This article contains spoilers for “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery.”
Who is Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto? This question has perplexed and excited crypto fans ever since Bitcoin was created by the person with that username in 2009. Fans have endlessly theorized, debated, and scoured the web for clues, while investigative journalists have tried to unravel the mystery without success. For Bitcoin believers, Satoshi’s identity is important. This is because their ideas have a meaning close to that of religion. “It’s a naive concept,” Bitcoin investor Michael Saylor said this year.
Satoshi, who hasn’t communicated publicly in years, also sits on a huge stash of Bitcoin. With more than 1 million Bitcoins, about 5% of the total supply, Satoshi is worth about $60 billion, making him about the 25th richest person alive. His return to the market could be a big shock to an already volatile ecosystem.
Now, a documentary filmmaker has claimed to have identified Satoshi, claiming that the Bitcoin founder did not walk away at all, but rather played a key role in shaping the development of the technology.
In “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” streaming Oct. 8 on Max, filmmaker Karen Hoback spends three years traveling the world with early Bitcoin gurus and comes to a conclusion: Masu. Satoshi is 39-year-old Canadian Bitcoin developer Peter Todd. His ideas and short-tempered personality have earned him notoriety in the Bitcoin community.
In an email to TIME, Todd denied that he was Satoshi. “I’m not Satoshi,” he wrote. “As I have said publicly many times, I learned about Bitcoin from reading the white paper.”
Four other early Bitcoiners interviewed by TIME expressed skepticism that Todd could be Satoshi, based on their knowledge of Todd’s coding abilities and temperament. But Hoback is confident he has come to the right conclusion. “People have a vision of what they want to be, and they want the perfect person to match their ideals,” Hoback says. “But here’s the evidence. And I think the case is very strong.”
Hoback investigates Cypherpunk
In 2021, Hoback’s documentary series on the QAnon conspiracy, Q: Into the Storm, aired on HBO. In it, Hoback alleges that Ron Watkins, a former administrator of the social network 8Chan, is the mastermind behind the conspiracy (Watkins denies this). After the series aired, Hoback was quoted by series executive producer Adam McKay as saying: The Succession director, who directed and executive produced The Big Short, once again asked Hoback for his opinion on who should be revealed next.
“Don’t call me Satoshi,” Hoback remembers telling him. “This is documentary’s most overblown and poorly told story.”
But Hoback was intrigued by the idea and decided to get involved. (McKay is also an executive producer on the project.) First, Hoback reached out to one of the few people Satoshi actually cited in the original Bitcoin white paper. British cryptologist Adam Back is a key member of the 1990s movement known as cypherpunks. Cypherpunks were a group of libertarian-leaning technologists who feared that the Internet would allow governments to strip people of their privacy and wanted to create technological solutions to protect individual rights online. . In 2002, Back created Hashcash, a system to limit email spam. Its cryptographic structure laid the seeds for Bitcoin’s own framework.
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Hoback spent some time with Buck, investigating whether Buck himself could be Satoshi, as others have speculated. During a meet-and-greet in Latvia, Buck introduced Hoback to Todd. With his hoodie and unruly beard, Todd really embodies the visual stereotype of a programmer. He has received grants to conduct research and write code on various parts of the crypto ecosystem, and frequently speaks at Bitcoin conferences. “If Adam Back introduces you to someone, you pay attention. He does it for a reason,” Hoback says. “I found there was something strange about their dynamic, almost a ‘Spy vs. Spy’ quality.”
Todd was an early adopter of Bitcoin. According to Matt Rising’s Out of the Ether, he attended the first Bitcoin meetup in Toronto in 2012, where he was joined by soon-to-be Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin was also in attendance. Hoback speaks with Todd and investigates him, finding small clues pointing his way.
Todd was interested in creating digital cash from an early age. In 2001, as a teenager and a self-proclaimed “young liberal,” he approached Back to ask how Hashcash’s structure could be applied to “real currency” with a “decentralized ‘central’ database.” Sent an email. Todd was Canadian. Satoshi used British/Canadian spellings of certain words such as “favour” and “neighbour”, but also the American/Canadian spelling of “realize”. Todd is a self-taught programmer who was in graduate school for physics at the time Bitcoin was created. When Hoback asked programmers to evaluate Bitcoin’s code, he was told that it was unsophisticated and “written as if it were a physicist turned software engineer.” ”
Then Hoback found what he considered the “smoking gun.” It was a thread on a Bitcoin forum in 2010, two days before Satoshi stopped posting to the site and largely disappeared from public view. In this thread, Satoshi wrote several paragraphs proposing advanced technical changes to Bitcoin’s code. A few hours later, Peter Todd (nobody in the Bitcoin community at this point) responded with what appeared to be a slight correction: If the second transaction incurs a transaction fee. ”
When Mr. Hoback reread the post, he came to believe that Todd was not correcting Satoshi, but Satoshi. Believing he had logged into his personal account by mistake, Hoback wrote a post clarifying previous messages written under a pseudonym. A few years later, Todd ended up actually creating this solution that Satoshi had discussed, called “fee replacement,” and implementing it into Bitcoin.
When Hoback confronted Todd and Adam Back on camera about the post and told Todd the theory that he was Satoshi, Todd denied it, calling it “ridiculous.” He was also clearly nervous, laughing and muttering under his breath. “His response is very thought-provoking,” Hoback said. “And Adam’s reaction, or lack thereof, is as clear as the evidence gathered up to that point.”
