“Cullen Hoback’s documentary promised to end the 15-year search for Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, but settling on Peter Todd as the answer felt like an anti-climax.
Key Takeaways:
- The much-anticipated HBO documentary faced criticism after it named Peter Todd as Satoshi Nakamoto.
- Todd repeatedly denied that he is Satoshi.
- There’s compelling evidence, including Satoshi’s unique coding style, that discredits Todd’s candidature.
The much-anticipated HBO documentary, which aired on Oct. 8, identified Canadian Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd as Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin who disappeared in 2011.
But, promising to end once and for all the 15-year search for the elusive Bitcoin inventor, filmmaker Cullen Hoback’s “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” underwhelmed.
Many people who have analyzed Satoshi’s background were stunned by the evidence put forward by Hoback to support his claims about Todd, a software developer who has made key improvements to Bitcoin.
“He [Satoshi] cannot be found, and any claims to the contrary are all constructed around circumstantial evidence – or fabricated in cases like Faketoshi [Craight Wright],” Samson Mow, the CEO of JAN3, a company that promotes the adoption of Bitcoin by nation-states, wrote on X
Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Bitcoin outfit Casa, posted on X that “wherever Satoshi may be, I like to think they’re having a laugh at this latest round of foolishness.”
Wherever Satoshi may be, I like to think they’re having a laugh at this latest round of foolishness.— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) October 8, 2024
Hoback’s theory relied on a comment Todd made in response to Nakamoto’s post in a BitcoinTalk forum in December 2010. Hoback believes Todd forgot to switch back profiles when he was posting as Satoshi. He says Todd accidentally logged into a new account with his name to continue a discussion he had started earlier as Satoshi.
The filmmaker also found similarities in the times that Todd – who was a fine arts student in Bitcoin’s early days – and Satoshi posted to the Bitcoin forum. He concluded that it was “like they were on an academic calendar.”
Another piece of evidence put up by Hoback is that Todd once claimed to be the “world’s leading expert on how to sacrifice your bitcoins…I’ve done one such sacrifice and I did it by hand.”
Hoback took this as an admission by Todd that he has lost the ability to access the 1.1 million BTC (valued at over $66 billion), which is believed to be held by Satoshi.
But there are several reasons why Todd is most likely not Satoshi, the Bitcoin founder who suddenly stopped posting on the cypherpunks mailing list at the end of 2010. Satoshi’s last known email was sent in April 2011, when he said, “I’m moving on to other things.” We look at some of those reasons.
Technical Contributions: Satoshi’s ‘Code Was Not Usual’
According to renowned British Bitcoin Core developer and cryptographer Amir Taaki, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote code – programs used by computers to perform tasks – that “was not usual.”
“He had many quirks,” Taaki wrote on X. He described Satoshi’s code as “highly idiosyncratic and personal, including the style itself.” From 2008 to 2010, the way that Satoshi wrote his code did not change, said Taaki.
He said the best way to identify Satoshi is by comparing his code with others, but no one has done that yet. Satoshi wrote his code in a computer language known as C++.
“When I first saw their code, I thought, ‘Satoshi is not a programmer’ because of how weird it was. He didn’t follow normal code practices that were modern at that time,” Taaki said, adding:
“He made big use of locks when it was out of fashion. He used Hungarian notation which was no longer used. He made spaghetti function recursion and never used objects to encapsulate processes. He also targeted Windows.”
Taaki noted that all of this indicates that Satoshi Nakamoto was likely an older person, “possibly not a software developer but from a close domain like engineering or physics.”
By comparison, Todd is 39 years old and was in his early 20s when Satoshi released the Bitcoin white paper in 2008.
It is unlikely that Todd, who graduated from Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, would have written a complex document such as the Bitcoin white paper and turned it into reality when he had just left high school. He also had not produced any publications of note until then.
In a separate post, Mow, the JAN3 CEO, appeared to agree with Taaki’s position regarding Satoshi’s unique coding prowess. He detailed:
“Peter Todd is not Satoshi despite what Cullen [Hoback] may believe. Peter may have said some dumb things to implicate himself, but he isn’t even a viable candidate because he’s not that strong of a coder. And he is simply too contrarian to resist arguing with people online for years.”
Public Denials: ‘I’m Not Satoshi,’ Says Peter Todd
One of the most obvious reasons Todd is not Satoshi is that Todd himself was shocked by Hoback’s conclusions. In the documentary, the Bitcoin developer denied he was Satoshi, describing the claim as “ludicrous.”
