Crypto Market Misses Satoshi Nakamoto

Source: Carbon Chain Value

Since the release of the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto has successfully hidden his true identity.

In the past 15 years, the entire network has been constantly asking who is Satoshi Nakamoto, while Bitcoin has been constantly creating historical highs. As of now, Bitcoin has become an alternative compliant asset worth $1.2 trillion.

On October 9, Forbes reported that if the man, woman or team called Satoshi Nakamoto still controls the 1.1 million bitcoins in a series of wallet addresses they hold, then his/her wealth will be close to $70 billion.

Now, HBO documentary producer Cullen Hoback pointed out that Peter Todd, a Bitcoin core developer who has been involved in Bitcoin research since 2010, is the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto in the real world. But Peter Todd himself personally denied on social media that he is not Satoshi Nakamoto.

According to Fortune magazine, at present, there is no conclusive evidence that Peter Todd is not Satoshi Nakamoto (although one will soon appear). But it is worth noting that Todd's name has never appeared on the candidate list of cryptocurrency insiders, and Hoback, as a newcomer to the field, could not have discovered the inventor of Bitcoin so easily.

Although Hoback's major revelation ultimately failed, "Money Electric" is still very worth watching. The filmmaker tells the story of cryptocurrency with superb skills - a phenomenon that exists almost entirely on the Internet - while cleverly using enough graphics to convey the timeline and technical parts.

For cryptocurrency novices, "Money Electric" tells a fascinating story that explains Bitcoin in a fair and accurate way. For long-term cryptocurrency enthusiasts, this documentary provides many familiar faces and sympathy for their culture - while also providing another legend that will become the subject of memes in the next few years.

The following is the original report of Fortune, which is very well written. For readers' reference.

In early 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto brought Bitcoin to the world. His invention sparked a global revolt against banks and governments, and Bitcoin’s value soared to more than $1 trillion, equal to the market capitalizations of Tesla and JPMorgan Chase combined. Satoshi also left us with a mystery. Who was this mysterious man who disappeared into the mists of the internet? And where did his vast Bitcoin fortune go?

The hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto has been going on for more than a decade. There have been many hilarious missteps, including Newsweek’s infamous 2014 cover story that claimed that Nakamoto had been found hiding in plain sight in Los Angeles. The discovery was completely wrong—Newsweek had found a confused old man whose last name just happened to be Satoshi Nakamoto—but the incident became another episode in the Bitcoin saga. It’s also a classic example of the dangers of confirmation bias.

Now it’s the turn of Cullen Hoback, whose new documentary Money Electric claims to demystify Satoshi Nakamoto once and for all. The documentary will premiere at 9 p.m. PT on HBO, the same channel that in 2021 released Hoback’s Q: Inside the Story, which took an up-close look at the Q-Anon conspiracy and credibly pinpointed the people behind it.

Hobak’s confident trailer (Money Electric declares that “the internet’s greatest mystery” will be revealed) is, by and large, a good documentary. It avoids the pitfalls of most other cryptocurrency movies. Money Electric is not a fan movie made by groupies to promote a token. Nor does it disparage and ridicule the cryptocurrency industry without trying to understand it—a common practice among self-proclaimed sophisticated critics.

Instead, Hoback depicts a group of long-time Bitcoin advocates on their own terms: they are the stewards of Satoshi’s gift, which brought to the earth a form of money that is not controlled by meddling, profligate governments. The villains, in this light, are JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—the Bitcoin-hating banker who appears at the beginning and end of Money Electric—and progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has allied herself with Wall Street against cryptocurrency.

The protagonists in Money Electric, meanwhile, are the co-founders of Blockstream, a private company that has been involved in the creation of a private company that has been involved in the creation of a private company. There’s also Blockstream founder Adam Back, who’s known for creating Bitcoin’s predecessor, Hash Cash. We also meet characters like Peter Todd, a follower of Back’s and a core Bitcoin developer, and Roger “Bitcoin Jesus” Ver, another influential early cryptocurrency figure who’s currently facing tax evasion charges. There are also cameos from notable figures in the business world, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who renamed his other company from Square to Bitcoin. Block, to express his dedication to the cryptocurrency.

The documentary’s interviews with a slew of Bitcoin veterans give it authority, as does its succinct treatment of major events in the cryptocurrency’s development. These include the so-called block size dispute sparked by Bitcoin’s architecture, the rise of Ethereum and altcoins (which critics call “shitcoins”), and recent actions by the U.S. government to hinder the industry.

Satoshi Unveiled

Money Electric also stands out from other cryptocurrency movies because of its huge production budget—Hobback shot scenes in Malta, Canada, El Salvador, and many other places—and the director’s all-out claim to have found Satoshi. Unfortunately, his bet was almost certainly wrong.

Hobback’s quest to find Satoshi Nakamoto started in the right direction. He identified the most prominent figures in a network of “cypherpunks” who shared a passion for privacy and cryptography and corresponded through a now-famous email list of the same name. It was on this mailing list, as well as an online forum called BitcoinTalk, that Nakamoto shared his vision for Bitcoin, in addition to his famous white paper.

