Cullen Hoback likes a good conspiracy. He’s the guy who tried to unmask QAnon, so it made sense that he’d eventually set his sights on the biggest "Who Is It?" in the history of the internet. That’s exactly what he did with the HBO documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery.
Satoshi Nakamoto. The name carries a weight that is honestly hard to describe if you aren't deep in the crypto weeds. We're talking about a person or group who owns roughly 1.1 million Bitcoin. At today's prices, that is tens of billions of dollars. If Satoshi woke up tomorrow and decided to sell, the entire global market would lose its mind. People have been hunting this ghost for over a decade. They've looked at Hal Finney, the brilliant programmer who received the first Bitcoin transaction. They've looked at Nick Szabo, the bit gold creator who writes just like Satoshi. They even tried to corner a guy actually named Dorian Nakamoto in his driveway, which was just awkward and wrong.
But Hoback went a different way. He pointed the finger at Peter Todd.
Wait. Who?
The Peter Todd Theory: A Massive Reach?
If you follow Bitcoin development, you know Peter Todd. He’s a Canadian developer, a security consultant, and someone who has been involved in the space for a long time. But almost nobody—and I mean nobody—had him on their Satoshi bingo card before Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery aired.
The documentary relies on a "gotcha" moment involving an old forum post from 2010. In the post, Todd replies to Satoshi on Bitcointalk.org. Hoback’s big theory is that Todd accidentally posted from his own account when he meant to stay logged in as Satoshi to "correct" or clarify a point about how Bitcoin transactions work. Todd, for his part, looked Hoback right in the face on camera and laughed. He called the idea "ludicrous."
It’s kind of a mess. Hoback points to Todd's early interest in "Hashcash" and his communications with Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream. He tries to paint a picture of a young genius who hid his tracks by pretending to be a latecomer to the project. But here’s the thing: Peter Todd was about 23 years old when the Bitcoin whitepaper was released in 2008. While there are certainly 23-year-old geniuses, the whitepaper shows a level of academic maturity and deep, cross-disciplinary knowledge in economics and C++ coding that most experts say doesn't fit Todd’s profile at that specific time.
Why Everyone Is So Obsessed With Finding Satoshi
Why do we even care? Seriously. Bitcoin works fine without a leader. That’s the whole point. It’s decentralized.
The obsession exists because of the "Satoshi Stash." Those 1.1 million coins haven't moved in over fifteen years. If Satoshi is dead—like Hal Finney or Dave Kleiman—then those coins are likely gone forever. That’s a massive "burn," which makes everyone else's Bitcoin more valuable because the supply is effectively smaller. But if Satoshi is alive? If it’s someone like Peter Todd or Adam Back? That represents a massive central point of failure and a huge amount of market pressure.
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Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery leans heavily into the drama of the "unmasking," but it ignores a fundamental truth about the cypherpunk culture Satoshi came from. These people valued privacy above everything. To them, the "reveal" isn't a celebration. It's an attack.
The Problems With the HBO Evidence
Let's get into the nitty-gritty. Hoback’s "smoking gun" is a 2010 Bitcointalk post where Todd clarifies a point about "Replace-by-Fee" (RBF) logic. Hoback argues that Todd was finishing Satoshi's thought.
Todd’s defense? He was just a guy who liked to argue on the internet. He’s been very open about the fact that he finds the whole accusation dangerous. Think about it. If the world thinks you have the keys to $60 billion, you’re going to have a target on your back for the rest of your life. Kidnappings, torture, extortion—it’s not a joke.
There's also the "British-isms" problem. Satoshi famously used British spellings like "favour" and "colour," and formatted dates in a way that suggested he was in the UK or a Commonwealth country. While Peter Todd is Canadian, his writing style doesn't align with the specific linguistic patterns that forensic linguists have identified in Satoshi's emails and forum posts.
The documentary also glosses over the fact that Satoshi’s code was, frankly, a bit "academic" and clunky in parts, whereas Todd’s later work is very different in structure.
Did Hoback Actually Find Him?
Most people in the Bitcoin community say "No."