“I’ll warn you, this is going to be very funny when you put this into the documentary, and a bunch of Bitcoiners watch it,” Todd says in the film, as he seems to troll his interviewer.
“I suspect a lot of them will be very happy if you go this route because it’s gonna be yet another example of journalists really missing the point.”
He said that people trying to reveal Satoshi’s identity are “distracted by nonsense.”
I like Peter Todd. I wish he was Satoshi. But this is just sloppy joirnalism. pic.twitter.com/q2CEuhRLvh— Beanie (@beaniemaxi) October 9, 2024
In an email to CoinDesk ahead of the HBO film’s release, Todd reportedly denied he was the creator of Bitcoin.
“Of course, I’m not Satoshi,” he said. “It’s ironic that a director who is also known for a documentary on QAnon has resorted to QAnon style coincidence-based conspiracy thinking here too.”
Todd doubled down on his denial when he responded to a thread originally posted by BitMEX Research on X, stating, “I’m not Satoshi.”
I’m not Satoshi.— Peter Todd (@peterktodd) October 8, 2024
He did not stop there. When Politico Europe finance editor Izabella Kamiska suggested on social media that Todd takes a polygraph test to prove he was not Satoshi, he said:
“Polygraph tests are pseudoscience bullshit. But sure, I’ll do one. Pay all my travel expenses (business class for this) and a $10k fee for my time, payable in advance.”
Todd’s transparency about his identity contrasts with Nakamoto’s rather secretive disposition. It seems far-fetched that Satoshi, who was averse to publicity, would take part in a film that exposes the creator of Bitcoin.
Mow says the real Satoshi “wouldn’t be going to conferences and giving interviews.”
Peter Todd’s Philosophies Detract From Satoshi’s
While Todd has made important contributions to Bitcoin—particularly in the areas of security and scalability—his work focuses more on improving an existing system rather than building one from the bottom up.
On the other hand, Satoshi’s work involved building the technology behind Bitcoin and spelling out its vision through foundational ideas about decentralized currency and trustless transactions.
For example, the first Bitcoin block mined by Satoshi has the message: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. The inscription is thought to refer to the state of the financial industry in 2009, a crisis that might have necessitated Bitcoin.
There is some concern about whether a much younger Todd would make coded attacks on government bureaucrats who may be ruining economies.
However, the Bitcoin genesis block’s inscription also illustrates Satoshi’s libertarian ideals of creating a stateless currency controlled by no one.
Todd shares some of Satoshi’s philosophical ideals, but his approach has tended to focus on security measures – something that could be seen as more aligned with traditional regulatory frameworks. He does not appear to emphasize the foundational economic principles of cryptocurrency.
In 2013, for example, Todd interacted with an unknown figure named John Dillon about a technical upgrade to Bitcoin. The emails were leaked in 2016 and caused an uproar in the Bitcoin community as it turned out that Dillon was a U.S. government spy paying Todd as part of a plot to infiltrate Bitcoin.
In his documentary, Hoback suggests that Todd and Dillon were the same person, and Todd arranged the entire email exchange to push for the Bitcoin upgrade he wanted. Todd said he doesn’t know Dillon. But the idea that Todd would broker government mediation detracts from Satoshi’s original vision for Bitcoin.
No Direct Involvement in Bitcoin’s Creation
Peter Todd only emerged as a key figure in the Bitcoin community long after the cryptocurrency had already started to gain traction.
Unlike Hal Finney, who was the first person to respond to Satoshi’s post about Bitcoin on the mailing list and the first to receive a Bitcoin transaction, Todd only made his first acceptable contribution to the blockchain around 2014.
At the time, the Canadian software developer introduced replace-by-fee connection, a mechanism that replaces a transaction sent on lower fees previously with a new one that pays a higher fee. The feature is said to be “useful during times of high network congestion when transactions with lower fees can get stuck waiting for confirmation.”
To qualify as Satoshi, analysts say Todd would need to have been active during Bitcoin’s very early days. In addition, a 2014 study by the Aston University Centre for Forensic Linguistics analyzed the writing style of 13 Nakamoto candidates. It controversially named cypherpunk Nick Szabo the author of the Bitcoin white paper.
Like Satoshi, some of Todd’s writings have included British-style spellings – such as colour and cheque. But there’s not enough proof to definitively conclude that the Canadian is the Bitcoin inventor.
As Blockstream CEO and legendary computer scientist, Adam Back said: “We will never know who Satoshi is”.
