Who Is Peter Todd, The Man Named By HBO As Bitcoin’s Mystery Creator Satoshi Nakamoto?

Satoshi Nakamoto—the mysterious, nameless creator of bitcoin—has efficiently stored their actual identification hidden since they revealed bitcoin’s white paper in 2008.

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Bitcoin has develop into a $1.2 trillion asset (although one Wall Avenue big has predicted it could possibly be about to go far greater) during the last 15 years—making the person, girl or group recognized solely as Satoshi Nakamoto value nearly $70 billion in the event that they nonetheless management the 1.1 million bitcoins they’re believed to carry throughout a sequence of pockets addresses.

Now, HBO documentary movie maker Cullen Hoback has named Peter Todd, a bitcoin core developer who has been concerned with bitcoin since 2010, as who he believes to be the real-world identification of Satoshi Nakamoto.

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“What if the true purpose for utilizing the title Satoshi, for the anonymity, was so that folks might take bitcoin significantly, so they may imagine it was created by [a famous cryptographer] and never some child nonetheless in class,” Hoback mentioned through the Cash Electrical: The Bitcoin Thriller documentary on HBO earlier than placing his concept on to Todd—who was in his early 20s and ending a advantageous arts diploma in 2008, the yr Satoshi Nakamoto revealed the bitcoin white paper.

“Here is what I feel occurred, probably,” Hoback mentioned, talking on digicam to Todd and Adam Again, the chief govt of bitcoin growth firm Blockstream that Todd has labored with for the reason that earliest days of bitcoin.

“I feel that John Dillon [an anonymous BitcoinTalk contributor that some believe to have been linked to the intelligence community] was created so you’d have an excuse to make replace-by-fee, an idea you had envisioned years earlier however wanted some type of cowl with the intention to make, and also you additionally wanted some cowl for the 2010 put up,” Hoback instructed Todd, referring to the Bitcoin Enchancment Proposal 125 launched by Todd in 2015 and a 2010 BitcoinTalk put up replying to Satoshi Nakamoto that Hoback believes was by chance posted utilizing Todd’s profile.

Hoback’s concept depends on a chat log message written by Todd through which he claims to be the “world’s main skilled on the right way to sacrifice your bitcoins … I’ve performed one such sacrifice and I did it by hand,” Todd wrote.

Hoback characterised the message as an “admission” by Todd that he destroyed his capability to entry the 1.1 million bitcoin believed to be held by Satoshi Nakamoto, one thing Todd denies.

“It is ludicrous,” Todd instructed Hoback, additionally denying he is John Dillon. “That is going to be very humorous whenever you put this into the documentary and a bunch of bitcoiners watch it.”

Forward of the documentary airing, leaked clips appeared on-line, spreading on the social media website X.

In a press release to Coindesk, Todd denied he is Satoshi Nakamoto, saying Hoback is “greedy at straws.”

Who Is Peter Todd?

Todd is a Canadian who began contributing to bitcoin’s code in 2012 and describes himself as a “cryptochronomancer” on X.

Throughout bitcoin’s so-called blocksize struggle, waged from August 2015 to November 2017, Todd was on the facet of the “small blockers”—together with Adam Again and Blockstream—who wished to maintain bitcoin’s 1 megabyte restrict, arguing towards the “massive blockers” who wished to extend the block dimension to allow cheaper and sooner transactions.

The small blockers received, forcing those that had opted to extend the blocksize to “fork” from bitcoin, creating the bitcoin money cryptocurrency.

Todd is the founding father of OpenTimestamps, an open-source mission designed to supply a typical format for blockchain timestamping.

He has labored on so-called “bitcoin 2.0” initiatives, together with Counterparty, Mastercoin and Coloured Cash and was concerned within the launch of privateness coin zcash in 2016 alongside NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden—publicly destroying the pc he used to create the cryptocurrency.

In 2019, Todd was accused of sexual misconduct by privacy-tech skilled Isis Lovecruft, a developer of the Tor identity-masking onion browser, settling his defamation go well with filed in response to the allegation in 2020.