Immediately after the film dropped, the reaction on X (formerly Twitter) was basically one big collective eye-roll. Even people who aren't fans of Peter Todd—and he’s a controversial figure who has rubbed plenty of people the wrong way over the years—admitted that the evidence was thin.
It felt like a conclusion in search of a narrative.
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But that's the nature of documentaries like this. You need an ending. You can't just spend two hours talking about cryptographic signatures and then say, "We have no idea." Or well, you can, but it doesn't get the same number of clicks on Max.
The real value of Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery isn't the unmasking. It’s the history lesson. It does a decent job of showing how Bitcoin grew from a weird mailing list experiment into a global financial asset. It captures the tension between the early "idealists" who wanted to destroy banks and the later "institutionalists" who just wanted to get rich.
What We Actually Know About Satoshi
If you want to look at facts, we have to go back to the beginning.
- The Genesis Block: Satoshi started the network on January 3, 2009. He included a headline from The Times about bank bailouts. He was making a political statement.
- The Disappearance: Satoshi stayed active until December 2010. His last public post was about WikiLeaks "kicking the hornet's nest" and how Bitcoin wasn't ready for that kind of heat.
- The PGP Key: Satoshi’s digital signature has never been used since he left.
- The "I am not Dorian Nakamoto" Message: In 2014, Satoshi’s P2P Foundation account posted one final message to clear the name of Dorian Nakamoto. Some think this was a hack, others think it was the real deal.
Peter Todd doesn't fit the "quiet departure" vibe. Todd is loud. He’s present. He’s constantly involved in public debates. Satoshi was the opposite. Satoshi was a ghost who knew exactly when to vanish to let the project live on its own terms.
The Real Danger of Doxing Satoshi
We need to talk about why this documentary is actually kinda problematic. Doxing Satoshi—or attempting to—is basically trying to assign a CEO to a leaderless system.
The beauty of Bitcoin is that it doesn't matter who wrote the code. The code is open source. You can read it. I can read it. It’s math. By trying to put a face on it, Hoback is trying to humanize something that was designed to be beyond human error or ego.
If Peter Todd was Satoshi, he’d be the greatest actor in the world. He would have had to spend the last fifteen years pretending to be a slightly-annoying-but-brilliant developer while secretly sitting on a mountain of gold. It doesn't track. Usually, the simplest explanation is the right one: Satoshi is either dead, or he’s a group of people, or he’s someone we’ve never even heard of.
Lessons for the Rest of Us
So, what do you do with this information?
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First, don't take every "true crime" style documentary as gospel. They are edited to tell a story. They need a climax. In this case, the climax felt forced.
Second, understand that the "Satoshi mystery" is part of the value proposition of Bitcoin. The fact that nobody owns it—that there is no "founder" to arrest or subpoena—is why it has survived this long. If Satoshi were unmasked, it would actually make Bitcoin less interesting. It would become just another company with a founder who might say something stupid on social media.
What You Should Do Next
If you've watched the documentary or are planning to, here is the smart way to process it.
Step 1: Check the Source Material
Go read the original Bitcoin Whitepaper. It’s only nine pages. It’s surprisingly easy to read. You’ll see that the tone is much more like a senior researcher or a seasoned academic than a 23-year-old developer looking for a fight.
Step 2: Follow the Wallets
Keep an eye on the "Whale Alert" accounts on social media. They track large movements of Bitcoin. If those original blocks from 2009 ever move, that is your news. Everything else is just speculation.
Step 3: Diversify Your Sources
Don't just listen to HBO. Listen to podcasts like What Bitcoin Did or read books like The Bitcoin Standard. They give you a much better sense of the technical and philosophical hurdles the early developers faced.
Step 4: Understand the Privacy Angle
The biggest takeaway from the Peter Todd situation is how hard it is to stay anonymous in the modern world. Even if you do everything right, someone might still come along and make a movie about you.
The mystery remains. Peter Todd says he isn't Satoshi. The Bitcoin community says he isn't Satoshi. And honestly? Satoshi probably wants it that way. The "Money Electric" isn't about a person; it's about the tech.
Stop looking for a man. Look at the code. That's where the real story is.