Who is Peter Todd, who has been named by HBO as Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin?
Satoshi Nakamoto—Bitcoin's mysterious, anonymous creator—has successfully kept his true identity a secret since publishing the Bitcoin white paper in 2008.
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Bitcoin has grown to a $1.2 trillion fortune over the past 15 years (though one Wall Street giant predicts it could be much more) — worth about $70 billion to the man, woman or group known only as Satoshi Nakamoto if they could still control it. 1.1 million bitcoins they are believed to hold across a series of wallet addresses.
Now, HBO documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback has named Peter Todd, a Bitcoin Core developer who has been involved with Bitcoin since 2010, who he believes is the real-world identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.
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Satoshi Nakamoto's Mystery Has Gripped the Bitcoin World for the Last 15 Years as Bitcoin … [+]
“If the real reason for using the name Satoshi, is for anonymity, so that people can take Bitcoin seriously, so that they can believe that it was created. [a famous cryptographer] And some kids aren't even in school yet,” Hoback said during the Money Electric: Bitcoin Mystery documentary on HBO before pitching his theory directly to Todd — who's in his early 20s and graduated with a fine arts degree in 2008, the year Satoshi Nakamoto published The Bitcoin White Paper.
“I think that's probably what happened,” Hoback said, speaking on camera with Todd and Adam Back, CEOs of bitcoin development company Blockstream.
“I think 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 do replacement-by-fee, an idea that you envisioned a few years ago but needed some kind of cover to create, and post 2010 you needed some cover as well,” Hoback told Todd. , referring to Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 125 introduced by Todd in 2015 and Satoshi Nakamoto's reply to a 2010 BitcoinTalk post that Hoback believes was mistakenly posted using Todd's profile.
Hoback's theory rests on a chat log message written by Todd in which he claims to be “the world's leading expert on how to sacrifice your bitcoins… I made one such sacrifice and I did it by hand,” Todd wrote.
Hoback characterized the message as Todd's “admission” that he had lost access to 1.1 million bitcoins believed to be held by Satoshi Nakamoto, which Todd denied.
“It's ridiculous,” Todd told Hoback, dissing John Dillon. “When you put it in a documentary and a bunch of bitcoiners watch it, it's going to be very funny.”
Before the documentary aired, leaked clips appeared online, making the rounds on social media site X.
in a statement coindeskTodd denied that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, saying Hoback was “grasping at straws.”
Who is Peter Todd?
Todd is a Canadian who began contributing code to Bitcoin in 2012 and describes himself as a “cryptochronomancer” at X.
During Bitcoin's so-called blocksize war, which ran from August 2015 to November 2017, Todd sided with “smaller blockers” — along with Adam Back and Blockstream — who wanted to “put a 1MB limit on Bitcoin, arguing against big blockers” who were cheaper and faster. Wanted to increase the block size to enable transactions
Small blockers won, who chose to “fork” from Bitcoin by increasing the block size, creating the Bitcoin Cash cryptocurrency.
Todd is the founder of OpenTimestamps, an open-source project designed to provide a standard format for blockchain timestamping.
He worked on so-called “Bitcoin 2.0” projects, including Counterparty, MasterCoin and Colored Coin, and was involved in launching the privacy currency ZCash in 2016 with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – publicly destroying the computer he used to create the cryptocurrency.
In 2019, Todd was accused of sexual misconduct by privacy-tech expert Isis Lovecraft, the developer of the Tor identity-masking Onion browser, settling her defamation lawsuit filed in response to the allegations in 2020.
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