The HBO documentary ‘Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery’ revealed that Canadian Bitcoin developer Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, but the crypto community is not convinced.
Cullen Hobak, the producer of the highly anticipated documentary, provides several alleged pieces of evidence in the 100-minute long article that led to the conclusion that Todd, an early figure in the cryptocurrency space, was the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.
Todd has been a core Bitcoin developer contributing to the cryptocurrency space for several years. He first became involved with cryptography and blockchain-related technologies at a young age, and developed an interest in these fields in his teens.
His first documented involvement with Bitcoin dates back to the late 2000s, when, at around age 23, he was already active in the crypto community, shortly after the publication of the Bitcoin white paper in 2008.
In a 2019 podcast episode On What Bitcoin Did, Todd revealed that he was about 15 years old when he started communicating with early Bitcoin contributors such as Hal Finney and Hashcash inventor Adam Back. These early interactions helped shape his later contributions to the Bitcoin space and cryptography in general.
In a 2018 interview with crypto.news, Todd revealed He worked as an analog electronics designer and a geophysics startup before his pivot to Bitcoin.
He officially began working as a core Bitcoin developer at Coinkite in July 2014 and went on to hold senior positions including chief scientist on projects such as Mastercoin and Dark Wallet.
Why Todd Satoshi?
The key reason behind naming Todd arises from a collection of circumstantial evidence gathered by Hobak, one of which is his cryptic online posts, particularly one in which he referred to himself as “the world’s leading expert on how sacrifice their Bitcoins”, which is interpreted as veiled confessions, suggesting that he may have destroyed access to the estimated 1.1 million BTC attributed to Nakamoto.
The documentary further fueled speculation with claims that Todd once posted from satoshi’s account on the BitcoinTalk forum in 2010, supposedly by accident.
Additionally, Todd is credited with being a key proponent of replacement by fee (RBF), a controversial topic within the community that proposed a mechanism that would allow a previous transaction to be replaced with a new transaction offering a higher fee. The documentary implied that this technical suggestion could only have come from someone with a deep understanding of the original Bitcoin code, like Nakamoto.
The community debunks the claims, and so does Todd
Despite these theories, Todd has continued flatly deny being Nakamoto, even before the documentary aired. More recently, on October 8, he responded to a comment on X asking him to come out and deny HBO’s claim, to which the developer responded, “I’m not Satoshi.”
The crypto community was quick to debunk HBO’s claims. Web3 researcher Pix pointed out several key points where the documentary went wrong.
first, photo noted that in 2008, Peter Todd was still finishing a fine arts degree and wasn’t even involved in the crypto space, so it was unlikely that he would have needed to use a pseudonym like Satoshi Nakamoto.
Next, Pix debunked HBO’s claim about a 2010 BitcoinTalk post, which suggested Todd accidentally revealed himself as Satoshi by not switching accounts. Pix argued that a follow-up post made 13 hours later was more likely a simple comment than evidence of a forgotten account change.
Pix also addressed the RBF connection, explaining that Todd introduced RBF in 2014, years after Satoshi had already left the scene. HBO’s suggestion that Satoshi pre-planned this feature was dismissed as a major exaggeration.
Lastly, Pix addressed the “sacrificing bitcoins” message, clarifying that Todd’s cryptic comment was a joke about the integrity of the blockchain, not an admission of destroying access to Satoshi’s 1.1 million BTC. This key piece of evidence, according to Pix, was taken completely out of context, further discrediting HBO’s claims.
Among other non-believers was CryptoQuant researcher Ki Young Ju, who labeled the “disgusting” documentary.
“It’s baffling that they came to this conclusion when all #Bitcoin experts disagree,” Ju wrote in an Oct. 9 X post.
BitMEX Research Too united skeptics, calling the evidence presented by HBO “patently ridiculous” and stating that there was “no reason” to believe Peter Todd is Satoshi.
Prominent community figures such as Adam Back, who has long been linked to the early development of Bitcoin, and Satoshi himself, also did not support the theory. Back, who appeared in the documentary, refrained from lending credence to the speculation, simply saying, “no one knows who Satoshi is.”
Other market observers considered the conclusion nothing more than sloppy journalism.
A surprise for Polymarket bettors
Polymarket, a popular prediction market platform, had listed probabilities about who the HBO documentary would identify as Satoshi Nakamoto. However, Peter Todd was not initially included as a betting option.
The bettors mainly focused on figures such as Nick Szabo and Len Sassamanwho have frequently been speculated as the creators of Bitcoin. Other contenders included Hal Finney and Elon Musk inter alia.
This omission is another testament to how unexpected and widely rejected the documentary’s claim about Todd really was.
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