Bitcoin creator suspect says he is not Bitcoin creator suspect

'If I was Satoshi I would have destroyed my ability to prove I'm Satoshi'

The man identified as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in a new HBO documentary has something to say: Wrong again, world.

In the just-released HBO film on the history of the world's biggest digital currency - Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery - documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback comes to the conclusion that the anonymous creator of Bitcoin was none other than a long-time member of the community and early Bitcoin developer Peter Todd. 

Todd dismissed the claim in the documentary, released yesterday, and denied it again when asked by The Register.

"[Hoback's] evidence for me being Satoshi is the same kind of coincidence-based, circumstantial thinking that fuels conspiracies like QAnon," Todd told us in an email. "Which is ironic, given that [Hoback's] previous big project was a documentary on QAnon. He clearly didn't try to debunk his theories either." 

Hoback's previous project - Q: Into the Storm - aimed to unmask the person behind QAnon, perhaps giving him an interest in uncovering the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Todd, however, thinks Hoback was just trying to drum up interest in his new film.

"I think [Hoback] only included the Satoshi claim as a marketing ploy: he was really creating a documentary about Bitcoin, and needed a hook to get media attention," Todd said. "He picked me to accuse mainly because I was an unlikely candidate, which helped drum up even more attention.

"I don't think he had any interest in finding the real truth."

To be fair, the documentary does come off like a history of Bitcoin, its spread, and the key figures in its rise - Satoshi suspects among them. It includes interviews with a number of potential Satoshis, including Adam Back, inventor of Bitcoin predecessor Hashcash, who is painted in the film as the other most likely candidate to be the man behind Bitcoin. Clues that the film ultimately focuses on Nakamoto's identity are included throughout, but always as an added layer of uncertainty on top of something that's more about the transformation of analog currency into digital form. 

Todd even admits early in the film that people have suspected him of being Satoshi while denying the claim and simultaneously engaging in the frequent joke that "Oh, I'm Satoshi," a line that's often bandied about amongst Bitcoin insiders engaging with the "normies" around them.

"You're pretty creative - you come up with some crazy theories," Todd told Hoback at the end of the film when confronted with the accusation that he's Nakamoto. "It's ludicrous, but it is the sort of theory someone who spends their time as a documentary journalist would come up with." 

Not exactly an air-tight case

The key information in Hoback's documentary that links Todd to being Nakamoto comes from two items: A series of communications between Todd and an unidentified individual who called themselves "John Dillon," claimed they worked in intelligence for the US government, and was advocating replace-by-fee (RBF) implementation for the Bitcoin blockchain. Todd later added RBF to the Bitcoin platform.

Hoback claimed that Todd used Dillon as a pseudonymous mouthpiece to push his own ideas, the same thing he claims Todd did while masquerading on the BitcoinTalk forum as Nakamoto.

Pointing to one of Todd's earliest posts on the forum - a direct response to Nakamoto's comment about transaction fees causing blockchain inputs and outputs not to match precisely - Hoback concludes that Todd accidentally logged into his new account under his real name, intending to answer as Nakamoto, since the post seemed to continue the same train of thought. 

However, Todd pointed to a comment on YCombinator by fellow early Bitcoin developer Greg Maxwell (also named in the documentary as a potential Nakamoto suspect), who notes that Todd's account was named "retep" at the time and wasn't renamed until later.

"If Satoshi had actually made that mistake, the obvious thing to do would be to just abandon the account. Not change the handle to your legal name a few years later," Todd said. "[Hoback] could have easily fact checked this himself, or by asking us after the interview if the theory made any sense. But he didn't."

At the end of the day, it's unlikely anyone will ever uncover the truth behind Nakamoto's identity - or, if they did, it's unlikely they could prove it, Todd said in the documentary.

"If I was Satoshi I would have destroyed my ability to prove I'm Satoshi, because then you'd never be tempted," Todd said early in the film. He told us that it was unlikely we'd ever know who Satoshi actually is, noting that "hiding your identity when people aren't seriously looking for you isn't actually that hard," likely a dig at Hoback, who he said is deserving of ridicule for his conclusion in part because it puts a giant target on Todd's back.

It's unknown how much Bitcoin Nakamoto has, but it's estimated that thousands of addresses linked to the unknown individual (or individuals) contain as much as 1.1 million BTC, worth close to $70 billion at current market rates. 

"Falsely accusing an ordinary person of ordinary wealth of having tens of billions of dollars puts them at risk for obvious reasons," Todd told us. "Cullen knows damn well he's putting my life in danger to promote his movie; I personally have had to do some emergency travel to reduce the risks to myself."

Todd said that the community joke that everyone is Satoshi is in part to water down the risk to others. "Everyone in the Bitcoin community knows this," he said. 

At the end of the film, Todd appears visibly agitated at being directly accused of being Nakamoto. In response, he sarcastically claims that he is not only Satoshi, but also Craig Wright [who claimed to be Nakamoto, but was proven not to be], which he later told us he did to ridicule Hoback's claims. 

"This is going to be very funny when you put this into the documentary and a bunch of Bitcoiners watch it," Todd said at the end of the film. His being accused, he said, will thrill the Bitcoin community because it's "yet another example of journalists really missing the point in a way that's really funny." 

"The point is to make Bitcoin the global currency, and people like you being distracted by nonsense can potentially do good on that," he added. 

For anyone interested in watching the HBO documentary, it's available now, and is an interesting look at the history of Bitcoin and its rise as a global influence. As to whether it actually unmasked Nakamoto - we're just as close to knowing the truth as we were two days ago, really. ®