The $1.3 trillion question we may never answer

Despite what a new HBO documentary suggests, the identity of one of the richest people in the world is still unknown.

By now, the story is so famous it’s taken on the aura of a creation myth: One day in early 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the inventor of bitcoin, released the world’s first cryptocurrency. Two years later, Nakamoto vanished seemingly forever. Since then, countless theories on who the real Nakamoto is have been advanced, with no single candidate coming out on top.

Whether Nakamoto’s anonymity is merely an entertaining mystery, a necessity for privacy, or a worrisome concern depends on who you ask. For filmmaker Cullen Hoback, whose documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery premiered on HBO last week, finding the mysterious bitcoin founder is a matter of public interest — and Hoback believes he has unmasked him as a 39-year-old Canadian bitcoin developer named Peter Todd. Since the film’s release, Todd and other prominent voices in the community have dismissed Hoback’s arguments; Todd reiterated to Vox in an email that he is not Nakamoto. According to these voices, Nakamoto remains an enigma. Many bitcoin enthusiasts prefer it that way.

But it’s obvious why the search has endured over the past 15 years. Bitcoin is far and away the most popular digital currency in the world, with a market cap of about $1.3 trillion at the time of writing. (For comparison, the second biggest, ethereum, has a market cap of $312 million.) For those who believe a decentralized alternative to government-issued currencies — like the US dollar — is crucial to protect individual privacy and freedom, Nakamoto is akin to Prometheus bringing the gift of fire from the gods.

Then there’s this mind-boggling possibility: If reports that Nakamoto might hold as much as 1.1 million bitcoins are true, they could be sitting on a fortune of over $70 billion, making them one of the 25 wealthiest individuals on Earth, according to Forbes’s real-time billionaires ranking. But Nakamoto doesn’t seem to have spent any of it — at least, not anything in their confirmed bitcoin wallets.

What does it mean for the rest of us that such an enormous treasure chest remains in the hands of an unknown entity, whose true aims and intentions can’t be determined? Who benefits if Nakamoto remains in the shadows — and who benefits if they’re revealed?

The internet user Satoshi Nakamoto first appeared in 2008, when they published a paper to a cryptographic technology mailing list laying out a system that they had dubbed bitcoin. It would function as a form of digital cash that people could use to send money back and forth without involving a bank. In other words, one could reliably make and receive payments anonymously.

There was a clear ideological aim: In Nakamoto’s view, the ability to keep your financial record out of the surveillance and reach of powerful authorities — whether it’s large private banks or the government — is an important personal freedom. Such institutions, after all, aren’t infallible. In one illuminating forum post in 2009, Nakamoto wrote that “the root problem with conventional currency” was “trust.”

“Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve,” they continued. “We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.” When Nakamoto created the first block that would become the bitcoin blockchain, they included a message referencing a headline in the British newspaper the Times that day: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

Nakamoto’s writings indicate they’re most likely someone with a strong understanding of economics, computer science, and modern cryptography, which involves methods and technologies for keeping information secure, like encrypting a message that can only be unlocked with a special key. Unsurprisingly, the commonly advanced candidates for who Nakamoto could be are self-identified “cypherpunks,” a community of mainly computer scientists who advocate for using cryptography to protect digital privacy.

According to Hoback, director of Money Electric, Peter Todd fits the bill. Todd is a libertarian pro-privacy advocate who, among other things, is a huge proponent of using cash because it’s harder for governments and banks to track your spending. As a teenager, he was already communicating with older, respected cypherpunks and seemed unusually knowledgeable about bitcoin despite his youth. Todd would have been 23 years old when the bitcoin white paper was published.

Hoback builds his case primarily on the fact that Todd joined the message board Bitcointalk.org in 2010 right before Nakamoto stopped posting. But the crux of Hoback’s argument hinges on an interaction between Todd and Nakamoto on Bitcointalk. Nakamoto had posted something technical about how bitcoin transactions work; about an hour and a half later, Todd replied with a small disagreement. Hoback contends the reply actually reads more like someone finishing their previous thought — that Todd had signed into the wrong account to make an addendum to the original Nakamoto post. In the film, he also points to a chat log in which Todd calls himself a foremost authority on sacrificing bitcoin, which Hoback connects to the fact that Nakamoto hasn’t done anything with their coins in all these years (at least, that we know of).

It’s an intriguing interpretation, but not exactly a smoking gun.

Hoback, both in interviews and within Money Electric, portrays Todd as someone who enjoys playing games over whether he could be the bitcoin founder, laughing on camera as the filmmaker explains why he believes Todd is Nakamoto — at one point saying with a smirking grin, “Well, yeah. I’m Satoshi Nakamoto.” On X, though, Todd has firmly denied he’s Nakamoto. In an email to Vox, Hoback wrote that Todd stopped speaking to him after filming this scene. Todd told Vox in an email that Hoback hadn’t been forthcoming about his intention to find out Nakamoto’s identity.

The other main person of interest in Money Electric is Adam Back, a British cypherpunk in his 50s whose work toward a functional digital currency was cited in Nakamoto’s original bitcoin paper. One reason Hoback finds Back suspicious is that he became more active in the bitcoin world — specifically concerned with how to make transactions completely anonymous — right after speculation emerged that Nakamoto controlled over 1 million bitcoins, more than previously thought. Unlike Todd, Back has stridently distanced himself from even joking suggestions that he could be Nakamoto.

Other commonly floated contenders include prominent cypherpunk figures such as Hal Finney, who died in 2014 and was the recipient of the first test bitcoin transaction that Nakamoto sent, and Nick Szabo, who came up with the concept of “smart contracts,” a crucial function of many blockchains today. One wild suggestion claims that the Japanese etymology behind Satoshi Nakamoto can roughly translate to “central intelligence,” a sign that bitcoin was in fact invented by the CIA as some sort of trap. Another conspiracy theory — practically a meme at this point — posits that Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk is the real Nakamoto. (He denies it.)

