has unmasked him as a 39-year-old Canadian bitcoin developer named Peter Todd. Since the film’s release, Todd and other prominent voices in the community have dismissed Hoback’s arguments; Todd reiterated to Vox in an email that he is not Nakamoto. According to these voices, Nakamoto remains an enigma. Many bitcoin enthusiasts prefer it that way.

But it’s obvious why the search has endured over the past 15 years. Bitcoin is far and away the most popular digital currency in the world, with a market cap of about $1.3 trillion at the time of writing. (For comparison, the second biggest, ethereum, has a market cap of $312 million.) For those who believe a decentralized alternative to government-issued currencies — like the US dollar — is crucial to protect individual privacy and freedom, Nakamoto is akin to Prometheus bringing the gift of fire from the gods.

Then there’s this mind-boggling possibility: If reports that Nakamoto might hold as much as 1.1 million bitcoins are true, they could be sitting on a fortune of over $70 billion, making them one of the 25 wealthiest individuals on Earth, according to Forbes’s real-time billionaires ranking. But Nakamoto doesn’t seem to have spent any of it — at least, not anything in their confirmed bitcoin wallets. 

What does it mean for the rest of us that such an enormous treasure chest remains in the hands of an unknown entity, whose true aims and intentions can’t be determined? Who benefits if Nakamoto remains in the shadows — and who benefits if they’re revealed?

What we know about the bitcoin creator

The internet user Satoshi Nakamoto first appeared in 2008, when they published a paper to a cryptographic technology mailing list laying out a system that they had dubbed bitcoin. It would function as a form of digital cash that people could use to send money back and forth without involving a bank. In other words, one could reliably make and receive payments anonymously.

There was a clear ideological aim: In Nakamoto’s view, the ability to keep your financial record out of the surveillance and reach of powerful authorities — whether it’s large private banks or the government — is an important personal freedom. Such institutions, after all, aren’t infallible. In one illuminating forum post in 2009, Nakamoto wrote that “the root problem with conventional currency” was “trust.”

“Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve,” they continued. “We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.” When Nakamoto created the first block that would become the bitcoin blockchain, they included a message referencing a headline in the British newspaper the Times that day: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

The top suspects, and why Nakamoto’s identity is still up for debate

Nakamoto’s writings indicate they’re most likely someone with a strong understanding of economics, computer science, and modern cryptography, which involves methods and technologies for keeping information secure, like encrypting a message that can only be unlocked with a special key. Unsurprisingly, the commonly advanced candidates for who Nakamoto could be are self-identified “cypherpunks,” a community of mainly computer scientists who advocate for using cryptography to protect digital privacy.

According to Hoback, director of Money Electric, Peter Todd fits the bill. Todd is a libertarian pro-privacy advocate who, among other things, is a huge proponent of using cash because it’s harder for governments and banks to track your spending. As a teenager, he was already communicating with older, respected cypherpunks and seemed unusually knowledgeable about bitcoin despite his youth. Todd would have been 23 years old when the bitcoin white paper was published.

Hoback builds his case primarily on the fact that Todd joined the message board Bitcointalk.org in 2010 right before Nakamoto stopped posting. But the crux of Hoback’s argument hinges on an interaction between Todd and Nakamoto on Bitcointalk. Nakamoto had posted something technical about how bitcoin transactions work; about an hour and a half later, Todd replied with a small disagreement. Hoback contends the reply actually reads more like someone finishing their previous thought — that Todd had signed into the wrong account to make an addendum to the original Nakamoto post. In the film, he also points to a chat log in which Todd calls himself a foremost authority on sacrificing bitcoin, which Hoback connects to the fact that Nakamoto hasn’t done anything with their coins in all these years (at least, that we know of).

It’s an intriguing interpretation, but not exactly a smoking gun. 

Hoback, both in interviews and within Money Electric, portrays Todd as someone who enjoys playing games over whether he could be the bitcoin founder, laughing on camera as the filmmaker explains why he believes Todd is Nakamoto — at one point saying with a smirking grin, “Well, yeah. I’m Satoshi Nakamoto.” On X, though, Todd has firmly denied he’s Nakamoto. In an email to Vox, Hoback wrote that Todd stopped speaking to him after filming this scene. Todd told Vox in an email that Hoback hadn’t been forthcoming about his intention to find out Nakamoto’s identity.

The other main person of interest in Money Electric is Adam Back, a British cypherpunk in his 50s whose work toward a functional digital currency was cited in Nakamoto’s original bitcoin paper. One reason Hoback finds Back suspicious is that he became more active in the bitcoin world — specifically concerned with how to make transactions completely anonymous — right after speculation emerged that Nakamoto controlled over 1 million bitcoins, more than previously thought. Unlike Todd, Back has stridently distanced himself from even joking suggestions that he could be Nakamoto.

Other commonly floated contenders include prominent cypherpunk figures such as Hal Finney, who died in 2014 and was the recipient of the first test bitcoin transaction that Nakamoto sent, and Nick Szabo, who came up with the concept of “smart contracts,” a crucial function of many blockchains today. One wild suggestion claims that the Japanese etymology behind Satoshi Nakamoto can roughly translate to “central intelligence,” a sign that bitcoin was in fact invented by the CIA as some sort of trap. Another conspiracy theory — practically a meme at this point — posits that Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk is the real Nakamoto. (He denies it.)

