HBO’s documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery identified Peter Todd as Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator — Satoshi Nakamoto.
The 39-year-old Canadian is known for his longtime contributions as a Bitcoin
core developer, a consultant and a developer of other crypto and blockchain software.
Still, Todd denied being Nakamoto both before the documentary’s debut and after it aired, bluntly posting on X, “I’m not Satoshi.”
BitMEX Research said in an Oct. 8 X post that some of the evidence presented in the documentary pointing to Todd being Nakamoto was “clearly ridiculous,” and there was “zero reason” to believe it.
He is among the few who publicly communicated with Nakamoto about the code and features behind Bitcoin before Nakamoto disappeared in 2011. These communications form some of the supposed evidence shown by the documentary’s producer, Cullen Hoback, as evidence that Todd might be Nakamoto.
Todd was about 23 when Nakamoto first published the Bitcoin white paper, outlining a vision for a decentralized peer-to-peer payment system.
On a 2019 podcast, Todd said he was about 15 when he started communicating with early Bitcoin contributor Hal Finney and Hashcash inventor Adam Back.
Todd has been a Bitcoin Core Developer at Bitcoin platform Coinkite since July 2014 and a board adviser at digital collectible platform Verisart since 2015.
He worked as a Linux system support and service Starnix developer for three months in 2001 and held various other short-term roles between 2007 and 2008.
The same year the Bitcoin white paper was published, Todd started working as an Electronics Designer at Gedex Inc.
He’s held high-level positions in the crypto industry, including chief scientist at Mastercoin, a digital currency and communications protocol built on the Bitcoin blockchain, since 2014.
Todd is also chief scientist at Dark Wallet, an open-source Bitcoin wallet, a role he also began in 2014.
In 2016, he participated in Zcash’s trusted setup ceremony, helping set up cryptographic keys for securing wallets and blockchain protocols. He later called his involvement “pointless” because he didn’t think “the Zcash trusted setup should be called a multiparty computation.”
In 2019, cryptographer Isis Lovecruft accused Todd of sexually assaulting her, which he denied and filed a defamation suit against Lovecruft the same year.
The case was settled in 2020, and the suit was dropped without monetary compensation in exchange for Lovecruft issuing a statement clarifying Todd never sexually assaulted her.
