Peter Todd is standing on the upper floor of a dilapidated industrial building somewhere in Czechia, chuckling under his breath. He has just been accused on camera of being Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin creator, whose identity has remained a mystery for 15 years.
In the final scene of a new HBO documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, documentarian Cullen Hoback confronts Todd with the theory that he is Satoshi. In a previous work, Hoback unmasked the figure behind QAnon. Here, he tries to repeat the trick with Bitcoin.
“I will admit, you’re pretty creative—you come up with some crazy theories,” Todd tells Hoback, before rejecting the idea as “ludicrous.” “I warn you, this is going to be very funny when you put this into the documentary.”
The film stops short of claiming to have conclusively unmasked the creator of Bitcoin, absent incontrovertible proof. “For the record, I am not Satoshi,” Todd says in an email. “It is a useless question, because Satoshi would simply deny it.”
The hunt for Bitcoin’s creator has yielded a broad cast of Satoshis over the years, among them Hal Finney, recipient of the first ever 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 is pointed at some; others elect themselves. But though Satoshi has had many faces, a consensus has formed around none of them.
“People have suspected basically everyone of being Satoshi,” Todd points out, early in the documentary. “The problem with this kind of stuff is that people play all these crazy games.”
WIRED has its own place in the history of the hunt for Satoshi. 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 very badly wants us to believe he did.” A few days later, WIRED published a second story, pointing to discrepancies in the evidence that supported the latter interpretation.
In March, a judge in the UK High Court ruled categorically that Wright is not Satoshi, closing a case brought by a group of crypto firms to prevent the Australian from bringing nuisance legal claims.
During the two months I spent covering the Wright trial, multiple Satoshis appeared in my inbox, too. “The world is not ready to learn about Satoshi Nakamoto, and they never will unless certain conditions are met,” wrote one of them, in a garbled message.
Hell, I even met a would-be Satoshi in-person, in the waiting area outside the courtroom. The man, who had introduced himself as Satoshi, sat down in the public gallery to hear closing arguments. Before long, he nodded off, chin slumped against chest. One of the other onlookers anointed him “Sleeptoshi.”
Plenty of bitcoiners welcome this strange, crypto version of “I Am Spartacus,” preferring that the identity of Bitcoin’s creator forever remain a mystery. Free from the overbearing influence of a founder, Bitcoin has evolved under a system of unspoiled anarchy, they say, in which nobody’s opinion is worth more than any other. Everyone is Satoshi, and nobody is Satoshi.