Peter Todd stands on the upper floor of a dilapidated industrial building somewhere in the Czech Republic, chuckling under his breath. He has just been accused on camera of being Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, who has remained a mystery for 15 years.
In the final scene of HBO’s new documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, documentarian Karen Hoback posits the theory that Todd is Satoshi. Hoback’s previous research uncovered the identity of the people behind QAnon. Here he tries to repeat the trick using Bitcoin.
“I’ll admit, you’re pretty creative. You come up with some crazy theories,” Todd told Hoback, who rejected the idea as “ridiculous.” “I’m warning you, if you put this into a documentary, it’s going to be very funny.”
The film stops short of claiming to have conclusively revealed the identity of Bitcoin’s creator, due to the lack of incontrovertible evidence. “Just to clarify, I’m not Satoshi,” Todd said in an email. “That’s a useless question, because Satoshi will just deny it.”
The search for Bitcoin’s founder has produced a wide range of Satoshis over the years, including Hal Finney, the recipient of the first-ever Bitcoin transaction. Adam Back, architect of precursor technology cited in Bitcoin’s white paper. Cryptographer Nick Szabo, just to name a few. The finger is pointed at someone. Others choose themselves. However, Satoshi has had many faces, and no consensus has formed regarding any of them.
“People basically suspect everyone of Satoshi,” Todd points out at the beginning of the documentary. “The problem with this kind of thing is that people just play crazy games.”
WIRED occupies a unique place in the history of the search for Satoshi. On the same day in December 2015, WIRED and Gizmodo separately nominated Australian computer scientist Craig Wright as Satoshi’s candidate. The original article, based on a trove of leaked documents, suggested that Wright “either invented Bitcoin or is just the brilliant con artist he wants us to believe.” However, a few days later, WIRED published a second article pointing out the contradiction. Among the evidence supporting the latter interpretation.
In March, a judge in the UK High Court ruled categorically that Wright was not Satoshi, ending a lawsuit brought by a group of crypto companies to stop Australians from making unsolicited legal claims. Ta.
During the two months I spent covering the Wright trial, I received multiple Satoshis in my inbox. “The world is not ready to know about Satoshi Nakamoto. It never will unless certain conditions are met,” one of them wrote in a garbled message.
To my surprise, I even met a Satoshi wannabe in person in the waiting room outside the courtroom. The man, who introduced himself as Satoshi, sat in the general audience to hear the closing argument. Eventually he nodded and rested his chin on his chest. One of the other onlookers anointed him with “sleep.”
Many Bitcoiners prefer that the identity of Bitcoin’s creator remain a mystery forever and welcome this strange cryptographic version of “I Am Spartacus.” They say Bitcoin has evolved in a pristine anarchic system, free from the tyrannical influence of its founders and where everyone’s opinion is worth more than anyone else’s. Everyone is Satoshi, and no one is Satoshi.
