Uncovering Satoshi Nakamoto: HBO Played a $68 Billion Joke

One hour ago, the top American streaming media HBO finally released a documentary about the founder of Bitcoin. In the trailer that whetted the appetite of all cryptocurrency traders, HBO claimed that this film will reveal who Satoshi Nakamoto is.

In the past, people just talked about Satoshi Nakamoto online, but this time it was different. People started to bet money.

As the director of the documentary, Hoback, said, the bets on Who is Satoshi Nakamoto have made the topic even hotter, and the betting pool on Polymarket has accumulated to 20 million US dollars. Hoback sits in front of the computer, constantly refreshing the betting pool manually, watching the bets in the pool increase. Although he promises that he will not participate in the betting to earn money, this documentary has undoubtedly increased his fame in the film industry.

It is said that in order to prevent the information from being leaked in advance, Hoback did a lot of confidentiality in the process of making the documentary. All interviews were conducted in different locations, and the interviewees could only preview the parts related to themselves. In addition, the editing of the film was scattered among multiple editing companies, and no one company had complete information about the film.

Who is the founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto? This has been a mystery for more than a decade since the birth of Bitcoin. More than a decade later, HBO gave its own answer, and they believe that the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd.

Regardless of whether you know this name or not, you can tell from the odds how abstract the answer is. Even in the options betting of Polymarket, there is Musks name, but not Peter Todds name.

Simply put, HBO played a big joke and a big meme.

Who is Peter Todd

We still have to look at why HBO believes that this big brother is Satoshi Nakamoto.

In the HBO documentary, director Hoback identified Peter Todd as Satoshi Nakamoto, a person who had never been suspected.

Peter Todd, source: HBO

Peter Todd is an early Bitcoin Core developer and cryptography consultant who lives in Canada and first submitted code to Bitcoin Core in April 2012. He has been involved in Bitcoin since its early stages of development, making important contributions in the areas of security and privacy. Todd is widely known for promoting several key Bitcoin Improvement Proposals and advocating for improving the robustness and security of the Bitcoin network.

Peters career began in 2008 when he started working as an electronics designer at Gedex Inc. After graduating from OCAD University with a Bachelor of Arts in Integrated Media in 2011, he has been working on the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. Not just Bitcoin, he has been involved in multiple projects in the cryptocurrency industry over the years, including Mastercoin, Dark Wallet, and Chief Scientist at Coinkite. In development, Todd is a security-focused developer, often highlighting potential vulnerabilities and working on solutions to reduce risks.

Todd is also an active member of the community, often sharing his insights on Twitter and has a large number of followers. His tweets cover a range of topics, including new cryptocurrency developments, industry news and events. Todd also often appears at many Bitcoin conferences and events, and many people who have heard his speeches think that Todd is an excellent speaker and host.

But the answer given by director Hoback obviously fooled everyone. In his rigorous deduction process, the most critical evidence and conclusion he could come up with was: in this conversation, Satoshi Nakamoto switched to the wrong account and used the account of Peter Todd to reply to everyone.

But in fact, this does not prove that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. As netizens in the community said and Peter Todd clarified, Todd was only correcting or clarifying Satoshi Nakamotos post at the time, not switching to the wrong account. Such deduction obviously lacks sufficient evidence.

Some professionals also pointed out that HBO got Peter Todds timeline wrong throughout the documentary, and therefore mistakenly believed that he was Satoshi Nakamoto. In fact, Peter Todd was not yet 16 years old in 2008, and his age was very inconsistent. His life and experience were also very different from the Satoshi Nakamoto we all know. Moreover, Todd has long served as a consultant for many projects. If he is really Satoshi Nakamoto, his Bitcoin wallet would not have remained completely untouched for so many years.

Peter Todd himself was also extremely dissatisfied with this and publicly denied that he was Satoshi Nakamoto. He repeatedly stated on social media that Hoback’s theory was ridiculous.

Peter Todd even sarcastically tweeted: A director famous for filming QAnon documentaries also adopted QAnon-style conspiracy theory thinking here.

Currently, most community users are blaming HBO and Hoback, because Hobacks attitude seems very casual and shows disrespect for Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, and encryption. Peter Todd is Hobacks lifeline. Because he didnt know who Satoshi Nakamoto was, so he just randomly pointed out a name.

Some more thoughtful community members said that Peter Todd might face life-threatening situations because of Hobacks casualness. After all, Hoback has a great influence in the film industry, and ordinary people are not able to discern the truth. They might go looking for trouble with Peter Todd because everyone knows that it is worth $68 billion.

No one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and that’s a good thing

Lets go back to September 2008, when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt not long ago. In order to cope with the crisis, the US Treasury launched an unprecedented large-scale bailout, and the Federal Reserve released a large amount of money in an attempt to stimulate the US economy by overissuing currency. Not only the United States, but the whole world also suffered. The US dollars in the hands of various countries shrank significantly, causing a series of butterfly effects such as increased exchange rate fluctuations and stock market stampede-like collapse; in an instant, the global economy was deeply mired in the quagmire of recession and could not extricate itself.

Three months after Lehman went bankrupt, a paper signed by Satoshi Nakamoto was published on the Internet. Its title was Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. The paper described in detail how to use a peer-to-peer network to create an electronic transaction system that does not rely on trust. Bitcoin was born.

To date, Bitcoin has gone through nearly 16 years, from the initial trading price of $0.0008 to the current $62,000, with a total market value of $1.3 trillion. Bitcoin has gradually appreciated by more than 77.5 million times.

The mysterious founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is said to own about 1.1 million Bitcoins , or $68 billion, which is the most unresolved asset in the cryptocurrency world. In the past few years, the discussion about who Satoshi Nakamoto is has never stopped.

I think the most abstract thing is, I don’t know if you still remember the phrase “not your key, not your coin”. When everyone opposed CSW claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, they just asked him to use Satoshi’s wallet to transfer money. As long as you can transfer money, it is 100% certain no matter how impossible it is. But this documentary doesn’t care about these.

Just like all the top suspense films, Satoshi Nakamoto is always an unknown answer, which is the best solution. Maybe it is him, maybe it is her, maybe it is them, maybe it is everyone. Maybe we have guessed the answer, or maybe we are still not close to the answer. However, it is this mystery that gives Bitcoin a unique vitality.

Satoshi Nakamotos anonymity is not only a mysterious attraction, but also symbolizes the decentralized spirit of Bitcoin. This decentralized concept does not rely on any single authority or individual, but distributes power to every participant. It is precisely because Satoshi Nakamoto never exposed himself that Bitcoin has been able to maintain its purity and avoid personality cult and human intervention. Satoshi Nakamotos retreat has allowed Bitcoin to transcend personal will from the beginning and become part of the global consensus.

Perhaps, the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is not important. What is really important is the concept behind Bitcoin and the changes it has brought to the world. It provides a new financial model, breaks the monopoly of the traditional banking system, and gives individuals more control and freedom.

No one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and this may be the best outcome. The power of Bitcoin does not lie in one person, but in everyone. Each of us is Satoshi Nakamoto, and we are all part of this decentralized revolution and historic experiment. Perhaps we never need to know who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Bitcoin has grown from an idea to the global phenomenon it is today because it represents much more than a name or an individual. It symbolizes the desire of countless people for financial freedom and privacy, and the power of technology to change the world.

We are all Satoshi.