Who Is the Person HBO Identified as Satoshi Nakamoto?

The 39-year-old Canadian is known for his long-standing contributions as a core developer, advisor, and programmer to various cryptocurrency and blockchain projects.

Peter Todd Denies

Despite this, Todd has consistently denied being Nakamoto, both before and after the documentary aired. He flatly stated on X: “I am not Satoshi.”

On October 8, BitMEX Research posted on X that some of the evidence in the documentary suggesting Todd is Nakamoto is “completely absurd” and there is “no basis” to believe it.

Todd was one of the few people who publicly communicated with Nakamoto about Bitcoin’s source code and features before Nakamoto disappeared in 2011. These conversations were used by director Cullen Hoback as part of the evidence to suggest that Todd might be Nakamoto.

Who is Peter Todd?

When Satoshi Nakamoto first published the Bitcoin white paper, outlining his vision for a decentralized peer-to-peer payment system, Peter Todd was around 23 years old.

In a 2019 podcast, Todd revealed that he began communicating with Hal Finney, one of the first contributors to Bitcoin, and Adam Back, the inventor of Hashcash, when he was around 15.

Since July 2014, Todd has served as a Bitcoin Core Developer at the Bitcoin platform Coinkite, and has been a board advisor at the digital collectibles platform Verisart since 2015.

Previously, in 2001, Todd worked at Starnix as a Linux system support and services developer for three months, and then in various short-term roles from 2007 to 2008.

At the same time that Bitcoin was introduced, Todd began working at Gedex Inc. as an Electronics Designer.

Since 2014, he has held key positions in the cryptocurrency space, including Chief Scientist at Mastercoin, a digital currency and communications protocol built on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Peter Todd has also been the Chief Scientist at Dark Wallet, an open-source Bitcoin wallet, since 2014. In 2016, he participated in the Zcash trusted setup, helping to create the cryptographic keys that secure the wallet and blockchain protocol. However, Todd later said that his involvement was “pointless” because he did not believe that the Zcash trusted setup was truly a multi-party computation system. In 2019, cryptographer Isis Lovecruft accused Todd of sexually assaulting her. Todd denied the accusation and sued Lovecruft for defamation the same year. The lawsuit was settled in 2020, with both parties agreeing to drop the lawsuit without any damages. Lovecruft also issued a statement clarifying that Todd had never sexually assaulted her.