Peter Todd is standing on the top floor of a dilapidated industrial building somewhere in the Czech Republic, chuckling. He has just been accused on camera of being Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, whose identity has remained a mystery for 15 years.
In the final scene of a new HBO documentary, Electric money: the mystery of Bitcoindocumentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback confronts Todd with the theory that he is Satoshi. In a previous work, Hoback unmasked the figure behind QAnon. Here try repeating the trick with Bitcoin.
“I admit, you’re pretty creative; you come up with some crazy theories,” Todd tells Hoback, before dismissing the idea as “ridiculous.” “I’m warning you, this is going to be a lot of fun when you put it in the documentary.”
The film stops short of claiming to have conclusively unmasked the creator of Bitcoin, absent incontrovertible evidence. “For the record, I am not Satoshi,” Todd says in an email. “It’s a useless question, because Satoshi would simply deny it.”
The search for the creator of Bitcoin has given rise to a wide cast of Satoshis over the years, including Hal Finney, recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction; Adam Back, designer of a precursor technology cited in the Bitcoin white paper; and cryptographer Nick Szabo, to name just a few. The finger points to some; others choose themselves. But although Satoshi has had many faces, no consensus has formed around any of them.
“People suspected that basically everyone was Satoshi,” Todd notes at the beginning of the documentary. “The problem with this kind of thing is that people play all these crazy games.”
WIRED has its own place in the story of Satoshi’s quest. On the same day in December 2015, WIRED and Gizmodo separately nominated Australian computer scientist Craig Wright as a potential Satoshi. The original story, based on a trove of leaked documents, proposed that Wright had “either invented Bitcoin or is a brilliant hoaxer who desperately wants us to believe he did.” A few days later, WIRED published a second story, pointing out discrepancies. on the evidence supporting this latter interpretation.
In March, a UK High Court judge ruled categorically that Wright is not Satoshi, closing a case brought by a group of crypto companies to prevent the Australian from filing nuisance legal claims.
During the two months I spent covering the Wright trial, several Satoshis also appeared in my inbox. “The world is not ready to learn about Satoshi Nakamoto, and never will be unless certain conditions are met,” one of them wrote in a confusing message.
Hell, I even met a Satoshi wannabe in person, in the waiting room outside the courtroom. The man, who had introduced himself as Satoshi, sat in the public gallery to listen to the closing arguments. Soon, he fell asleep, chin resting on his chest. One of the other spectators anointed him “Sleeptoshi.”
Many bitcoiners welcome this strange crypto version of “I am Spartacus”, preferring that the identity of the creator of Bitcoin forever remain a mystery. Free from the dominating influence of a founder, Bitcoin has evolved under a system of intact anarchy, they say, in which no one’s opinion is worth more than another’s. Everyone is Satoshi and no one is Satoshi.