The documentary by Cullen Hoback aired yesterday revealed that Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Peter Todd, but for many, it was a disappointment.
This hypothesis, in fact, was not well received at all by the crypto community.
The crypto market has practically not reacted to the news, almost completely ignoring it, because it is a hypothesis that is full of holes.
Is Peter Todd the real Satoshi Nakamoto?
As revealed by Politico, Peter Todd is currently 39 years old, therefore when Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper on October 31, 2008, Todd was 23 years old.
Although this theoretically does not rule out that Todd at 23 years old could have designed a similar system, it turns out to be very difficult to believe.
The Bitcoin protocol is not very complex from an IT perspective, but the economic-financial reasoning that Satoshi used to develop that whitepaper is decidedly more complex. It is very difficult to imagine that a person like Todd at 23 years old could have developed that reasoning.
Moreover, Todd graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, therefore at the time it does not seem that he was close to the economic-financial environments.
However, Todd himself in the past stated that he came into contact with the cypherpunk environment already at the age of 15, therefore in 2000.
It should also be added that today Peter Todd explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.
I'm not Satoshi.
— Peter Todd (@peterktodd) October 8, 2024
Instead, at the end of the documentary, interviewed by Hoback, Todd answered a question about his insights at the time of Bitcoin’s creation by saying “Well, yes, I am Satoshi Nakamoto”.
It should be noted, however, that in the crypto environment, the famous phrase “we are all Satoshi” circulates, which can easily explain this statement by Todd.
The evidence of the documentary
The documentary by Cullen Hoback actually does not provide real evidence to support his theory, but only clues and assumptions.
Even BitMEX Research has described such “evidence” as pathetic and irrelevant, as well as wrong.
Summary of HBO documentary
Around 15 minutes of the long film is dedicated to trying to indicate that @peterktodd is Satoshi. The “evidence” for this claim in the film is absolutely pathetic, being both wrong and inconsequential at the same time.
Seems they just perhaps added… https://t.co/l20s4FQfes
— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) October 9, 2024
Many other sources agree, describing them as embarrassing, foolish, incoherent, and fundamentally wrong.
The hypothesis that is circulating, and to be honest was already circulating even before the broadcast, is that Hoback and HBO have tried to attract attention by inventing a theory based on weak clues and forced assumptions, solely for the purpose of increasing the audience.
BitMEX Research defines the documentary as “average,” indicating that its quality does not seem sufficiently high to consider Hoback’s theory as noteworthy.
Satoshi Nakamoto, Peter Todd and Bitcoin
Another aspect that raises many doubts, and that has not been clarified in the documentary, is that Todd seems to make his entrance into the development of Bitcoin only in 2010, that is, more than a year after the launch of the Bitcoin software.
It should be remembered that the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto himself on January 3, 2009.
In 2010 Todd was 25 years old, and it is believable that he had approached the development of Bitcoin as a computer programmer.
A criticism made by Todd to Hoback is not having conducted in-depth research on the birth of Bitcoin, and in particular not having interviewed people close to him and the other early bitcoin at the time when Bitcoin was emerging.
The documentary interviews Adam Back, one of the first bitcoiners in the world, but it does not delve much into the research regarding what happened in 2008 and 2009.
Todd, however, remains one of the most important bitcoiners from a technical point of view, thanks to his contribution to the Bitcoin project in the early days, especially at the IT level.
The reaction of BTC’s price to the revelation of the HBO documentary
The most evident clue that Hoback’s theory was not well-received by the crypto community is the absolute non-reaction of Bitcoin’s price to the airing of the documentary.
At this moment, there does not seem to be any Bitcoin expert who truly believes that Satoshi Nakamoto could be Peter Todd.
The fact is that the real Satoshi is estimated to own more than a million BTC, so if he decided to sell them, he could sink the price of Bitcoin.
However, not only did Satoshi completely and definitively disappear in 2011, but none of his BTC has ever been moved. All the BTC believed to belong to Satoshi were mined by him and collected between 2009 and 2010, when Bitcoin practically had no value because it was not yet publicly and freely exchangeable in fiat currency.
The most likely hypothesis, which is also the one that the market has probably already priced in for some time, is that in reality the true Satoshi has died without leaving anyone the private keys to be able to move his BTC.
The markets consider those 1.1 million BTC of Satoshi as definitively lost, so much so that they have no fear of them being sold. However, this also means that if any of those BTC were ever to be moved, panic could immediately spread in the crypto market.
Peter Todd does not seem to have even remotely the power to impact in this way on the price of BTC, and this perhaps is the most overwhelming proof that he is not Satoshi.
