Bitcoin Creator Is Peter Todd, HBO Film Says

A new HBO documentary claims Canadian developer Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder of bitcoin. The documentary's director, Emmy-nominated filmmaker Cullen Hoback, 'comes to the conclusion by stitching together old clues and new ones,' reports Politico. In the film's finale, Hoback confronted Todd and said: 'It seems like you had these deep insights into bitcoin at the time?' Todd replies: 'Well, yeah, I'm Satoshi Nakamoto.' From the report: The admission, however, is not necessarily a smoking gun. Todd, who is a vocal backer of Ukraine and Israel on his X feed, is known to invoke the claim 'I am Satoshi' as an expression of solidarity with the creator's bid for privacy. In an email to CoinDesk prior to the documentary's release, Todd reportedly denied he was the bitcoin creator: 'Of course I'm not Satoshi,' he said. If Todd is widely accepted as bitcoin's creator, the revelation would end more than a decade of speculation over the identity of a person whose work spawned a global, multibillion-dollar craze for digital currencies: a mania that has pushed back the frontiers of finance but also enabled widespread fraud and other illicit activities.

Todd is not unknown to enthusiasts of the stateless money system. As a longstanding bitcoin core developer known for communicating publicly with 'Satoshi' before his disappearance from crypto forums in 2010, his name has always carried weight in the community. But he was rarely considered a prime suspect. A 39-year-old graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Todd would have been 23 when the famous bitcoin white paper that first laid out the vision for the decentralized money system was being completed. Todd previously told a podcast he was about 15 years old when he first started communicating with key crypto influencers, known as the cypherpunks. 'In investigations like these, digital forensics can only take you so far; they're like a compass,' Hoback told POLITICO before the documentary aired. 'Real answers can only be found offline.'

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