It’s unlikely that Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, but the documentary is still worth watching.

By Jeff John Roberts, Fortune Magazine

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

In early 2009, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin to the world. His invention sparked a global rebellion against banks and governments, and the value of Bitcoin has soared over the past 15 years, now worth more than $1 trillion, equivalent to the combined market value of Tesla and JPMorgan Chase. Satoshi Nakamoto also left us with a mystery. Who is this mysterious man who disappeared into the mist of the Internet? Where did his huge Bitcoin fortune go?

The search for Satoshi has been going on for more than a decade and has featured many eye-popping farces, including the infamous 2014 Newsweek cover story that claimed that Satoshi had been found hiding in plain sight in Los Angeles. This was completely wrong, and Newsweek found a confused old man whose last name just happened to be Satoshi, but the incident will become another piece of Bitcoin lore. It is also a classic example of the harmful effects of confirmation bias.

Now it’s Cullen Hoback’s turn, and his new documentary (Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery) aims to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto once and for all. The film premiered on October 8 on HBO, which in 2021 released Hoback’s (Q: The Story), which took an up-close look at the Q-Anon conspiracy and plausibly named the mastermind behind it.

Hoback is confident (Money Electric’s trailer declares that “the internet’s greatest mystery” will be revealed), and overall his documentary is a good one. It avoids the pitfalls of most other crypto films. Money Electric isn’t a fan film made by enthusiasts to promote cryptocurrencies. Nor does it disparage and ridicule the cryptocurrency industry without trying to understand it (a common practice among critics).

Instead, Hoback describes a group of long-time Bitcoiners on their own terms: They are stewards of Satoshi’s gift, which gave the world a form of money that is not controlled by profligate governments. From this perspective, the villains are JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the Bitcoin-hating banker who appears at the beginning and end of Money Electric, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is allied with Wall Street to oppose cryptocurrency.

Meanwhile, Money Electric features people associated with Blockstream, a company dedicated to promoting Bitcoin adoption among individuals, companies, and even countries. At the beginning of the film, we see Samson Mow, a self-proclaimed Bitcoin ambassador who helps convince the Serbian prince and the president of El Salvador to accept this new electronic currency.

There’s also Blockstream founder Adam Back, who’s known for creating Bitcoin’s predecessor, Hash Cash. We see people like Peter Todd, a follower of Back and a Bitcoin Core developer. There’s also “Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver, another influential early cryptocurrency figure who’s currently facing tax evasion charges. There are also cameos from well-known figures in the business world, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who renamed his other company from Square to Block to express his advocacy for cryptocurrency.

The documentary’s interviews with a host of Bitcoin veterans give it authority, as does its succinct treatment of major events in the cryptocurrency’s development, including the so-called block size war sparked by Bitcoin’s architecture, the rise of Ethereum and altcoins (which critics call “shitcoins”), and recent actions by the U.S. government to hinder the crypto industry.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity revealed

Money Electric also stands out from other cryptocurrency movies because of its massive production budget. Hoback filmed scenes in Malta, Canada, El Salvador, and many other places, and the director claims to have found Satoshi Nakamoto. Unfortunately, he is almost certainly wrong.

Hoback’s initial journey to find Satoshi Nakamoto was on the right track. He identified the most prominent figures in the “cypherpunks” network, who shared a passion for privacy and cryptography and communicated through a now-famous email list. It was on this mailing list, as well as an online forum called BitcoinTalk, that Nakamoto shared his vision for Bitcoin.

At the beginning of the documentary, Hoback shows photos of the cypherpunks most closely associated with Bitcoin, who are the most likely candidates to be Satoshi Nakamoto. They are Back, the founder of Blockstream and Hash Cash, and other familiar names to Bitcoin veterans: Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and Wei Dai.

Hoback briefly and absentmindedly assesses the candidates for Satoshi before moving on to Australian con man Craig Wright, who entered the cryptocurrency space in 2016 by fabricating evidence claiming he invented Bitcoin. Fortunately, the filmmaker was not fooled and moved on to other candidates. As the plot of (Money Electric) progressed, it first featured Back as a potential Satoshi candidate, and then Back’s Blockstream protégé and partner Peter Todd.

