The Bitcoin Creator Unmasked

After years of searching, a filmmaker says he has found the person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.

Cullen Hoback’s investigation into Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity began with a hunch and a cryptic message. In 2019, Hoback, a documentary filmmaker, was working on a film about the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin when he received an anonymous e-mail. The message contained a single sentence: “Peter was the only person who tried to talk me out of it.” The e-mail was from Jeff Garzik, a Bitcoin developer who had worked closely with Satoshi in the early days of the cryptocurrency. Garzik’s message hinted at a possibility that had been circulating among Bitcoin enthusiasts for years: that Peter Todd, another well-known Bitcoin developer, might be Satoshi himself.

Hoback was intrigued by Garzik’s message, but he was also skeptical. Todd was a controversial figure in the Bitcoin community, and his outspoken nature seemed at odds with Satoshi’s reserved and enigmatic persona. Nevertheless, Hoback decided to follow up on Garzik’s lead. He began by searching for any evidence that could link Todd to Satoshi’s activities.

One of the first things Hoback noticed was that Todd had registered for the bitcointalk.org forum on December 11, 2010, just three days after Satoshi had announced the creation of Bitcoin. Todd’s first post on the forum was a throwaway request for an invitation to something. His second post, however, was extremely technical, and in a peculiar way. About an hour earlier, Satoshi had posted a schematic recommendation for future Bitcoin development—a feature called “replace-by-fee.” Todd’s contribution looked like a surprisingly sophisticated reply to the master’s original post. Upon closer inspection, it seemed less like a reply than like a correction. Hoback eventually came to believe that it wasn’t even a correction but an explicit continuation of Satoshi’s last thought.

“Someone who had just created this account, and never posted about Bitcoin before, was finishing Satoshi’s sentences?” Hoback says in the film. And that same person would later go on to develop the very same feature Satoshi was asking about? What if Todd, who had otherwise been so careful, had logged in under the wrong username this one time?

(In an e-mail, Todd told me, “That post is simply me noticing a small mistake in one of Satoshi’s posts, and correcting it.” He continued, in a reference to Hoback’s earlier work, “Pointing to a one-off event like that as evidence of someone being Satoshi is QAnon-level conspiracy thinking.”)

The incident, Hoback realized, only got weirder. Three days after the replace-by-fee exchange between Satoshi and Todd, Satoshi disappeared from the forum—forever. So did Todd, who wouldn’t post again on the forum for another two years.

Two years after that, in 2014, Todd would reply to a forum novice, John Dillon, who posted a bounty of five hundred dollars—a bizarrely puny amount—to create “replace-by-fee.” An allegedly leaked e-mail exchange between Todd and Dillon revealed that Dillon claimed to be some sort of intelligence agent. Hoback, for various reasons that he details in the film, came to suspect that Todd had invented Dillon as part of an ongoing misdirection campaign.

(Todd told me that those claims were “an attempt to smear me,” and that the e-mails “have no relevance to Satoshi’s identity at all.”)

Todd seemed perfectly comfortable with the creation of alternate personae for ventriloquist purposes. He also seemed capable of playing a long game.

“For some people, like Adam, trying not to look like Satoshi made you look more like Satoshi,” Hoback told me. “But not for Peter Todd.”

In a 2014 tweet, Todd wrote, “Pro-tip: when starting a revolutionary cryptocurrency, find someone to frame for doing it first.”

As Hoback delved deeper into Todd’s history, he uncovered more and more evidence that seemed to suggest that he might be Satoshi. For example, Todd, at the time, was a Canadian college student, which lined up with Satoshi’s posting habits, Anglicisms in his spelling and vocabulary, and hints at a Commonwealth background. Moreover, Todd had e-mailed Adam Back about hashcash when he was in high school, and his father was an economist, both of which seemed to align with Satoshi’s expertise in cryptography and economics.

On the other hand, there were also some discrepancies between Todd and Satoshi. For example, Satoshi was, by consensus, not a professional programmer, and it seemed highly unlikely that he was an original cypherpunk; he hadn’t, for example, even heard of Wei Dai’s “B-money,” another major Bitcoin antecedent, until Back filled him in. The Bitcoin white paper, contrary to academic practice, was extremely thin on citations. All of this pointed to a much