Bitcoin creator is Peter Todd, HBO film says
The admission, however, is not necessarily a smoking gun. Todd, who is a vocal backer of Ukraine and
Israel on his X feed, is known to invoke the claim “I am Satoshi” as an expression of solidarity with
the creator’s bid for privacy. In an email to CoinDesk prior to the documentary's release, Todd
reportedly denied he was the bitcoin creator: "Of course I'm not Satoshi," he said.
If Todd is widely accepted as bitcoin's creator, the revelation would end more than a decade of
speculation over the identity of a person whose work spawned a global, multibillion-dollar craze for
digital currencies: a mania that has pushed back the frontiers of finance but also enabled widespread
fraud and other illicit activities.
Todd is not unknown to enthusiasts of the stateless money system. As a longstanding bitcoin core
developer known for communicating publicly with “Satoshi” before his disappearance from crypto forums in
2010, his name has always carried weight in the community. But he was rarely considered a prime suspect.
A 39-year-old graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Todd would have been 23 when the
famous bitcoin white paper that first laid out the vision for the decentralized money system was being
completed.
Todd previously told a podcast he was about 15 years old when he first started communicating with key
crypto influencers, known as the cypherpunks.
“In investigations like these, digital forensics can only take you so far; they’re like a compass,”
Hoback told POLITICO before the documentary aired. “Real answers can only be found offline.”
“Todd’s game theory is next level,” Hoback said. “Just consider, in the run-up to release: he’s in the
trailer, there’s a multi-million dollar betting pool, hundreds of thousands of tweets about the film and
I didn’t see anyone suggest this possibility. He’s a fucking genius.”
The naming of Todd will be a blow to crypto-based prediction markets, which had until Monday identified
the late Len Sassaman, an American information privacy advocate, as the favorite.
