Following claims made in HBO’s Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery that developer Peter Todd was the enigmatic creator of the protocol — Satoshi Nakamoto — cypherpunk, and early Bitcoin (BTC) developer Adam Back explained that this likely isn’t the case.
Speaking with Cointelegraph’s Gareth Jenkinson, Back opined that the likely creator of the Bitcoin protocol is not even on the radar, let alone anyone who was featured in the HBO documentary:
"I'm fairly confident that it's nobody that has been talked about because there are lots of clever people in the world who can program and understand cryptography."
The cypherpunk also asserted the lack of a central figure at the helm of the Bitcoin protocol was a positive thing for the decentralized currency.
Back contrasted the anarchic structure of Bitcoin with companies that have a bombastic leader or highly public founder, who could cause problems within the ecosystem and create risk vectors for the project. Back told Cointelegraph that this lack of a public founder fits with the core ethos of the Bitcoin protocol:
"Its mission is more about being adopted as a kind of global fabric and electronic money. And with no founder type of figure involved, it helps it feel more like a discovery than a startup or an invention. Right. So, I think that's good for the concept of Bitcoin as a commodity."
Despite Back’s opinion about Satoshi’s true identity, he pointed out that it was important for early Bitcoin developers and individuals who “Understand the Bitcoin mission” to speak to the documentary’s filmmakers.
Back explained that knowledgeable individuals speaking to the filmmakers would prevent the documentary team from speaking to unreliable sources, who may spread misconceptions about the protocol or peddle personal projects to the public that make the Bitcoin movement look bad at a time when the protocol is going mainstream.
Related: IMDB reveals HBO’s Bitcoin documentary secret: Everyone in the cast is Satoshi
Everything wrong with the HBO Satoshi claims
HBO caused an uproar in the Bitcoin community by naming Peter Todd as Satoshi Nakamoto — a claim that Todd publicly denied before the airing of the documentary and after the release of the film.
Source: Peter Todd
The claims made in the documentary that Todd was the mysterious creator of Bitcoin center around a 2010 BitcoinTalk forum post.
HBO asserts that a response to Satoshi from Todd’s account indicates that Todd was controlling both accounts and accidentally posted the response — which the filmmakers claimed was a continuation of Satoshi’s original post — as “Peter Todd” before posting the response.
Critics of the theory say that the post indicates nothing and that Todd was responding to Satoshi in his typical, sarcastic style to clarify what Satoshi was saying.
Another major problem with HBO’s claim is a mismatch of the Bitcoin development timeline. Satoshi released Bitcoin in 2008, but Todd did not become involved in Bitcoin development until 2014 — years after the pseudonymous creator completely disappeared.
Moreover, Todd was studying for an arts degree at a university in 2008 — making him an unlikely candidate as the inventor of the paradigm-shifting protocol.