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.

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