Documentarian Says He’s Solved the Mystery of Bitcoin’s Creator. Insiders Are Extremely Skeptical

This article contains spoilers for Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery.

Who is Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto? The question has perplexed and excited cryptocurrency fans ever since Bitcoin was created by someone with that username in 2009. Fans have endlessly theorized, debated and hunted for clues across the web, while investigative journalists have tried to unwind the mystery with no success. To Bitcoin acolytes, Satoshi’s identity matters because their ideas are imbued with near-religious significance: “It’s the immaculate conception,” Bitcoin investor Michael Saylor said this year. 

Satoshi, who has not publicly communicated in years, also sits on an enormous stash of Bitcoin: over one million of them, which is about 5% of the total supply and would make him worth around $60 billion: roughly the 25th richest person alive. His return to the markets could send enormous shocks through an already volatile ecosystem.

Now, a documentary filmmaker is arguing that he’s identified Satoshi—and contends that Bitcoin’s founder didn’t walk away at all, but rather has played a significant role in shaping the technology’s development. 

In Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, which streams on October 8 on Max, filmmaker Cullen Hoback spends three years traveling the world with early Bitcoin mavens before reaching a conclusion: that Satoshi is Peter Todd, a 39-year-old Canadian Bitcoin developer, whose ideas and hot temper have earned him notoriety in the Bitcoin community.

In an email to TIME, Todd denied that he is Satoshi. "I'm not Satoshi," he wrote. "I discovered Bitcoin first from reading the whitepaper, as I've said publicly many times."

Four other early Bitcoiners who spoke to TIME expressed skepticism that Todd could be Satoshi, based on their knowledge of Todd's coding ability and temperament. But Hoback is confident he’s come to the right conclusion. “People have a vision of who they want it to be: They want someone perfect, who matches their ideals,” Hoback says. “But this is where the evidence lies—and I think the case is so strong.”

Hoback Investigates the Cypherpunks

In 2021, Hoback’s docuseries about the QAnon conspiracy, Q: Into the Storm, ran on HBO. In it, Hoback makes a case that Ron Watkins, a former administrator of the social network 8Chan, is the conspiracy’s leader, Q. (Watkins has denied this.) After the series aired, Hoback says that the series’ executive producer Adam McKay—who directed The Big Short and executive-produced Succession—reached back out to Hoback with a suggestion for who he should unmask next. 

“Don’t say Satoshi,” Hoback remembers telling him. “It’s the most over-pitched and under-delivered story in the documentary space.” 

But Hoback was intrigued by the idea and decided to dive in. (McKay is an executive producer on this project as well.) To start, Hoback reached out to one of the few people that Satoshi actually cites in his original Bitcoin white paper: the British cryptographer Adam Back, a core member of the 1990s movement known as the Cypherpunks. The Cypherpunks were a group of libertarian-leaning technologists who feared the internet would allow governments to strip people of their privacy, and wanted to create technical solutions to preserve 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.

Read More: Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town.

Hoback spent some time with Back, and investigated whether Back himself might be Satoshi, as others have speculated. During one of their meetups in Latvia, Back introduced Hoback to Todd. With his hoodies and unkempt facial hair, Todd practically embodies the visual stereotype of a coder. He receives grants to conduct research and write code for various parts of the crypto ecosystem, and frequently gives talks at Bitcoin conferences. “If Adam Back introduces you to somebody, you pay attention: He has his reasons,” Hoback says. “I could just tell that there was something strange about their dynamic, which almost had a ‘spy versus spy’ quality to it.” 

Todd was an early adopter of Bitcoin. According to Matt Leising’s Out of the Ether, he attended the first Bitcoin meetup in Toronto in 2012, where Vitalik Buterin, the soon-to-be founder of Ethereum, was also in attendance. As Hoback talked to Todd and researched him, he found small clues pointing his way.

Todd had been interested in creating digital cash from an early age; as a teenager and self-professed “young libertarian” in 2001, he had emailed Back to ask him how Hashcash’s structure might be applied to a “real currency” with a “decentralized ‘central’ database.” Todd was Canadian; Satoshi used British/Canadian spellings of certain words like ““favour” and “neighbour,” but also the American/Canadian spelling of “realize.” Todd was a self-taught coder who was in graduate school for physics when Bitcoin was created—and when Hoback asked a programmer to assess Bitcoin’s code, they told him that it lacked polish, and was written as if “a physicist became a software engineer.”

Then, Hoback found what he considered a “smoking gun”: a thread from a Bitcoin forum in 2010, two days before Satoshi stopped posting on the site and largely disappeared from public life. In the thread, Satoshi wrote a few paragraphs proposing a highly technical change to Bitcoin’s code. A few hours later, Peter Todd—who was, at this point, a nobody in the Bitcoin community—responded with what appeared to be a slight correction: “Of course, to be specific, the inputs and outputs can’t match “exactly” if the second transaction has a transaction fee.”

When Hoback reread this post, he came to believe that Todd wasn’t correcting Satoshi, but was Satoshi: he had mistakenly logged into his personal account, Hoback believed, and written a post clarifying his previous message written under the pseudonym. A few years later, Todd would actually write and implement this solution that he had Satoshi were discussing, called “replace-by-fee,” into Bitcoin. 

When Hoback confronted Todd and Adam Back on camera about this post and told Todd about his theory that he was Satoshi, Todd denied it, calling it “ludicrous.” He also became visibly nervous, laughing and muttering under his breath. “His reaction is extremely telling,” Hoback says, “and Adam’s reaction, or his lack of saying anything, is almost as revealing as the evidence compiled up until that point.”

