Since publishing the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto has successfully hidden his true identity.
Over the past 15 years, the entire network has been constantly asking who is Satoshi Nakamoto, while Bitcoin has been creating new historical highs. As of now, Bitcoin has become an alternative compliant asset worth $1.2 trillion.
On October 9, Forbes reported that if the man, woman or team known as Satoshi Nakamoto still controls the 1.1 million bitcoins they hold in a series of wallet addresses, his/her wealth would be close to $70 billion.
Now, HBO documentary producer Cullen Hoback points out that Peter Todd, a Bitcoin core developer who has been involved in Bitcoin research since 2010, is the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto in the real world. But Peter Todd himself personally denied on social media that he is not Satoshi Nakamoto.
According to Fortune magazine, there is no conclusive evidence that Peter Todd is not Satoshi Nakamoto (although there will be evidence soon). But it is worth noting that Todd's name has never appeared on the candidate list of cryptocurrency insiders, and Hoback, as a newcomer in the field, could not have discovered the inventor of Bitcoin so easily.
While Hoback’s big reveal ultimately fails, Money Electric is still well worth a look. The filmmaker expertly tells the story of cryptocurrency — a phenomenon that exists almost entirely online — while cleverly using just enough graphics to convey the timeline and technical aspects.
For cryptocurrency newbies, (Money Electric) tells a fascinating story that explains Bitcoin in a fair and accurate way. For long-time cryptocurrency enthusiasts, the documentary provides many familiar faces and a sympathetic look at their culture - while also providing another legend that will become the subject of memes in the years to come.
The following is the original report of Fortune, which is very well written. For readers' reference.
In early 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin to the world. His invention sparked a global revolt against banks and governments, and the value of Bitcoin soared to more than $1 trillion, equivalent to the market capitalizations of Tesla and JPMorgan Chase combined. Satoshi Nakamoto also left us with a mystery. Who was this mysterious man who disappeared into the mists of the Internet? And where did his vast Bitcoin fortune go?
The search for Satoshi Nakamoto has been going on for more than a decade. It has produced many hilarious blunders, including the infamous 2014 Newsweek cover story that claimed that Satoshi Nakamoto had been found hiding in plain sight in Los Angeles. The discovery was completely wrong — Newsweek found a confused old man whose last name just happened to be Satoshi Nakamoto — but the incident became another episode in Bitcoin lore. It is also a classic example of the dangers of confirmation bias.
Now it’s the turn of Cullen Hoback, whose new documentary (Money Electric) claims to demystify Satoshi Nakamoto once and for all. The documentary will premiere at 9 p.m. Pacific time on HBO, the channel that in 2021 released Hoback’s (Q: Inside the Story), which took an up-close look at the Q-Anon conspiracy and reliably pinned down the people behind it.
Hoback’s confident trailer (Money Electric) claims that “the internet’s greatest mystery” will be revealed, and overall, his documentary is a good one. It avoids the pitfalls of most other cryptocurrency movies. (Money Electric) is not a fan film made by groupies to promote a token. Nor does it belittle and ridicule the cryptocurrency industry without trying to understand it — a common practice among self-proclaimed sophisticated critics.
Instead, Hoback describes a group of longtime Bitcoiners on their own terms: They are the stewards of Satoshi’s gift, which brought to Earth a form of money that is free from meddling, profligate government control. From this perspective, the villains are JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—the Bitcoin-hating banker who appears at the beginning and end of Money Electric—and progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has allied herself with Wall Street against cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, Money Electric stars people associated with Blockstream, a company dedicated to driving Bitcoin adoption among individuals, companies, and even countries. At the start of the film, we meet Samson Mow, a self-proclaimed Bitcoin ambassador who helps convince the Serbian prince and the president of El Salvador to accept the currency.
There’s also Blockstream founder Adam Back, who’s best known for creating Bitcoin’s predecessor, Hash Cash. We also meet characters like Peter Todd, a follower of Back and a core Bitcoin developer, and Roger “Bitcoin Jesus” Ver, another influential early cryptocurrency figure who’s currently facing tax evasion charges. There are also cameos from notable figures in the business world, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who renamed his other company from Square to Block to signify his dedication to cryptocurrency.
The documentary’s interviews with a slew of Bitcoin veterans give it authority, as does its succinct treatment of major events in the cryptocurrency’s development, including the so-called block size war sparked by Bitcoin’s architecture, the rise of Ethereum and altcoins (which critics call “shitcoins”), and recent actions by the U.S. government to hinder the industry.
Satoshi Nakamoto "Revelation"
Money Electric also stands out from other cryptocurrency movies because of its massive production budget — Hoback shot scenes in Malta, Canada, El Salvador, and many other places — and the director’s all-out claim to have found Satoshi Nakamoto. Unfortunately, his bet was almost certainly wrong.
