When Canadian developer Peter Todd found out that a new HBO documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, was set to identify him as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin, he was mostly just pissed. “This was clearly going to be a circus,” Todd told WIRED in an email.
The identity of the person—or people—who created bitcoin has been the subject of speculation since December 2010, when they disappeared from public view. The mystery has proved all the more irresistible for the trove of bitcoin Satoshi is widely believed to have controlled, suspected to be worth many billions of dollars today. When the documentary was released on October 8, Todd joined a long line of alleged Satoshis.
Documentary maker Cullen Hoback, who in a previous film claimed to have identified the individual behind QAnon, laid out his theory to Todd on camera. The confrontation would become the climactic scene of the documentary. But Todd nonetheless claims he didn’t see it coming; he alleges he was left with the impression the film was about the history of bitcoin, not the identity of its creator.
Since the documentary aired, Todd has repeatedly and categorically denied that he created bitcoin: “For the record, I am not Satoshi,” he alleges. “I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film.”
For his part, Hoback remains confident in his conclusions. The various denials and deflections from Todd, he claims, are part of a grand and layered misdirection. “While of course we can’t outright say he is Satoshi, I think that we make a very strong case,” says Hoback.
Whatever the truth, Todd will now bear the burden of having been unmasked as Satoshi. He has gone into hiding.
The search for the creator of bitcoin has dragged into its orbit a colorful cast of characters, among them Hal Finney, recipient of the first bitcoin transaction; Adam Back, designer of a precursor technology cited in the bitcoin white paper; and cryptographer Nick Szabo, to name just a few. Journalists at Newsweek, The New York Times, and WIRED, among others, have all taken stabs at solving the Satoshi riddle. But irrefutable proof has never been unearthed.
In the week before the documentary was released, online betting markets had Len Sassaman, a cryptographer who moved in similar online circles as Satoshi, as the most likely candidate to be revealed as the bitcoin creator. Sassaman took his own life in 2011 at the age of 31, shortly after Satoshi disappeared.
The case for Sassaman was first outlined in 2021 by Evan Hatch, founder of crypto gaming platform Worlds. Whenever speculation about Sassaman bubbles periodically to the surface, the spotlight is thrown on his widow, software developer Meredith Patterson, who believes the theory is unfounded.
“People used to be really fucking nosy and entitled. I’d get people writing me with a two-page list of dates and locations, asking where I was at such and such a time or place,” says Patterson. “Where do you get off? A complete stranger walking up to a widow and trying to interrogate her. It’s like, fuck off Sergeant Joe Friday.”
When Patterson caught wind that the documentary might name her former husband, her first thought was for her parents, whom she worried might be targeted as a way of threatening her into handing over Satoshi’s bitcoin stash. “I called my dad and said, ‘Something weird has happened and it’s not any of our faults,’” she says. A friend who works in law enforcement in Belgium, where Patterson now lives, advised her to take refuge in her local police station if she felt unsafe.
In the end, the problem was not hers to deal with. “I was relieved for myself and my family that they named Peter Todd,” says Patterson. “But I feel sorry for Peter Todd. Frankly, nobody deserves getting a target painted on their back.”
Nothing to be gained
The stance of many bitcoin advocates, including Todd, is that there is nothing to be gained by the hunt for Satoshi. In the absence of its creator, bitcoin has evolved under a meritocracy of ideas, in which changes are proposed and decided upon by community vote, they say. Meanwhile, there is plenty to lose for anyone accused of being Satoshi, whether accurately or otherwise.
After the documentary aired, emails began to flood into Todd’s inbox. “So far, [it’s] a bunch of people asking for money,” says Todd. In one exchange seen by WIRED, an individual sent 25 emails in the span of two days asking Todd to help repay a loan.
Todd expects that “continued harassment by crazy people” will become the indefinite status quo. But he says the potential personal safety implications are his chief concern—and the reason he has gone into hiding.
