A new HBO documentary suggests bitcoin's creator is Canadian programmer Peter Todd
Warner Bros Discovery
- A new HBO documentary says that Canadian programmer Peter Todd is the creator of bitcoin.
- It points to several things to back the claim, but Todd denies he is the token's creator.
- The true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, who wrote the bitcoin white paper, has been hotly debated.
A new HBO documentary suggests the identity of bitcoin's inventor is a Canadian programmer named Peter Todd.
"Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery," which premiered on HBO on Tuesday, names Todd as bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
The crypto community had been anticipating a potential reveal in the documentary, though Todd was not among the most commonly cited names people had been expecting.
Crypto watchers were focused on figures including programmer Len Sassaman, computer scientist Nick Szabo, and Blockstream CEO Adam Back. A slew of meme coins named after them even debuted ahead of the documentary and saw huge swings as traders placed bets on who the documentary would name.
Todd, an applied cryptography consultant at GitHub, has been mostly overlooked but filmmaker Cullen Hoback suggests that Todd is the most likely suspect.
Hoback points to a 2010 post on a bitcoin forum, where Todd replied to a post by Nakamoto in a seeming continuation of the thought — as if he had accidentally made the second post from the wrong account, Hoback suggests.
Shortly after that, 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.
Other theories, though, have speculated that Nakamoto's abrupt disappearance points to the late programmer Len Sassaman, who died in July 2011, shortly after Nakamoto's last post.
Hoback also names discrepancies in Todd's story as possible reasons, like how his previous résumé claims he knows C++, which was used for the original bitcoin code and which Todd later denied knowing.
Hoback says Todd and Nakamoto share some aspects of their linguistic choices in spelling and grammar, too.
Todd himself denies he is the creator. On camera, he scoffs, telling Hoback, "I will admit you're pretty creative. You come up with some crazy theories. It's ludicrous."
He jokingly added, "But I'll say, yeah, of course, I'm Satoshi. And I'm Craig Wright," referring to the Australian scientist who has previously claimed to be Nakamoto.
In comments obtained by the New York Times, Todd denied the claims more firmly, saying, "For the record, I am not Satoshi," adding, "It's a useless question, because Satoshi would simply deny it."
The documentary follows years of speculation about the identity of Nakamoto, whose 2008 bitcoin white paper established the idea of a frictionless, immutable payments system.
After the paper's release and bitcoin's launch in 2009, Nakamoto interacted with users on web forums until 2011.
Leading up to the documentary's release, a flurry of memecoins named after possible bitcoin creators.
The Nakamoto-themes coins are still seeing big swings, with a meme coin named PeterTodd up almost 800% in the last day.
Prior to the documentary's release, bettors also funneled funds into prediction markets like Polymarket. Participants put Nick Szabo, a computer scientist who published research on Bitcoin's precursor, "bit gold," as the lead suspect with 15% of the bets.
Len Sassaman and Adam Back garnered 8% and 7%, respectively, while a variety of other cryptographers followed with smaller bets. Todd's name was not mentioned.