Todd is much younger than other long-held candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto, and would have been 19 or 20 years old when Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper. To prove Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, Hoback showed a 2013 email exchange between him and an unknown figure named John Dillon about upgrading Bitcoin technology.

The emails were leaked in 2016 and caused a minor uproar in the cryptocurrency community, as people believed that Dillon was a US intelligence agent who paid Todd to infiltrate the Bitcoin network. However, Hoback makes a plausible argument in the film that Todd and Dillon are actually the same person, and that Todd orchestrated the entire controversy in order to push for an upgrade to Bitcoin.

Hoback sees this as an epiphanic moment, and based on this, he seizes on the public records of exchanges between Satoshi and Todd as evidence that the latter must be Satoshi, with Todd appearing to correct the Bitcoin inventor. In other words, Todd once again used the trick of replying to his own messages under an anonymous identity. To support this claim, Hoback points out that Satoshi's last communication appeared three days after the exchange with Todd, and that Todd, a Canadian, contains British-style spellings (such as colour and cheque) in his writings, which also appear in the texts of the Bitcoin inventor.

In the film’s climax, Hoback interviews Back and Todd in a run-down castle in the Czech Republic (why they’re there is unclear) and lays out his theory to them directly. Rather than explicitly denying that he’s Satoshi, Todd plays it coy during the interview, seeming to gently tease the filmmaker.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Hoback and HBO have been hyping (Money Electric) as a revealing film about Satoshi Nakamoto, finally revealing his true identity after all these years. Unfortunately, they should have remembered the lessons of (Newsweek) and the dangers of confirmation bias. This is a very common practice of interpreting new information to confirm existing beliefs and rejecting information that contradicts them.

At present, there is no definitive proof that Peter Todd is not Satoshi Nakamoto (although proof will soon emerge). But it is worth noting that Todd's name has never appeared on the list of Satoshi Nakamoto candidates among cryptocurrency insiders, and Hoback, as a newcomer to the field, could not have found the inventor of Bitcoin so easily. It is impossible for someone who has just graduated from high school and has not yet published any notable publications to both write a document as complex as the Bitcoin white paper and skillfully implement its contents. Finally, it is difficult to imagine that Satoshi Nakamoto, a man who has tried hard to avoid public appearances, would choose to participate in an HBO movie exploring who created Bitcoin. When Todd tells Hoback in the movie that "we are all Satoshi Nakamoto", the filmmakers should have simply realized that this is a familiar mantra among Bitcoin enthusiasts and left it at that.

Hoback’s biggest mistake, though, wasn’t his decision to focus on Todd, but rather his ignoring a more compelling theory about Satoshi’s identity, one that also fits Occam’s razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

The film begins by highlighting the original cypherpunks, which is the right direction for the search for Satoshi Nakamoto, especially the investigation of a man named Nick Szabo. Hoback introduces him as a potential candidate, but then dismisses him without basis. He not only ignores long-standing rumors within the Bitcoin community, but also ignores a large amount of solid evidence.

That evidence includes the work of Nathaniel Popper, a former (New York Times) reporter and author of (Digital Gold), a close look at the early Bitcoin scene that gets closer to the cryptocurrency’s origin story. Popper’s reporting (including this 2015 article) clearly points to Nick Szabo, and is supplemented by an academic study that did a regression analysis comparing Satoshi’s writing style to that of the potential inventor of Bitcoin. The study found a striking similarity between Satoshi and Szabo, who also used British spellings. If you like circumstantial evidence, there’s also the fact that Nick Szabo’s initials, NS, are SN in reverse.

While Hoback’s grand revelation ultimately fails, Money Electric is still well worth a look. The filmmaker tells the story of cryptocurrency (a phenomenon that exists almost entirely online) with masterful craftsmanship, while also making clever use of rich graphics to illustrate Bitcoin’s development timeline and technical details.

For cryptocurrency newbies, (Money Electric) tells a fascinating story that explains Bitcoin in a fair and accurate way. For long-time cryptocurrency enthusiasts, the documentary provides many familiar faces and cultural sympathy for them, while also providing another legend that will become the subject of memes for years to come.