HBO's new documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, purports to reveal the long-sought-after identity of bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. The man selected by investigative documentarian Cullen Hoback, however, has completely rejected the filmmaker's claim as patently false and untrue.
"Obviously, falsely accusing someone of having tens of billions of dollars puts them at risk of robbery and kidnappings. He's putting my life at risk to promote his movie," Peter Todd told Bloomberg recently.
Todd, a bitcoin developer living in Canada, said that the filmmaker's claim that he was Nakamoto was "ludicrous": "If Cullen had actually wanted to find Satoshi, he could have easily fact-checked this," Todd said. "Based on what has happened and his behavior I strongly suspect that naming me as Satoshi was just a marketing ploy to drum up attention for his documentary."
Todd criticized the HBO film for being a "threadbare, circumstantial, coincidence based-approach to trying to find Satoshi."
While Todd is not eager to take up the title, others in the bitcoin community have attempted to masquerade as Satoshi Nakamoto with limited success. In one high-profile case, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright has sued several members of the crypto community who say he is fabricating being Nakamoto, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Binance's former CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao , and several others. Earlier this spring, a judge in the United Kingdom ruled that Wright was definitively not Satoshi Nakamoto.
For now, the bitcoin community is continuing its search to identify the enigmatic creator – or perhaps set of creators – behind the name Satoshi Nakamoto.