Hoback now says he is “very confident” that Todd is Satoshi. “When I compiled a list of reasons why it might be him and why it might not be him, the list of ‘couldn’t be him’ was very short,” he says. (That list includes questions about why Todd didn’t simply delete posts that could hurt him.)
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In the documentary, Todd tells Hoback that if he were Bitcoin’s creator, he would have destroyed “the ability to prove that I am Satoshi.” In an email forwarded to TIME, Todd wrote that the quest to find Satoshi was not only “stupid” but “dangerous,” adding that his coding skills were not at the level of Bitcoin’s codebase. said.
Adam Back wrote to X after the trailer was released, “No one knows who Satoshi is, so this documentary is probably wrong.”
Insiders question Todd
The entire Bitcoin community is encouraged to keep Satoshi anonymous: In 2021, Coinbase included Satoshi’s identity in its list of business risk factors. Many Bitcoiners are angry at the very existence of the HBO project, saying that Satoshi’s privacy must be respected and that if he is identified, he could be accused by the government of violating securities laws or being a threat to national security. He claimed that there was.
Throughout Bitcoin’s 15-year history, similar attempts to unmask Satoshi have been met with fierce backlash. “The hero-founder cult in crypto is causing nothing but problems,” said Austin Campbell, a professor at Columbia Business School and founder of a crypto consultancy. “The fact that Bitcoin came out and then Satoshi disappeared is essential to Bitcoin’s success.”
Pointing out Todd Todd is likely to infuriate many insiders in particular, some of whom believe he is actually having a negative impact on Bitcoin’s development. Much of the animosity toward Todd stems from his role in a dispute known as the Blocksize War, in which Bitcoin enthusiasts have fought over how best to scale Bitcoin for consumer growth. The house is divided into two camps. Todd, along with Adam Back & Buck’s company Blockstream, opposed the implementation of a Bitcoin “hard fork” that would have allowed transactions to be processed faster. After a long back and forth, Todd’s side won.
In July, a thread on a Bitcoin-focused subreddit was filled with comments criticizing Todd. “His organization destroyed Bitcoin and prevented its expansion,” one commenter wrote. “He has done so much damage to BTC,” another poster wrote, referring to the fee-based alternative that Todd “discussed” with Satoshi in 2010, adding, “Why would anyone tell him I don’t know if they’ll give me a time,” he said.
If Todd is actually Satoshi, as Hoback claims, his role in the Blocksize War is significant. This is because it would show that Bitcoin’s founders have too much influence over the future of Bitcoin, even though it is supposed to be a decentralized community. -Initiated project. “You say you’re open source, but Blockstream manipulated ongoing development to keep the scale always in their favor,” says one Bitcoin developer who opposed Todd during the block size wars. Bryce Weiner says. However, Weiner dismissed the idea that Peter Todd could be Satoshi. “He’s a guy who knows how to engineer and got lucky by getting into Bitcoin,” he says.
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Samson Moe, a former Blockstream executive who features prominently in the documentary, also doubts that Todd created Bitcoin. “He’s too contrarian to focus on building something this complex and intricate,” he says.
Mike Hearn, one of Bitcoin’s early developers, emailed Satoshi in 2010 and said there were some clues that Satoshi was much older. Satoshi’s coding style was outdated for its time, Hahn said. “It suggests that he came of age as a developer in the ’90s and then quit. He couldn’t keep up with the evolution of the industry,” he says. (Todd was 10 years old in 1995). Satoshi also mentions an obscure financial incident in 1979, in which the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market, “as if to remind us,” Hahn says.
Todd’s Social Media Presence
Mr. Todd maintains a polarizing presence on Twitter, taking far-right views on issues such as U.S. immigration and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The Russian people are genocidal terrorists whose purpose is to steal what others have. Our goal must be to eradicate them,” he wrote in July. “If we kill them, the world will be a better place.” He wrote that it was strategically advantageous for Israel to bomb hospitals in Lebanon, and reposted a conspiracy theory about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
Todd has also used social media and his podcast to criticize some of Satoshi’s ideas, which is unusual in a community that typically accepts Satoshi’s ideas as gospel. Speaking about Bitcoin fans who love Bitcoin’s hard-coded 21 million coin cap, Todd said on a recent podcast: ” In another tweet, he claimed, “Sigops’ mistake is proof that Satoshi was working alone and in a hurry.”
And in 2015, Todd wrote: “Bitcoin shows that ideas that change the world can actually be so simple that you don’t need to be a world-class expert to come up with them, just someone with open knowledge. I think it’s a great example of the spark of the heart, the spark of inspiration, and the collaborative community that works to fix flaws and bring ideas to life. ”
Hoback sees this as evidence supporting his theory. “Satoshi’s obsession with whether his ideas are right or wrong speaks volumes,” Hoback says. “If you think back to where you were 15 years ago, maybe you did something wrong, but then people say, ‘No, this is the word of God, so you have to take it as gospel.’ That would be quite annoying.”
Although the evidence he presents is circumstantial, Hoback hopes the documentary will prompt deeper investigation into the issues that have plagued the crypto community for a decade and a half. “This conclusion was unexpected and not what many in the Bitcoin community wanted,” Hoback said. “But maybe if they watch the film and absorb the evidence and want to get closer to the answer, they’ll look into this as well.”