It isn’t clear whether Nakamoto is still alive, or even whether they’re one person rather than a group of people working together. Early this year, an unknown person sent 26.9 bitcoins (worth approximately $1.8 million today) to Nakamoto’s dormant wallet, firing up fresh excitement over where Nakamoto is and what they might be doing.

Since 2011, Nakamoto hasn’t emailed or posted anywhere under their username. They also haven’t used the crypto wallets associated with that name. But even if someone is determined to remain in the shadows, and has left no obvious evidence giving them away, there are bound to be some breadcrumbs. Much of the theorizing around Nakamoto depends on analyzing their style of coding and writing. Hoback, at one point in the film, nods to the fact that Nakamoto and Todd both used slurs that could indicate immaturity. Another commonly noted marker is that Nakamoto often used British English spelling (such as “favour”), and Todd is Canadian.

But other linguistic comparisons of commonly used words and phrases have been made that inconclusively point to other candidates. On the forum, Nakamoto often uses a double space at the start of a sentence, while Todd does not. Both Back and Todd pepper in dashes to break up clauses in a single sentence — Nakamoto doesn’t. Could the stylistic differences be a cunning, intentional misdirection? No one knows. Ultimately, none of these tics add up to definitive proof.

Many in the bitcoin world conjecture that Nakamoto disappeared because WikiLeaks — the site where Julian Assange published many leaked documents — appeared poised to start accepting donations in bitcoin, which might lead to more attention on Nakamoto. In one of their last known communications, Nakamoto wrote to bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, “I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle.” In the last known email, sent in April 2011, Nakamoto claimed they were no longer involved with bitcoin.

“The fact is, what makes bitcoin such an interesting system is precisely the fact that the original creator doesn’t have control over bitcoin,” Todd said, adding that their identity is irrelevant. It’s clear Nakamoto never intends to out themselves — and, indeed, they seem to argue there’s no point. Bitcoin is now out of their hands. So how much does their identity matter?

Hoback argues that it matters a lot due to how important bitcoin has become. “Bitcoin is already being baked into our financial system,” he told Vox, referring to its acceptance as legal tender in some countries and the fact that it could now be included in 401(k)s. Nakamoto potentially controls a significant portion of the total limited supply of bitcoin; if they one day decided to come forward and start moving (and spending) the coins in their possession, such an enormous sell-off could be destabilizing for the cryptocurrency. If they spend their riches, there’s also arguably a public interest in knowing where so much money is going, and whether it has any political impact.

Acknowledging the possibility that Nakamoto could be multiple people, Hoback continued, “This group is making themselves super rich while saying no one should look into Satoshi. Isn’t that a little suspicious?”

If you believe holding the powerful to account is important, then Nakamoto’s insistence on anonymity stands against the transparency that such accountability requires. It’s no secret that many of the world’s richest people have historically cleaved to remaining as private as possible, using elaborate financial structures and tax havens to avoid scrutiny of what their money is funding.

Then again, there’s no proof Nakamoto has spent any of their fortune. Their known bitcoin hoard is a rough value of net worth, not yet used for anything — and we know this because all bitcoin transactions are part of a public ledger. If they started cashing in their bitcoin stockpile, that could make it easier for people to find their real-life identity, which is an incentive for Nakamoto to leave that stash untouched. (It is curious, though, that in late September about $13 million worth of bitcoin mined in the early days of the cryptocurrency suddenly moved.)

Perhaps there’s a better question than whether it matters who Nakamoto is: How important is it that the inventor of bitcoin remains a mystery?

From the perspective of the cypherpunks, it’s crucial. There’s a financial motivation — the reveal of Nakamoto’s real identity could tank the price of bitcoin. But Nakamoto’s lasting anonymity is also an ideological resistance to government authority in an increasingly surveilled digital world. Many key figures in the bitcoin community unequivocally express a desire for Nakamoto’s identity to stay a secret — according to Hoback, Todd seemed displeased that people had found Nakamoto’s million-plus bitcoin stash, and told him to leave Nakamoto alone. There’s also the potential danger someone could be in if others think they’re Nakamoto. In a comment to the New Yorker, Todd said Hoback had put his safety at risk by accusing him of being a multibillionaire, and that he would soon be doing “some unplanned travel.”

Todd isn’t wrong that prior attempts to unmask Nakamoto have disturbed people’s personal lives — take the case of Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a former engineer and programmer in California who was the subject of a Newsweek report claiming he was the bitcoin god. Dorian Nakamoto has categorically denied even knowing what cryptocurrencies are, and has said the accusation and public scrutiny caused a “great deal of confusion and stress” for him and his family. In response, Hoback told Vox that other people long suspected of being Nakamoto, like Nick Szabo and Adam Back, are fine.

For his part, Todd noted Hoback also had a financial motivation — to sell his documentary. “I think that financial incentive is clouding his moral judgement here,” he told Vox.

Toward the end of the Money Electric, Todd says the hunt for bitcoin’s Nakamoto is yet another example of “journalists really missing the point.” The point, he elaborates, is “to make bitcoin the global currency.” But if that came to fruition — and it isn’t close to becoming reality yet — then ironically, Hoback’s argument for hunting down the bitcoin mastermind would only become more compelling to both the general public and almost certainly to governments around the world. The surest way to protect Nakamoto’s anonymity seems to be for bitcoin to not become a widespread alternative threatening government-issued currencies — to not become too important.

Update, October 22, 11:10 am: This story, originally published October 17, has been updated with comments from Peter Todd.