HBO’s documentary “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” claims Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s mysterious creator. The film presents circumstantial evidence, including forum posts and coding similarities. However, Todd firmly denies being Satoshi, and criticizes the documentary’s methods. The crypto community remains skeptical, preferring the creator’s anonymity.

Introduction

HBO last week released a much-anticipated reveal-all documentary that promised to finally solve one of the biggest mysteries in the crypto world: who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin? Titled ‘Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery’, the documentary was directed by Cullen Hoback, the filmmaker known for ‘Q Into the Storm’, a documentary on QAnon.

The documentary came at a time when Satoshi-era wallets that lay dormant for nearly 16 years showed some activity. About 250 Bitcoins dating from January to February 2009 were moved in September 2024, reigniting interest and speculation about the early days of crypto. Bitcoin OGs like Samson Mow and Adam Back took to Twitter to either stir the pot or to deny everything. 

The build-up to the documentary sparked interest in the identity of the Bitcoin creator. But principled Bitcoiners had a different take: they prefer Satoshi Nakamoto‘s mystery to his definitive unmasking. It also reminded the crypto world that there have been many other highly-publicized ‘Satoshi reveals’ that turned out to be nothingburgers.

This, in their eyes, is one of those documentaries filled with nothing but circumstantial evidence that would leave us where we started: Satoshi Nakamoto remains an enigma. The only irrefutable evidence of who Satoshi Nakamoto is is the transfer of Bitcoins from Satoshi’s public wallets. The industry’s proponents have endured crypto’s four seasons without knowing the person who started it all. Could the documentary change it?

In the build-up to the documentary’s release, Len Sassaman’s name came forward, with prediction site punters betting heavily on him being the programmer behind Satoshi.

Prediction Markets Bet on Len Sassaman

The trailer for the documentary left people guessing who it would claim as the real Satoshi. After the trailer gave nothing but ambiguous hints, about $44 million in bets were placed on Polymarket ahead of the documentary’s release on who it would name as Satoshi Nakamoto. 45% of opinions on Polymarket, which is the largest crypto prediction market for betting on real-world events, favored Len Sassaman as the man the documentary would identify as Satoshi. 

Sassaman’s background makes him a plausible candidate for Satoshi, and others have written convincingly about his case.

Sassaman was born on April 9, 1980, and died on July 3, 2011 at the age of 31. He was a cypherpunk, cryptographer, and privacy advocate. Bitcoin and its underlying technology are built on the principles of cryptography and privacy, and the cypherpunks were its first true supporters. Sassaman studied under David Chaum, who is regarded by many as the godfather of crypto.

One of the reasons why Sassaman could be a potential Satoshi candidate is the correlation of the dates between Satoshi’s final messages and Sassaman’s tragic death. Two months after Satoshi’s final communication with the Bitcoin community on April 23, 2011, Sassaman died of suicide.

This correlation was not enough to convince the documentary makers that Sassaman was Satoshi. Instead, they pointed to another name as Satoshi Nakamoto: Peter Todd.

Why did Todd join the long list of names such as Dorian Nakamoto, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, and Paul Le Roux who have been identified as Satoshi? (Not to mention those who controversially claimed to be the Bitcoin creator?)

Peter Todd: The Satoshi That Never Was 

The filmmaker behind the documentary ‘Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery’ is convinced Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto. Just who is Peter Todd? Todd is a Canadian programmer and early Bitcoin developer. He founded OpenTimestamps, an open-source project for timestamping on blockchains.

Todd worked on several cryptocurrency projects, including Counterparty, Mastercoin, and Colored Coins. He worked alongside NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in launching the privacy-focused cryptocurrency ZCash in 2016.

The documentary’s claim that Todd is Satoshi is circumstantial. The strongest claim hinges on a 2010 public forum post in which Todd offers a response to Satoshi’s post. Hoback argues that Todd continues Satoshi’s train of thought using his account instead of Satoshi’s. This has been debunked as a correction to Satoshi’s post. Observers say the documentary was trying to make a meal out of it.

Other circumstantial evidence includes Todd’s interest in cryptography at a tender age, and his being Canadian (Satoshi used British/Canadian spelling). Another piece of evidence used by Hoback is a blog post in which Todd claimed he could ‘sacrifice coins.’ This, according to Hoback, meant that Todd could destroy the 1.1 million (valued at roughly $66 billion) held by Satoshi. Hoback acknowledges that this was stretching it, and too far from being a confession. 

There are several pieces of evidence against HBO’s claim that Todd is Satoshi. Todd’s code’s structure and style from 2008 has a different style from the one used in Bitcoin’s original release.  

Todd was 23 when Satoshi published the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008. Critics may argue that Todd was too young to build something as complex as Bitcoin. Then again Vitalik Buterin proposed Ethereum in 2013 at the age of 19.

Does the HBO Documentary Solve the Satoshi Mystery?

Over the years, the media has tried to reveal Satoshi’s true identity. This has been an elusive task, with several potential candidates denying being the Bitcoin creator. After the Dorian Nakamoto disaster which saw Newsweek track the wrong person down and cause him to get hounded by the media for weeks, it’s no surprise. 

Todd is now the latest candidate to deny this honor. He told CNN that “I am not Satoshi” and accused the film of “putting his life in danger.” Although Hoback is confident that Todd is Satoshi, the Canadian developer said the filmmaker was “grasping at straws.”

The documentary ‘Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery’ does not give conclusive evidence on the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. It further cements the notion that Satoshi may have vanished for good, with the crypto community content with not knowing the true person or group of persons behind the cryptocurrency valued at more than $1.2 trillion.

The lack of a well-known leader seems appealing to the Bitcoin community. This documentary may have brought back one uncomfortable question – what would happen if the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is unmasked? 

The biggest takeaway from the HBO documentary is that it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie, and that the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto shouldn’t and doesn’t matter. It’s his work, not his name, that matters most. It has yielded a network of code and a community of activity more important than one man. But, hey, it makes for fun television. 

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