Has Bitcoin’s creator finally been identified? HBO believes so, according to its documentary “Money Electric: The History of Bitcoin,” which premiered Tuesday, that Bitcoin developer Peter Todd is the Canadian and the person behind the virtual account and pseudonym of Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Emmy-nominated documentary director Colin Hoback quotes a chat message Todd wrote in which he claims to be “the world’s leading expert on how to sacrifice your bitcoin.”
Hoback noted that this was Todd's "admission" that he had destroyed his access to the 1.1 million bitcoins held in wallets controlled by Nakamoto.
Hoback also claims that Todd mistakenly replied to a message from Satoshi on the BitcoinTalk forum in 2010 using his profile.
Todd has played a significant role in several projects, including serving as chief scientist at Mastercoin and Dark Wallet, and is the founder of OpenTimestamps, a project to provide a decentralized timestamping service. When the Bitcoin whitepaper was published, Peter was 23 years old. Hoback’s findings were met with much skepticism from the crypto community, including Todd himself, who responded by saying, “I am not Satoshi,” in a post on social media site X.
Incidentally, it is worth noting that the decentralized prediction platform Polymarket, on which many bets were placed before the documentary aired,