Bitcoin founder or not, is he having fun messing with our heads?

There was already something kind of amusing about Bitcoin, a currency backed by the full faith and credit of magical thinking and traded (until a virtual heist) by, among others, a Tokyo-based company whose name, Mt. Gox, comes from “Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange.�

The capper might have been when Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection: a cryptocurrency for people who don’t trust government, asking for government’s help.

But no! The latest Bitcoin dramatic apogee was a weird sidewalk media congerie and an L.A. car chase that would have done Mack Sennett proud.

A man who may or may not have been Bitcoin’s founder was sussed out at his house in the middling suburb of Temple City, after Newsweek’s sleuthing — via naturalized citizen registration cards and the man’s lifelong love of model trains — identified Dorian Sakoshi Nakamoto hiding in plain sight under his real name. (The reporter has since come in for a mudslide of name-calling.)

When other reporters, not surprisingly, showed up at his house, Nakamoto said he had nothing to do with birthing Bitcoin. And then came the Mack Sennett part, or rather, something from the days of “The Front Page,� when one reporter had an exclusive and the rest tried to wedge in on it.

As The Times wrote, Nakamoto came out of his house and said he wouldn’t talk to anyone until he got some lunch first. An Associated Press reporter spirited Nakamoto off in a blue Prius to pick up a sushi lunch in Arcadia.

Nakamoto and the AP reporter then hopped back into the blue Prius and spent an hour wending their way to the AP offices in downtown L.A., trailing a phalanx of envious reporters like tin cans and old shoes on a honeymoon car.

At the AP building’s elevator, a Times reporter on Nakamoto’s heels asked about Bitcoin. “I was never involved,� he said. The only reason he went along with the AP reporter “was all for a free lunch.�

Then, over the course of two hours, he told the AP that he never heard of Bitcoin until his son told him that there’d been a call — presumably from the Newsweek reporter — a few weeks before.

That doesn’t sound too plausible. Bitcoin is huge in the zeitgeist, and Nakamoto, with a degree in physics, has worked as a systems engineer, a software engineer and a computer engineer.

And L.A. County sheriff’s deputies who showed up at Nakamoto’s house last month when the Newsweek reporter was there confirmed that he told her just what she said he did: “I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it. It’s been turned over to other people.� Nakamoto told the AP he was referring to his engineering career, not Bitcoin.

Whether he’s a Bitcoin begetter or not, I think he may be just messing with us all, and getting a huge kick out of it — along with that free lunch. I’m surprised no one has pointed out that, at the end of this video, he’s saying twice, in slightly clumsy Russian, “I don’t speak English.�

But dude, where’s my car chase? Where oh where were the news helicopters, for the best freeway pursuit since the O.J. Simpson slow-speed chase — which, by the way, was 20 years ago this June? Bitcoin fanciers might have lined the roads to the AP, cheering on Nakamoto, whoever he is.

As an Angeleno, I feel shortchanged — in any currency.

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Follow Patt Morrison on Twitter @pattmlatimes