Hoback now says he’s “very, very confident” that Todd is Satoshi. “When I put together a list of why and why not it might be him, the ‘might not be him’ list was very short,” he says. (That list includes the question of why Todd didn’t simply delete his potentially incriminating post.)

Read More: Why Bitcoin Mining Companies Are Pivoting to AI.

In the documentary, Todd tells Hoback that if he were Bitcoin’s creator, he would have destroyed “the ability to prove that I was Satoshi.” In an email forwarded to TIME, Todd wrote that the quest to find Satoshi was not only "dumb," but "dangerous," and said his coding abilities aren't at the level of Bitcoin's code base.

Adam Back wrote on X after the trailer was released that the “documentary will presumably be wrong, as no one knows who Satoshi is.”

Insiders Cast Doubts Upon Todd

The Bitcoin community as a whole is incentivized to keep Satoshi anonymous: In 2021, Coinbase included Satoshi’s identification in a list of business risk factors. Many Bitcoiners have responded with anger to the HBO project's very existence, arguing that Satoshi's privacy should be respected and that he could be charged by governments for violating securities laws or threatening national security if identified.

Over Bitcoin's 15-year history, similar attempts to unmask Satoshi have been met with fierce backlash. “The hero-founder cult in crypto has caused nothing but problems,” says Austin Campbell, professor at Columbia Business School and the founder of a crypto consultant company. “The fact that Bitcoin was kind of put out there and then Satoshi vanished is integral to its success.”

Pointing to todd Todd will likely especially incense many insiders, some of whom believe Todd has actually hurt Bitcoin’s development. Much of the animosity towards Todd comes from his role in a conflict known as the block size wars, in which Bitcoin enthusiasts split into two camps over how to best scale bitcoin for consumer growth. Todd, along with Adam Back and Back’s company Blockstream, argued against implementing a “hard fork” of Bitcoin that would allow it to process transactions much faster. After a lengthy back and forth, Todd’s side won.

In July, a thread on a Bitcoin-focused subreddit filled with commenters criticizing Todd. “His organization subverted Bitcoin, preventing it from scaling,” one commenter wrote. “He caused sooooooo much damage to BTC,” another posted, referring to the replace-by-fee function that Todd had “discussed” with Satoshi back in 2010. “I don’t know why anyone gives him the time of day.”

If Todd is in fact Satoshi, as Hoback argues, then his role in the block size wars is significant, because it would show Bitcoin’s founder having an inordinate sway over Bitcoins’ future, despite the fact that it is supposed to be a decentralized, community-driven project. “You say it’s open-source, but Blockstream manipulated the ongoing development so they always had the thumb up the scale in their favor,” says Bryce Weiner, a Bitcoin developer who opposed Todd during the block size wars. Weiner, however, dismisses the idea that Peter Todd could be Satoshi. “He’s just somebody who knew how to engineer and fell into Bitcoin and got lucky,” he says.

Read More: The Prince of Crypto Has Concerns.

Samson Mow, a former executive of Blockstream who is featured prominently in the documentary, also doubts that Todd could have created Bitcoin. “He’s too contrarian to focus on building something as complex and involved,” he says.

Mike Hearn, one of Bitcoin's earliest developers, emailed with Satoshi in 2010 and says there are several clues pointing to Satoshi being much older. Satoshi's coding style, Hearn says, was antiquated for its time: "It suggested he came of age as a developer in the '90s and then stopped: He did not keep up with the evolution of the industry," he says. (Todd was 10 in 1995). Satoshi also referenced an obscure 1979 financial event—the Hunt brothers trying to corner the silver market—"as if he remembered it," Hearn says.

Todd's Social Media Presence

Todd maintains a divisive presence on Twitter, where he takes extreme right-wing views about issues like migrants in America and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The Russian people are genocidal terrorists whose goal is to steal what others have. Our goal must be to exterminate them,” he wrote in July. “Kill them and you make the world better.”  He’s written that it would be strategically advantageous for Israel to bomb Lebanon’s hospitals and reposted conspiracy theories about migrants in Springfield, Ohio. 

Todd also uses social media and podcasts to criticize some of Satoshi’s ideas, which is rare in a community that usually accepts Satoshi’s ideas as gospel. When talking about Bitcoin fans who love Bitcoin’s hard-coded cap of 21 million coins, Todd said on a recent podcast: “They’ve bought in so hard to the 21 million meme that they just cannot accept that Satoshi might have screwed that one up.” In another Tweet, he contended: “The sigops mistake is evidence that Satoshi worked alone, and was in a rush.” 

And in 2015, Todd wrote: “I think Bitcoin is a great example of how sometimes world-changing ideas are actually pretty simple and don't require you to be a world-class expert to come up with them, just someone with an open mind, a flash of brilliance, and a supportive community to fix the flaws and bring the idea to fruition.”

Hoback sees this as evidence in support of his theory. “His fixation on whether or not Satoshi got stuff right or wrong is telling,” Hoback says. “Think back on who you were 15 years ago—maybe you got some things wrong. But then people are like, ‘No, it's the word of God, and we have to take it as gospel’: That would be pretty annoying.” 

While the evidence he presents is circumstantial, Hoback hopes the documentary will spur deeper investigations into a question that has bedeviled the crypto community for a decade and a half. “This conclusion is unexpected and it’s not who many people in the Bitcoin community want it to be,” Hoback says. “But maybe once they see the film and absorb the evidence, and then want to get closer to the answer, they'll look into this as well.”