< strong>A new HBO documentary identifies Canadian developer Peter Todd as the "father of Bitcoin" Satoshi Nakamoto - the anonymous founder of cryptocurrency. Award-winning director Cullen Hoback wrote the film, which comes to a conclusion by uncovering clues old and new, Politico reports.
The film, titled "Electrified Money: The Bitcoin Mystery", brings together Todd and Blockstream founder Adam Beck, who is another suspect to be Satoshi, presenting various hypotheses and evidence.
Who really is Satoshi Nakamoto?
"You seem to have had some deep insights into Bitcoin at the time?", the director tells Todd in the film's finale.
"Well, yes, I'm Satoshi Nakamoto,", Todd replies.
Confession, however, is not necessarily proof of truth. Todd, who vocally supports Ukraine and Israel on his channel on the X platform, can refer to the statement "I am Satoshi" as an expression of solidarity with the cryptocurrency creator's proposal for privacy.
In an email to CoinDesk before the release of the documentary, Todd initially denied being the creator of Bitcoin.
"Of course I am not Satoshi," he said then.
If Todd is widely accepted as the creator of Bitcoin, the revelation will end more than a decade of speculation about the identity of a man whose work sparked a global multibillion dollar craze for digital currencies, a craze that has reshaped the boundaries of finance but also thus enabling widespread fraud and other illegal activities.
Todd is no stranger to stateless money enthusiasts. As a long-time developer of the so-called Bitcoin Core, known for publicly communicating with Satoshi before his disappearance from crypto forums in 2010, his name has always carried weight in the crypto community. But he is rarely considered a prime suspect.
"He is one of the most important Bitcoin traders from a technical perspective," says Castle Island Ventures founding partner Nick Carter, adding that he has known Todd since 2017.
"In general, people consider his views on Bitcoin very important."
A 39-year-old graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Todd was 23 years old when the famous "Bitcoin White Paper" first laid out the vision of the decentralized monetary system was completed. As a matter of fact, in a podcast that is popular beyond recognition, Todd recently stated that he was about 15 years old when he first started communicating with key crypto influencers known as cypherpunks.
"In investigations like these, digital forensics can only take you so far. The real answers can only be found offline," Hoback says.
Suspicion that Canadian Peter Todd is the creator of Bitcoin is another blow to crypto-based prediction markets, which until Monday pegged the late Len Sassaman, an American privacy advocate, as the favorite.
Against this backdrop, Jameson Lopp, who co-founded Bitcoin company Casa, posted on X that "wherever Satoshi is, I like to think he's laughing at all these other stupid claims.
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Source: money.bg