The HBO documentary states that Peter Todd created Bitcoin

The search for Satoshi has now lasted more than a decade. It has led to spectacular failures, including Newsweek's infamous 2014 cover story that claimed Satoshi had been found hiding out in Los Angeles. The discovery was completely wrong –Newsweek had instead found a confused older man whose last name happened to be Nakamoto – but the episode would become another part of Bitcoin history. It also served as a textbook example of the dangers of confirmation bias.

Now comes Cullen Hoback, his new documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Conundrum claims to expose Satoshi Nakamoto once and for all. The film premieres at 9:00 p.m. PT on HBO, the network that released Hoback's in 2021 Q: Into historya close look at the Q-Anon conspiracy that credibly points to the people who orchestrated it.

Hoback doesn't lack confidence (the trailer for Money electric proclaims that “the internet’s biggest secret” will be revealed) and on the whole his documentary is good. It avoids the pitfalls of most other crypto films. Money electric is not a fan film made by groupies who want to promote a token. Nor does it denigrate or mock the crypto industry without attempting to understand it – a common practice among supposedly sophisticated critics.

Instead, Hoback portrays a group of long-time Bitcoin advocates as they see themselves: as stewards of Satoshi's gift, which gave the planet a form of money beyond the reach of intrusive, wasteful governments. From this perspective, the villains are Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan – the Bitcoin-hating banker shown at the beginning and end of Money electric– and Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator who allied with Wall Street against crypto.

The main characters are now in Money electric are those associated with Blockstream, a company that promotes Bitcoin adoption by individuals, companies and even countries. At the start of the film, we meet Samson Mow, a self-proclaimed Bitcoin ambassador who helps convince the Prince of Serbia and the President of El Salvador to adopt the currency.

There's also Adam Back, the founder of Blockstream, known for developing Hash Cash, a precursor to Bitcoin. We also meet the likes of Peter Todd, a baking acolyte and key Bitcoin developer, as well as Roger “Bitcoin Jesus” Ver, another influential early crypto figure who is currently facing tax evasion charges. There are also guest appearances from high-profile figures from the business world, including Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, who rebranded his other company from Square to Block as part of his commitment to crypto.

The documentary's interviews with this group of long-time Bitcoiners give it authority, as does its succinct coverage of key events in the cryptocurrency's development. These include the so-called block size wars over Bitcoin's architecture, the rise of Ethereum and altcoins (“shitcoins” to critics), and the US government's recent campaign to hamper the industry.

Satoshi “revealed”

Money electric also stands out from other crypto films because of its high production budget – Hoback shoots scenes in Malta, Canada, El Salvador and numerous other locations – and because the director uses his full potential to claim to identify Satoshi Nakamoto. Unfortunately, his bet is almost certainly wrong.

Hoback's quest to identify Satoshi is starting in the right direction. He identifies the most prominent figures in a network of “cypherpunks” who shared a passion for privacy and cryptography and corresponded through a now-famous email list of the same name. It was on this mailing list, as well as an online forum called BitcoinTalk, where Satoshi shared his vision for Bitcoin, in addition to his famous white paper.

At the start of the documentary, Hoback shows photos of the cypherpunks most closely associated with Bitcoin and the most likely candidates for Satoshi. They are Back, the creator of Blockstream and Hash Cash, as well as other names familiar to long-time Bitcoiners: Hal Finney, Nick Szabo and Wei Dai.

Hoback makes a brief, half-hearted attempt to assess whether these candidates are Satoshi, then moves on to Craig Wright, an Australian charlatan who burst onto the crypto scene in 2016 with fake evidence claiming he invented Bitcoin. Luckily, the filmmaker doesn't get involved and switches to other candidates. As Money electric As it progresses, it focuses first on Back as a potential Satoshi and then on Back's Blockstream protégé and friend Peter Todd.

