According to HBO, Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd.
The mystery of Satoshi’s identity remains open after the release of the documentary.
As promised by HBO, and despite the initial disbelief against this claim by many users through social networks, the network revealed the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. He did it through his documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mysterywhich came out today, October 8 at 9:00 PM ET through the Max streaming platform.
A look at the documentary reveals that the community’s suspicion was justified. According to Cullen Hoback, the director of the HBO documentary, Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd.
Peter Todd is a Bitcoin Core developer active since 2010. When Bitcoin was born, Todd was in his late 20s and was an active participant in digital crypto asset forums.
The evidence alluded to by the director to “support” the attribution was taken from a comment made by Todd on BitcoinTalk, during 2010, in which he allegedly gave an accidental response, from his profile with a real identity, to a comment by satoshi. This implies that Todd was responding to himself as if he were someone else to cover up an original idea about crypto transactions.
In the documentary, Todd settles the accusation with irony: “I’m sure they (the community) will be happy if you take this route. Because this will be another example of the media not understanding the issue.” Finita then saying: “people like you have been distracted by nonsense.”
Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery
The documentary, which lasts 1 hour and 40 minutes, included various personalities related to bitcoin. Among them, Adam Back, founder of Blockstream and the first person to be messaged by Satoshi; Samson Mow, CEO of JAN3, and developers such as Peter Todd and Roger Ver, the latter involved in the creation of Bitcoin Cash.
In the official trailer of the documentary, released by HBO on October 3, audio fragments can be seen where interviewees and those familiar with the mystery of Satoshi They are skeptical about the possibility of revealing the real identity of the creator of Bitcoin.
In one excerpt, an interviewer in the documentary says, in reference to a person not mentioned in the trailer, that there is “good evidence of him being Satoshi.” Adam Back quickly points out, as a correction, that there is good evidence “of him not being Satoshi”, in reference to the same person.
In another fragment, which this time includes the words of another speaker, he says that “someone competent enough to create Bitcoin is probably competent enough not to leave any trace.”
These fragments aroused the disbelief of many Internet users, skepticism expressed in opinions compiled by CriptoNoticias in an article published on October 7.
Finally, the one identified by the documentary as Satoshi was Peter Todd, a statement that is not entirely convincing since Todd himself denies, with irony and cynicism, his attribution as the creator of bitcoin. “It’s ridiculous,” he says verbatim.
As CriptoNoticias reported in another news item, the list of suspects of being Satoshi included characters such as Len Sassaman, whose wife came out to deny the information on October 7. Another suspect was Adam Back himself, who was interviewed for the HBO documentary. Aside from the aforementioned, Nick Szabo led the Polymarket surveys as the figure behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Peter Todd did not appear as a relevant character in the previous votes and previous bets about Satoshi’s identity.
The mystery of the identity of the person behind Bitcoin has always been considered to contribute enormously to the prestige and decentralization of the currency, since where there is a recognizable face, there is a person vulnerable to coercion. Apparently, the documentary does not provide conclusive evidence about Satoshi’s identity, and although the investigation is of interest to bitcoiners and those curious about technology, The mystery about the creator of Bitcoin remains open.