It isn’t clear whether Nakamoto is still alive, or even whether they’re one person rather than a group of people working together. Early this year, an unknown person sent 26.9 bitcoins (worth approximately $1.8 million today) to Nakamoto’s dormant wallet, firing up fresh excitement over where Nakamoto is and what they might be doing. 

How do you track down a mystery like Nakamoto? Should you even try?

Since 2011, Nakamoto hasn’t emailed or posted anywhere under their username. They also haven’t used the crypto wallets associated with that name. But even if someone is determined to remain in the shadows, and has left no obvious evidence giving them away, there are bound to be some breadcrumbs. Much of the theorizing around Nakamoto depends on analyzing their style of coding and writing. Hoback, at one point in the film, nods to the fact that Nakamoto and Todd both used slurs that could indicate immaturity. Another commonly noted marker is that Nakamoto often used British English spelling (such as “favour”), and Todd is Canadian.

But other linguistic comparisons of commonly used words and phrases have been made that inconclusively point to other candidates. On the forum, Nakamoto often uses a double space at the start of a sentence, while Todd does not. Both Back and Todd pepper in dashes to break up clauses in a single sentence — Nakamoto doesn’t. Could the stylistic differences be a cunning, intentional misdirection? No one knows. Ultimately, none of these tics add up to definitive proof.

Many in the bitcoin world conjecture that Nakamoto disappeared because WikiLeaks — the site where Julian Assange published many leaked documents — appeared poised to start accepting donations in bitcoin, which might lead to more attention on Nakamoto. In one of their last known communications, Nakamoto wrote to bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, “I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle.” In the last known email, sent in April 2011, Nakamoto claimed they were no longer involved with bitcoin.

“The fact is, what makes bitcoin such an interesting system is precisely the fact that the original creator doesn’t have control over bitcoin,” Todd said, adding that their identity is irrelevant. It’s clear Nakamoto never intends to out themselves — and, indeed, they seem to argue there’s no point. Bitcoin is now out of their hands. So how much does their identity matter?

Hoback argues that it matters a lot due to how important bitcoin has become. “Bitcoin is already being baked into our financial system,” he told Vox, referring to its acceptance as legal tender in some countries and the fact that it could now be included in 401(k)s. Nakamoto potentially controls a significant portion of the total limited supply of bitcoin; if they one day decided to come forward and start moving (and spending) the coins in their possession, such an enormous sell-off could be destabilizing for the cryptocurrency. If they spend their riches, there’s also arguably a public interest in knowing where so much money is going, and whether it has any political impact.

Acknowledging the possibility that Nakamoto could be multiple people, Hoback continued, “This group is making themselves super rich while saying no one should look into Satoshi. Isn’t that a little suspicious?”

If you believe holding the powerful to account is important, then Nakamoto’s insistence on anonymity stands against the transparency that such accountability requires. It’s no secret that many of the world’s richest people have historically cleaved to remaining as private as possible, using elaborate financial structures and tax havens to avoid scrutiny of what their money is funding.

Then again, there’s no proof Nakamoto has spent any of their fortune. Their known bitcoin hoard is a rough value of net worth, not yet used for anything — and we know this because all bitcoin transactions are part of a public ledger. If they started cashing in their bitcoin stockpile, that could make it easier for people to find their real-life identity, which is an incentive for Nakamoto to leave that stash untouched. (It is curious, though, that in late September about $13 million worth of bitcoin mined in the early days of the cryptocurrency suddenly moved.)

Perhaps there’s a better question than whether it matters who Nakamoto is: How important is it that the inventor of bitcoin remains a mystery?

From the perspective of the cypherpunks, it’s crucial. There’s a financial motivation — the reveal of Nakamoto’s real identity could tank the price of bitcoin. But Nakamoto’s lasting anonymity is also an ideological resistance to government authority in an increasingly surveilled digital world. Many key figures in the bitcoin community unequivocally express a desire for Nakamoto’s identity to stay a secret — according to Hoback, Todd seemed displeased that people had found Nakamoto’s million-plus bitcoin stash, and told him to leave Nakamoto alone. There’s also the potential danger someone could be in if others think they’re Nakamoto. In a comment to the New Yorker, Todd said Hoback had put his safety at risk by accusing him of being a multibillionaire, and that he would soon be doing “some unplanned travel.”

Todd isn’t wrong that prior attempts to unmask Nakamoto have disturbed people’s personal lives — take the case of Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a former engineer and programmer in California who was the subject of a Newsweek report claiming he was the bitcoin god. Dorian Nakamoto has categorically denied even knowing what cryptocurrencies are, and has said the accusation and public scrutiny caused a “great deal of confusion and stress” for him and his family. In response, Hoback told Vox that other people long suspected of being Nakamoto, like Nick Szabo and Adam Back, are fine.

For his part, Todd noted Hoback also had a financial motivation — to sell his documentary. “I think that financial incentive is clouding his moral judgement here,” he told Vox.

Toward the end of the Money Electric, Todd says the hunt for bitcoin’s Nakamoto is yet another example of “journalists really missing the point.” The point, he elaborates, is “to make bitcoin the global currency.” But if that came to fruition — and it isn’t close to becoming reality yet — then ironically, Hoback’s argument for hunting down the bitcoin mastermind would only become more compelling to both the general public and almost certainly to governments around the world. The surest way to protect Nakamoto’s anonymity seems to be for bitcoin to not become a widespread alternative threatening government-issued currencies — to not become too important.

Update, October 22, 11:10 am: This story, originally published October 17, has been updated with comments from Peter Todd.