Todd is much younger than the other people who have long been identified as likely candidates and would have been 19 or 20 years old at the time of Satoshi Nakamoto's publication of the Bitcoin white paper. To prove that Todd is Satoshi, Hoback turns to his 2013 email exchange with an unknown person named John Dillon about a technical upgrade to Bitcoin.

The emails were leaked in 2016 and caused a minor uproar in crypto circles when it emerged that Dillon was a US Secret Service agent who paid Todd as part of a conspiracy to infiltrate Bitcoin. However, Hoback plausibly argues in the film that Todd and Dillon were one and the same person – and that Todd orchestrated the whole controversy to further modernization.

Hoback sees this as a Eureka moment, using a published exchange between Satoshi and Todd – one in which Todd appears to correct the Bitcoin inventor – as evidence that the latter must be Satoshi. In other words, Todd again used his trick of replying to his own pseudonymous messages. To bolster the case, Hoback points out that Satoshi's last communication appeared three days after the exchange and that Canadian Todd's writings contained British-style spellings – such as “color” and “cheque” – that are also found in Bitcoin texts inventor can be found.

In the film's climax, Hoback interviews Back and Todd in a dilapidated castle in the Czech Republic (why they are there is unclear) and puts his theory directly to them. Todd never clearly denies that he is Satoshi, but instead makes ambiguous statements and seems to settle on gently trolling the filmmaker.

Who is Satoshi?

On this basis, Hoback and HBO have hailed Money Electric as a blockbuster exposé that exposes Satoshi after all these years. Oops. They should have instead remembered the lesson from Newsweek and the dangers of confirmation bias – the all-too-common practice of interpreting new information to confirm existing beliefs and rejecting what contradicts them.

At the moment there is no clear evidence that Peter Todd is one not Satoshi (although one might show up soon enough). However, it's notable that Todd's name has never surfaced among crypto insiders as a likely candidate, and it's unlikely that Hoback, a newcomer to the scene, would be so comfortable stumbling upon Bitcoin's inventor. It is also unlikely that someone barely out of high school and with no significant publications could have written a document as complex as the Bitcoin white paper while also having the sophistication to implement its presentation. After all, the idea that Satoshi – who vehemently avoided publicity – would choose to appear in an HBO film about who created Bitcoin is beyond the imagination. When Todd Hoback says in the film that “we are all Satoshi,” the filmmaker should have simply recognized this as a familiar refrain from Bitcoin supporters and left it at that.

Hoback's biggest mistake, however, is not so much his decision to focus on Todd, but rather his ignoring a far more compelling theory about Satoshi's identity – one that is also consistent with Occam's Razor, the theorem that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

The film started off on the right track by highlighting the original cypherpunks, and that's where the search for Satoshi should have stayed – and in particular a man named Nick Szabo, who Hoback introduces as a potential suspect but then dismisses him without any compelling reason. Not only does he ignore long-standing rumors within the Bitcoin community, but also a number of compelling pieces of evidence.

This evidence includes the work of Nathaniel Popper, a former New York Times Journalist and author of Digital Gold, a close look at the early Bitcoin scene, written much closer to the cryptocurrency's origin story. Popper's reporting – including this 2015 article – clearly points in the direction of Szabo and is complemented by an academic study that conducted regression analysis comparing Satoshi's writings to those of potential Bitcoin inventors. The study found a striking agreement between Satoshi and Szabo, who also uses British spelling. If you prefer circumstantial evidence, there's also the fact that Nick Szabo's initials NS are the inverse of SN.

While Hobuck's big reveal is ultimately a misfire, “Money Electric” is still very watchable. The filmmaker admirably manages to tell the story of crypto – a phenomenon that exists almost entirely online – with sophistication and passion, deftly using just enough graphics to convey timelines and technical bits.

For those new to crypto, Money Electric offers a compelling story that explains Bitcoin in a fair and accurate way. For long-time crypto devotees, the documentary features plenty of familiar faces and a sympathetic look at their culture – while also providing another piece of lore that will be the subject of memes for years to come.