Bitcoin creator is Peter Todd, HBO film says

LONDON — A new HBO documentary identifies Canadian developer Peter Todd as Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder of cryptocurrency bitcoin.

Cullen Hoback, the award-winning filmmaker behind the documentary, comes to the conclusion by stitching together old clues and new ones, and then confronting both Todd and Blockstream founder Adam Back, another key Satoshi suspect, with the evidence.

“It seems like you had these deep insights into bitcoin at the time?” Hoback puts to Todd in the film’s finale. “Well, yeah, I’m Satoshi Nakamoto,” Todd replies.

The admission, however, is not necessarily a smoking gun. Todd, who is a vocal backer of Ukraine and Israel on his X feed, is known to invoke the claim “I am Satoshi” as an expression of solidarity with the creator’s bid for privacy. In an email to CoinDesk prior to the documentary’s release, Todd reportedly denied he was the bitcoin creator: “Of course I’m not Satoshi,” he said.

If Todd is widely accepted as bitcoin’s creator, the revelation would end more than a decade of speculation over the identity of a person whose work spawned a global, multibillion-dollar craze for digital currencies: a mania that has pushed back the frontiers of finance but also enabled widespread fraud and other illicit activities.

Todd is not unknown to enthusiasts of the stateless money system. As a longstanding bitcoin core developer known for communicating publicly with “Satoshi” before his disappearance from crypto forums in 2010, his name has always carried weight in the community. But he was rarely considered a prime suspect.

“He is one of the most important bitcoiners, from a technical perspective,” said Castle Island Ventures Founding Partner Nic Carter, who added that he has known Todd since 2017. “Generally speaking, people consider his views on bitcoin as very important.”

A 39-year-old graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Todd would have been 23 when the famous bitcoin white paper that first laid out the vision for the decentralized money system was being completed.

Todd previously told a podcast he was about 15 years old when he first started communicating with key crypto influencers, known as the cypherpunks.

“In investigations like these, digital forensics can only take you so far; they’re like a compass,” Hoback told POLITICO before the documentary aired. “Real answers can only be found offline.”

“Todd’s game theory is next level,” Hoback said. “Just consider, in the run-up to release: he’s in the trailer, there’s a multi-million dollar betting pool, hundreds of thousands of tweets about the film and I didn’t see anyone suggest this possibility. He’s a fucking genius.”

The naming of Todd will be a blow to crypto-based prediction markets, which had until Monday identified the late Len Sassaman, an American information privacy advocate, as the favorite.

But the bitcoin and crypto industry were not immediately sold on the Todd-as-Satoshi theory. As news of the documentary’s findings trickled out, Jameson Lopp, a co-founder of bitcoin company Casa, posted on X that “wherever Satoshi may be, I like to think they’re having a laugh at this latest round of foolishness.” Carter said he feels certain that Todd is not Nakamoto, in part because of deep knowledge the bitcoin creator would have had to have about cryptography and digital cash systems.

“There’s no bigger mystery in history,” he later said of the identity of Satoshi, who is believed to own a massive amount of bitcoin tokens. “The fact that Satoshi successfully pulled this off — it really is magical. I personally hope we never find out who Satoshi is.”

This story was updated with additional reactions to the documentary’s revelations.

Declan Harty contributed to this report.