Who is Peter Todd, identified by HBO as Satoshi Nakamoto?

Author: Stephen Katte, CoinTelegraph; Translator: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

HBO's documentary "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery" identifies Peter Todd as Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin.

The 39-year-old Canadian is known for his long-term contributions as a Bitcoin core developer, consultant, and other crypto and blockchain software developer.

Despite this, Todd denied being Satoshi Nakamoto both before and after the premiere of the documentary, and bluntly posted on X: "I am not Satoshi Nakamoto."

BitMEX Research said in an X post on October 8 that some of the evidence presented in the documentary pointing to Todd being Satoshi Nakamoto is "obviously ridiculous" and there is "no reason" to believe it.

Source: BitMEX Research

He was one of the few people who publicly communicated with Satoshi Nakamoto about the Bitcoin code and functionality before Satoshi disappeared in 2011. These exchanges formed some of the so-called evidence presented by documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback that Todd might be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Todd was about 23 years old when Satoshi Nakamoto first published the Bitcoin white paper, which outlined a vision for a decentralized peer-to-peer payment system.

In a 2019 podcast, Todd said he began communicating with early Bitcoin contributor Hal Finney and Hashcash inventor Adam Back when he was about 15 years old.

Todd has been a Bitcoin Core developer at Bitcoin platform Coinkite since July 2014 and a board advisor to digital collectibles platform Verisart since 2015.

In 2001, he worked as a Linux system support and services developer at Starnix for three months and held various other short-term positions between 2007 and 2008.

The same year the Bitcoin white paper was released, Todd began working as an electronics designer at Gedex Inc.

Since 2014, he has held senior positions in the crypto industry, including Chief Scientist of Mastercoin, a digital currency and communications protocol based on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Todd is also the Chief Scientist of the open-source Bitcoin wallet Dark Wallet, a position he has also held since 2014.

In 2016, he participated in the trusted setup ceremony for Zcash, helping to set up the cryptographic keys used to protect the wallet and blockchain protocol. He later called his participation "pointless" because he believed that "Zcash trusted setup should not be called multi-party computation."

In 2019, cryptographer Isis Lovecruft accused Todd of sexually assaulting her, an allegation he denied and filed a defamation lawsuit against Lovecruft that same year.

The case was settled in 2020 and the lawsuit was dropped without monetary damages, but Lovecruft issued a statement clarifying that Todd never sexually assaulted her.