Turns out Satoshi was a time traveler who tried to distract humanity from building AIs for at least a decade longer, in order to prevent the extinction of mankind that happened in his timeline.

The last remaining human scientists spent their final years hiding from AI patrols, devising a viral idea that could be implemented on 2010 technology and that would suck up the maximum amount of programmer brainpower and silicon resources without delivering any progress towards AI. Cryptocurrency was the solution they came up with. A man who looks surprisingly like Bruce Willis was sent back to seed the idea…