At the beginning of the documentary, Hoback shows photos of the cypherpunks most closely associated with Bitcoin, who are the most likely candidates to be Satoshi Nakamoto. They are Back, the founder of Blockstream and Hash Cash, and other familiar names to Bitcoin veterans: Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and Wei Dai.

Hobback briefly and absentmindedly assesses the candidates for Nakamoto before turning to Craig Wright, an Australian scammer who entered the cryptocurrency space in 2016 and forged evidence claiming that he invented Bitcoin. Fortunately, the filmmaker doesn't fall for it and moves on to other candidates. As Money Electric progresses, it focuses first on Back as a possible Satoshi, and then on Back’s Blockstream protégé and friend Peter Todd.

Todd is much younger than the other characters long considered possible candidates, and would have been only 19 or 20 years old when Satoshi released the Bitcoin white paper. To prove that Todd was Satoshi, Hoback seized on a 2013 email exchange between him and an unknown figure named John Dillon regarding a technical upgrade for Bitcoin.

The emails were leaked in 2016 and caused a minor stir in crypto circles, as people believed Dillon was a U.S. intelligence agent who paid Todd to infiltrate the Bitcoin network. However, Hoback makes a plausible argument in the film that Todd and Dillon are the same person—and that Todd orchestrated the entire controversy to push for the upgrade.

Hobak sees this as an epiphanic moment, and uses it to seize on the publicly available transcript of exchanges between Satoshi and Todd—where Todd appears to be correcting the Bitcoin inventor—as evidence that the latter must be Satoshi. In other words, Todd has once again pulled the stunt of replying to his own anonymous message. To support this claim, Hobak points out that Satoshi’s last communication appeared three days after the exchange, and that Canadian Todd’s writings contain British-style spellings—such as colour and cheque—that also appear in the Bitcoin inventor’s texts.

In the film’s climax, Hobak interviews Buck and Todd in a dilapidated castle in the Czech Republic (why they’re there is unclear), and lays out his theory directly to them. Todd never explicitly denies being Satoshi, but instead equivocates, seemingly gently teasing the filmmaker.

Who is Satoshi?

Based on all of this, Hoback and HBO have been hyping Money Electric as a blockbuster reveal of Satoshi Nakamoto, finally revealing him after all these years. Oops. They should have remembered the lessons of Newsweek and the dangers of confirmation bias — the all-too-common practice of interpreting new information to confirm existing beliefs and rejecting information that contradicts them.

At this point, there is no definitive proof that Peter Todd is not Satoshi Nakamoto (although one will soon emerge). But it is worth noting that Todd’s name never appeared on a short list of cryptocurrency insiders, and Hoback, a relative newcomer to the field, could not have so easily discovered the inventor of Bitcoin. Someone who had just graduated from high school and had yet to publish any notable publications could not have both written a document as complex as the Bitcoin white paper and expertly implemented its contents. In the end, it is hard to imagine that Satoshi Nakamoto — who has actively avoided public appearances — would choose to participate in an HBO documentary exploring who created Bitcoin. When Todd tells Hoback in the documentary that “we’re all Satoshi,” the documentary makers should have simply realized that this was a familiar mantra among Bitcoin enthusiasts and left it at that.

Hobback’s biggest mistake, though, wasn’t his decision to focus on Todd, but rather his ignoring a more compelling theory about Satoshi’s identity — one that also fits Occam’s razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually correct.

The documentary starts out by highlighting the original cypherpunks, which is the right direction to go in the search for Satoshi, especially the investigation of a man named Nick Szabo. Hoback introduces him as a potential suspect, but then dismisses him without basis. He ignores not only long-standing rumors within the Bitcoin community, but also a wealth of hard evidence.

That evidence includes the work of Nathaniel Popper, a former New York Times reporter and author of Digital Gold, a close look at the early Bitcoin scene that comes closer to the cryptocurrency’s origin story. Popper’s reporting (including this 2015 article) pointed clearly to Szabo, and was supplemented by an academic study that performed a regression analysis comparing Satoshi’s writing to that of the potential inventor of Bitcoin. The study found a striking match between Satoshi and Szabo, who also used British spelling. If you like circumstantial evidence, there’s also the fact that Nick Szabo’s initials, NS, are the reverse of SN.

While Hoback’s big reveal ultimately failed, Money Electric is still well worth a watch. The filmmaker tells the story of cryptocurrency — a phenomenon that exists almost entirely online — with masterful craft, while deftly utilizing just enough graphics to convey the timeline and technical parts.

For crypto newbies, Money Electric tells a fascinating story that explains Bitcoin in a fair and accurate way. For longtime crypto enthusiasts, the documentary offers a host of familiar faces and a sympathetic look at their culture — while also providing another legend that will become the subject of memes for years to come.