- A new HBO documentary claims Canadian programmer Peter Todd is the founder of Bitcoin.
- Todd denies being the creator of the token, although he points to several things as evidence.
- The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, who wrote the Bitcoin white paper, is hotly debated.
A new HBO documentary suggests that the inventor of Bitcoin was a Canadian programmer named Peter Todd.
“Money Electric: Bitcoin Mystery,” which premiered on HBO on Tuesday, revealed that Todd is Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
The cryptocurrency community had been hoping for revelations in the documentary, but Todd was not among the names many expected.
Crypto watchers have been keeping an eye on figures such as programmer Len Sassaman, computer scientist Nick Szabo, and Blockstream CEO Adam Back. A meme coin named after them debuted ahead of the documentary, but has seen wild swings as traders bet on who would be named.
Todd, an applied cryptography consultant at GitHub, has been largely ignored, but filmmaker Karen Hoback suggests he is the most likely suspect.
Mr. Hoback pointed to a 2010 post on a Bitcoin forum in which Mr. Todd responded to Mr. Nakamoto's post as if he had accidentally posted it a second time from the wrong account. It seemed like he was replying with a continuation of that.
Nakamoto sent his final email to the Bitcoin community in April 2011, saying he had “moved on to other things,” and Todd's account stopped posting.
Some claim that Mr. Nakamoto's sudden disappearance refers to Mr. Sassaman, who died in July 2011.
Hoback also highlighted inconsistencies in Todd's story, including an earlier resume in which he claimed to know C++, which was used for the original Bitcoin code, but later said he didn't know C++. He denied it.
Hoback said Todd and Nakamoto also share linguistic choices in spelling and grammar.
Todd denied that he was the creator. He scoffed on camera, telling Hoback: “I admit you're pretty creative. You come up with some crazy theories. It's ridiculous.”
“But, of course, I'm Satoshi. And I'm Craig Wright,” he jokingly said, referring to the Australian scientist who goes by Nakamoto.
In comments to the New York Times, Todd more firmly denied the allegations. “Just to be sure, I'm not Satoshi. Satoshi would just deny it, so it's a pointless question,” he added.
The documentary follows long-standing speculation about the identity of Nakamoto, who established the idea of a frictionless and immutable payment system in his 2008 Bitcoin White Paper.
After the paper was published and Bitcoin was launched in 2009, Nakamoto interacted with users on web forums until 2011.
Nakamoto-themed meme coins created before the documentary's release continue to see big price movements, with one named Peter Todd up nearly 800% in one day.
Bettors were also pouring money into prediction market Polymarket. Participants identified Szabo, who published research on Bitcoin's predecessor BitGold, as the main suspect, followed by Sassaman, Buck, and various other cryptographers. Todd's name was not mentioned.