Hoback’s quest to find Satoshi Nakamoto started in the right direction. He identified the most prominent figures in the “cypherpunk” network, who shared a passion for privacy and cryptography and communicated through a now-famous email list of the same name. It was on this mailing list, as well as an online forum called BitcoinTalk, that Satoshi Nakamoto shared his vision for Bitcoin in addition to his famous white paper.
At the beginning of the documentary, Hoback shows photos of the cypherpunks most closely associated with Bitcoin, who are the most likely candidates to be Satoshi Nakamoto. They are Back, the founder of Blockstream and Hash Cash, and other familiar names to Bitcoin veterans: Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and Wei Dai.
Hoback briefly and absentmindedly assesses the candidates for Satoshi before moving on to Craig Wright, an Australian scammer who entered the cryptocurrency space in 2016, falsifying evidence to claim he invented Bitcoin. Fortunately, the filmmaker was not fooled and moved on to other candidates. As Money Electric progressed, it first focused on Back as a possible Satoshi, and then on Peter Todd, Back's Blockstream protégé and friend.
Todd is much younger than other figures long considered possible candidates, and would have been 19 or 20 when Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper. To prove that Todd is Satoshi, Hoback seized on a 2013 email exchange between him and an unknown figure named John Dillon about a technical upgrade for Bitcoin.
The emails were leaked in 2016 and caused a minor stir in cryptocurrency circles, as people believed that Dillon was a US intelligence agent who paid Todd to infiltrate the Bitcoin network. However, Hoback makes a plausible argument in the film that Todd and Dillon are the same person — and that Todd orchestrated the entire controversy to drive escalation.
Hoback sees this as an epiphanic moment, and uses it to seize on the public record of exchanges between Satoshi and Todd—where Todd appears to correct the Bitcoin inventor—as evidence that the latter must be Satoshi. In other words, Todd has once again pulled the trick of replying to his own anonymous message. To support this claim, Hoback points out that Satoshi’s last communication appeared three days after the exchange, and that Canadian Todd’s writings contain British-style spellings—such as colour and cheque—that also appear in the Bitcoin inventor’s texts.
In the film’s climax, Hoback interviews Buck and Todd in a run-down castle in the Czech Republic (why they’re there is unclear) and lays out his theory to them directly. Todd never explicitly denies being Satoshi, but instead remains vague, seemingly gently teasing the filmmaker.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Based on all of this, Hoback and HBO have been hyping (Money Electric) as the blockbuster Satoshi reveal that, after all these years, it finally revealed the true face of Satoshi Nakamoto. Oops. They should have remembered the lessons of (Newsweek) and the dangers of confirmation bias - the all-too-common practice of interpreting new information to confirm existing beliefs and rejecting information that contradicts them.
At present, there is no definitive proof that Peter Todd is not Satoshi Nakamoto (although one will soon emerge). But it is worth noting that Todd’s name never appeared on the list of candidates for cryptocurrency insiders, and Hoback, as a newcomer to the field, could not have discovered the inventor of Bitcoin so easily. It is impossible for someone who has just graduated from high school and has not yet published any notable publications to both write a document as complex as the Bitcoin white paper and skillfully implement its contents. Finally, it is difficult to imagine that Satoshi Nakamoto - who has vigorously avoided public appearances - would choose to participate in an HBO documentary exploring who created Bitcoin. When Todd tells Hoback in the documentary that "we are all Satoshi Nakamoto", the documentary filmmakers should have simply realized that this is a familiar mantra among Bitcoin enthusiasts and left it at that.
Hoback’s biggest mistake, though, wasn’t his decision to focus on Todd but rather his ignoring a more compelling theory about Satoshi’s identity — one that also fits with Occam’s razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
The documentary begins by highlighting the original cypherpunks, which is the right direction for the search for Satoshi Nakamoto, especially the investigation of a man named Nick Szabo. Hoback introduces him as a potential suspect, but then dismisses him without basis. He not only ignores long-standing rumors within the Bitcoin community, but also ignores a large amount of solid evidence.
That evidence includes the work of Nathaniel Popper, a former (New York Times) reporter and author of (Digital Gold), a close look at the early Bitcoin scene that writes closer to the cryptocurrency’s origin story. Popper’s reporting (including this 2015 article) points explicitly to Szabo, and is supplemented by an academic study that performed a regression analysis comparing Satoshi’s writing to that of the potential Bitcoin inventor. The study found a striking match between Satoshi and Szabo, who also used British spellings. If you like circumstantial evidence, there’s also the fact that Nick Szabo’s initials, NS, are the reverse of SN.
While Hoback’s big reveal ultimately fails, Money Electric is still well worth a look. The filmmaker expertly tells the story of cryptocurrency — a phenomenon that exists almost entirely online — while cleverly using just enough graphics to convey the timeline and technical aspects.
For cryptocurrency newbies, (Money Electric) tells a fascinating story that explains Bitcoin in a fair and accurate way. For long-time cryptocurrency enthusiasts, the documentary provides many familiar faces and a sympathetic look at their culture — while also providing another legend that will become the subject of memes in the years to come.
