Satoshi Nakamoto—the enigmatic and anonymous creator of bitcoin—has managed to conceal their true identity since publishing bitcoin's white paper in 2008.
Over the past 15 years, bitcoin has evolved into a $1.2 trillion asset, with one Wall Street giant predicting it could soar even higher. If Nakamoto still controls the estimated 1.1 million bitcoins held in various wallet addresses, their worth would be nearly $70 billion.
Now, HBO documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback has identified Peter Todd, a bitcoin core developer involved with the cryptocurrency since 2010, as the person he believes to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
"What if the real reason for using the name Satoshi, for the anonymity, was so that people could take bitcoin seriously, so they could believe it was created by [a famous cryptographer] and not some kid still in school," Hoback stated during the *Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery* documentary on HBO, directly addressing his theory to Todd, who was in his early 20s and completing a fine arts degree in 2008, the same year Satoshi Nakamoto released the bitcoin white paper.
"Here's what I think happened, possibly," Hoback said while speaking on camera to Todd and Adam Back, the CEO of bitcoin development company Blockstream, with whom Todd has collaborated since the early days of bitcoin.
"I think that John Dillon [an anonymous BitcoinTalk contributor that some believe to have been linked to the intelligence community] was created so you would have an excuse to make replace-by-fee, a concept you had envisioned years earlier but needed some kind of cover in order to make, and you also needed some cover for the 2010 post," Hoback explained to Todd, referencing the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 125 introduced by Todd in 2015 and a 2010 BitcoinTalk post in response to Satoshi Nakamoto that Hoback suspects was mistakenly posted using Todd's profile.
Hoback's theory is based on a chat log message from Todd in which he claims to be the "world's leading expert on how to sacrifice your bitcoins ... I've done one such sacrifice and I did it by hand," Todd wrote.
COMMENTS
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.
For more information, please see our Comments FAQ