We are all Satoshi Nakamoto — except Peter Todd

Despite slick marketing leading up to the release of HBO documentary Money Electric, we’re no closer to finding out the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.

What filmmaker Cullen Hoback, whose most recent work chronicled QAnon and 8chan with “Q: Into The Storm,” has given us is more of a creative retelling of Bitcoin lore. 

The early efforts of the Cypherpunks, the formation of Blockstream and its victory in the Blocksize War, into the corporatization/industrialization of bitcoin mining and El Salvador adopting it as legal tender.

All that’s squeezed into 90 minutes, including cutaways to incessant negging from Nouriel Roubini and the mainstream media — solid comedic relief.

That side of the film makes for a great primer on the discourse. It even features a decent, albeit small, roster of legitimate insiders, including (among others): Adam Back, co-founder of Blockstream, veteran hacktivist Amir Taaki, a prominent early Bitcoiner now working on anonymous protocol DarkFi, as well as cryptography consultant and former Bitcoin core dev Peter Todd. 

Hoback later suggests Todd could be Nakamoto, hiding in plain sight all these years.

Read more: Craig Wright is not Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, UK judge says

The bulk of Electric Money’s baseline reality, however, is woven with clips of Hoback following Back around the streets of Malta, to see if he’s Satoshi. 

If Back was the progenitor, then the surrealness of Bitcoin Miami and nation state adoption were expressions of his genealogy. 

It would also technically make Back a trillionaire, if bitcoin were to hit $1 million per coin, a factoid the film repeats over and over. That’s based on prior analysis that found Nakamoto had mined over 1 million BTC, although there is some dispute about the real number.

Other scenes shadow former Blockstream marketing chief Samson Mow — who advised El Salvador president Nayib Bukele on his bitcoin adoption plan — on a world trip as a self-styled Bitcoin ambassador. The film also tags along with Todd on urban exploration trips in Latvia, before he’s presented as a real candidate.

Read more from our opinion section: Why we need philosophers to explain bitcoin: A review of ‘Resistance Money’

Back, who has repeatedly denied that he created Bitcoin, is the only person cited by name in the body of the white paper for his work on Hashcash. It was an early proof-of-work system built in 1997 for curbing denial-of-service attacks and email, which Nakamoto tweaked for bitcoin mining.

Hoback looked for holes in Back’s story, the biggest of which was a letdown: Back was actually interested in Bitcoin years earlier than he previously claimed, and he’d even edited a Wikipedia entry to include potential identities for Nakamoto that weren’t him, including Nick Szabo, Wei Dei and the late Hal Finney. Not exactly proof.

Read more: 25-year old video shows Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney talking zero-knowledge proofs

It’s only at the 80th minute that Hoback lays his cards on the table: a bluff based on a loose interpretation of BitcoinTalk forum posts.

Todd was supposedly Nakamoto at the age of 15 because he’d:

• Spoken online about building a digital currency based on Hashcash before 2009.
• Never officially held a position at Blockstream despite working closely on Bitcoin Core, for decentralization purposes.
• Minorly corrected Nakamoto about how a fee market would work in a BitcoinTalk thread, by “finishing his sentence” with a followup post over an hour later.
• Perhaps created a sockpuppet, roleplaying as a US intelligence agent who would later publicly assign Todd the task of coding that fee market.
• Stopped posting on BitcoinTalk around the same time as Nakamoto.
• Cryptically once suggested in an IRC channel that he had physically destroyed the keys to his bitcoin.

It makes for a fun theory. For a final showdown, Hoback presents it to Todd and Back in an abandoned railway, a have-fun-staying-poor man’s Point Break. They both — rightfully — laugh it off, which has continued on X following the film’s release.

Whether we should or shouldn’t know who Nakamoto is or was is a tired conversation at this point. 

Still, it’s obvious that for many normal folk, the question indeed presents a Rubicon that they can’t cross. That itself would hinder adoption, I guess, but as far as shedding light on the way through that mess goes, Money Electric ain’t it.

A version of this article first appeared in the daily Empire newsletter. Subscribe here so you don’t miss tomorrow’s edition.

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