A new HBO documentary suggests bitcoin's creator is Canadian programmer Peter Todd

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2024-10-09 23:00:14

"Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery," which premiered on HBO on Tuesday, identifies Todd as bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

The crypto community had been anticipating a reveal in the documentary, though Todd was not among the names many people were expecting.

Crypto watchers were focused on figures including the programmer Len Sassaman, the computer scientist Nick Szabo, and Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream. Meme coins named after them debuted ahead of the documentary and saw huge swings as traders placed bets on whom it would name.

Todd, an applied cryptography consultant at GitHub, has been mostly overlooked, but the filmmaker Cullen Hoback suggests he's the most likely suspect.

Hoback points to a 2010 post on a bitcoin forum in which Todd seemed to reply to a post by Nakamoto with a continuation of the thought — as if he had accidentally made the second post from the wrong account.

Nakamoto sent his last email to the bitcoin community in April 2011, saying he had "moved on to other things," and Todd's account stopped posting.