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 id hidden since they revealed bitcoin’s white paper in 2008.

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Bitcoin has change into a $1.2 trillion asset (although one Wall Road big has predicted it may very well be about to go far greater) during the last 15 years—making the person, lady or group identified solely as Satoshi Nakamoto value virtually $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 id of Satoshi Nakamoto.

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“What if the actual cause for utilizing the identify Satoshi, for the anonymity, was so that individuals might take bitcoin critically, so they might imagine it was created by [a famous cryptographer] and never some child nonetheless at school,” Hoback stated in the course of 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 positive arts diploma in 2008, the 12 months Satoshi Nakamoto revealed the bitcoin white paper.

“This is what I feel occurred, presumably,” Hoback stated, talking on digital camera to Todd and Adam Again, the chief govt of bitcoin growth firm Blockstream that Todd has labored with because the 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 sort of cowl with a purpose to make, and also you additionally wanted some cowl for the 2010 publish,” Hoback instructed Todd, referring to the Bitcoin Enchancment Proposal 125 launched by Todd in 2015 and a 2010 BitcoinTalk publish replying to Satoshi Nakamoto that Hoback believes was by accident posted utilizing Todd’s profile.

Hoback’s concept depends on a chat log message written by Todd wherein he claims to be the “world’s main knowledgeable on methods to sacrifice your bitcoins … I’ve finished one such sacrifice and I did it by hand,” Todd wrote.

Hoback characterised the message as an “admission” by Todd that he destroyed his skill 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 needed to maintain bitcoin’s 1 megabyte restrict, arguing in opposition to the “massive blockers” who needed to extend the block measurement to allow cheaper and quicker transactions.

The small blockers gained, 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 offer an ordinary 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 knowledgeable 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.