Last night, HBO aired a documentary about Bitcoin that claimed to reveal the identity of the cryptocurrency’s anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. In Money Electric, journalist Cullen Hoback chased the identity of the mysterious creator and came to a controversial conclusion. According to Hoback, Satoshi is software developer Peter Todd.
Todd has repeatedly said he isn’t Satoshi and the cryptocurrency community has roundly rejected the theory.
Todd is a bit of a trickster and a troll. Others in the film described him as a “contrarian.” He was in his early 20s when Bitcoin appeared and he did post on BitcoinTalk, a forum where Satoshi posted before vanishing from the internet. Todd is a character in Hoback’s documentary, present for large portions of the film as a kind of jester figure. More than once, Todd looks directly at the camera and says “I am Satoshi” with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“For the record, I’m not Satoshi,” Todd told CNN after the documentary aired. “Cullen is grasping for straws here. He is playing up a few coincidences into something much more. Ironic really: that’s a hallmark of conspiracy thinking.”
Hoback’s evidence for Todd being Satoshi is interesting but thin. At the center of the theory is a Satoshi post on BitcoinTalk in which he elaborates on some of the code behind the cryptocurrency. Todd replies to the thread, correcting Satoshi on a technical issue. For Hoback, it seems that Todd is finishing a thought that Satoshi began.
“Someone who had just created an account and had never posted about Bitcoin before, was finishing Satoshi’s sentences?” Hoback says in the documentary. The film truncates the end of Satoshi’s post in the editing, making it appear that Todd’s thoughts flow more freely from Sataoshi’s than they actually do.
Hoback also pointed out that Satoshi posted more in the summer, indicating they may be on an academic schedule. Todd was in school at the time. Both Todd and Satoshi use the British spelling for words like “colour,” there’s evidence Todd was trying to invent something similar when he was just 15 years old and that he scrubbed an old resume from the internet where he talked about his proficiency in C++. Bitcoin was written in C++.
When confronted with this evidence at the end of the film, Todd laughs it off. “It’s ludicrous, but it’s the sort of theory that someone who spends their time as a documentary journalist would come up with. So yeah, yeah. I’ll say ‘of course I’m Satoshi,’” he says. “The point is to make Bitcoin the global currency and people like you being distracted by nonsense can potentially do good on that.”
The cryptocurrency community has firmly rejected the theory. In the film, Bitcoin ambassador Samson Mow says “Peter was ruled out a long time ago.” Hoback says suggesting Todd is Satoshi would get you laughed off of every major Bitcoin forum in the world. The morning after the documentary aired, that’s indeed what’s happening.
Articles are spreading across the cryptocurrency world calling the documentary a poorly researched hatchet job. Todd has gone on record with CNN, saying he’s not Satoshi and complaining that he wasn’t allowed to screen the film before its release. “He’s had over a year to prepare for this moment,” Hoback told CNN. “Peter’s got next-level game theory. His reaction doesn’t surprise me at all.”