“Obviously, falsely claiming that ordinary people of ordinary wealth are extraordinarily rich exposes them to threats like robbery and kidnapping,” says Todd. “Not only is the question dumb, it’s dangerous. Satoshi obviously didn’t want to be found, for good reasons, and no one should help people trying to find Satoshi.”
Hoback sees things very differently. Though there have been cases where violent extortionists have targeted crypto holders, plenty of people have been unmasked as Satoshi before—and nothing terrible is known to have happened to them, he argues. “I think the idea that it puts their life [at risk] is a little overblown,” says Hoback.
In any case, says Hoback, the identity of the real Satoshi is a matter of public interest. “This person is potentially on track to become the wealthiest on Earth,” says Hoback. “If countries are considering adopting this in their treasuries or making it legal tender, the idea that there’s potentially this anonymous figure out there who controls one-twentieth of the total supply of digital gold is pretty important.”
The main evidence presented by Hoback in support of the theory that Todd created bitcoin is a forum thread from December 2010 in which Todd appears to be “finishing Satoshi’s sentences,” as Hoback puts it. The topic of that thread—a way to prioritize transactions based on the fee paid—is something Todd would later go on to build into bitcoin as a contributing developer, responding to a request posted by another forum user, John Dillon, whom Hoback alleges to be another of Todd’s alter egos.
Some have questioned whether Todd, who would have been in his early twenties when the bitcoin white paper was published, would have been capable of developing a sophisticated peer-to-peer digital cash system—a problem that had confounded many talented and experienced cryptographers before him. But in his youth lies the reason for anonymity and pretense, Hoback claims. “Everybody had always thought that Satoshi must have used anonymity because they knew that their invention was going to be a hit,” he says. “But perhaps it was because they wanted to be taken seriously—because they were young.”
It was Todd’s reaction to being confronted with the theory that ultimately solidified Hoback’s conviction in the conclusion he had reached. “The end scene is really about his body language—his expressions. Were you ever caught in a lie? That’s what Peter’s reaction reads like to me,” says Hoback.
Repeatedly in the course of the documentary, Todd confesses to being Satoshi, before retreating from the admission. “By the way, everyone is Satoshi,” says Todd, after one such confession. “I was trolling the shit out of him,” Todd says, of the moment Hoback confronts him with the theory that he is Satoshi.
In the time since the documentary aired, Todd has moved to counter Hoback with evidence of his own. He provided WIRED with images of himself participating in outdoors activities, like skiing and spelunking, which a superficial look at the metadata would suggest were taken at roughly the same time that Satoshi was posting to the BitcoinTalk forum. (WIRED has not had the images forensically analyzed for signs of tampering, so cannot attest to their value as an alibi for Todd.)
The idea that Todd mistakenly completed Satoshi’s forum post from a personal account, instead of logging in as Satoshi, he rejects as “ridiculous.” Only later did Todd change his personal account to his full name; at the time of the supposed slip-up, he was using yet another pseudonym for the account. “If I had actually replied to myself by accident, the obvious thing to do would have been to just abandon that account and make a new one,” says Todd.
Todd’s urgent dismissal of the documentary reads to Hoback like an attempt to throw Satoshi-hunters off the scent. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that Peter would go on the offense. He’s a master of game theory—it’s what he does. He has spent a lot of years now muddying the waters,” says Hoback. “He’s an unbelievable genius.”
“[Todd] throws so much shit at the wall that nothing sticks,” alleges Hoback. “It’s a pretty effective technique—it’s hard to pin down someone who’s a contrarian and constantly makes opposite statements.” (Todd rejects Hoback’s assessment as “wooly conspiracy thinking.”)
But just as Todd’s “trolling” insulates him, it also exposes him. Though Todd has not been proven outright to be Satoshi, he knows a denial alone is not enough to convince the world he is not. “If you assume a sophisticated enough Satoshi, practically any theory is possible,” says Todd. “It’s a useless question, because Satoshi would simply deny it.”