The true identity of Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto has been one of the cryptocurrency world’s enduring mysteries
A statue in honor of Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto in Budapest, Hungary. © Janos Kummer/Getty Images
A Canadian software designer has denied that he’s the creator of Bitcoin following the release of a documentary claiming to have solved the mystery surrounding the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.
‘Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery’, released on Tuesday on US television network HBO, claims that Peter Todd, a Toronto-based contributor to the digital currency’s core programming, is in fact Satoshi Nakamato, the person who founded Bitcoin in 2009. Satoshi stopped posting online and largely disappeared from public life in 2011.
The 39-year-old Canadian, who was involved in developing Bitcoin during its early years, has since denied the claim.
“I’m not Satoshi,” Todd wrote in an email to Time magazine. “I discovered Bitcoin first from reading the white paper, as I’ve said publicly many times,” he added.
The 100-minute documentary presents largely circumstantial evidence, including the use of British-Canadian English in forum posts by Satoshi.
Filmmaker Cullen Hoback has said he’s “very, very confident” that Todd is Satoshi, Time reported. “When I put together a list of why and why not it might be him, the ‘might not be him’ list was very short,” he said.
The publication also quoted four other early ‘Bitcoiners’ as having expressed skepticism about whether Todd actually had the coding ability needed to create the world’s most prominent cryptocurrency token.
The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym for the author of a white paper titled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ in 2008, remains a mystery. Various theories have emerged but to date nobody knows who Nakamoto is.
In 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed that hyper-secretive cryptocurrency expert Nick Szabo might be the creator of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.
One of the most celebrated candidates was a 75-year-old Japanese-American computer engineer named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2014, he became the subject of an extensive Newsweek magazine report, which claimed to identify Bitcoin’s inventor. The man, however, has denied any involvement in cryptocurrency.
The mystery surrounding the identity of Bitcoin’s creator has been described as a contributing factor to the token’s popularity. According to Austin Campbell, professor at Columbia Business School, “The fact that Bitcoin was kind of put out there and then Satoshi vanished is integral to its success.”
If Satoshi were identified, he could risk being arrested for tax evasion, violation of financial and other regulations, given the prosecution of high-profile crypto figures such as Changpeng Zhao. The founder of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance was sentenced to four months in prison in April after pleading guilty to violating money-laundering laws.
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Analysts have warned that if Satoshi’s identity were revealed, he could sell his holdings of over a million Bitcoin and drive the price of the token to the floor from its current level of $57,766.