During the two months I spent covering the Wright trial, multiple Satoshis appeared in my inbox, too. “The world is not ready to learn about Satoshi Nakamoto, and they never will unless certain conditions are met,” wrote one of them, in a garbled message.
Hell, I even met a would-be Satoshi in-person, in the waiting area outside the courtroom. The man, who had introduced himself as Satoshi, sat down in the public gallery to hear closing arguments. Before long, he nodded off, chin slumped against chest. One of the other onlookers anointed him “Sleeptoshi.”
Plenty of bitcoiners welcome this strange, crypto version of “I Am Spartacus,” preferring that the identity of Bitcoin’s creator forever remain a mystery. Free from the overbearing influence of a founder, Bitcoin has evolved under a system of unspoiled anarchy, they say, in which nobody’s opinion is worth more than any other. Everyone is Satoshi, and nobody is Satoshi.
“Satoshi’s greatest gift to the world was Bitcoin,” Jameson Lopp, an early bitcoiner and founder of crypto custody business Casa, told me earlier in the year. “His second greatest gift was to disappear.”
The main evidence supplied in the documentary to back up the theory that Todd created Bitcoin is a forum thread from December 2010 in which Todd appears to be “finishing Satoshi’s sentences,” as Hoback puts it. The topic of that thread—a way to prioritize transactions based on the fee paid—is something Todd would later go on to build into Bitcoin as a contributing developer.
As corroborating evidence, Hoback points to similarities in the grammar and syntax used by Todd and Satoshi, as well as the timing of Satoshi’s communications, many of which were composed during the summer, when Todd would not have had college classes to attend. (Todd disputes the characterization of his availability during the relevant summers.)
Todd is well known in crypto circles for his contributions to the Bitcoin codebase and vocal advocacy for the technology as an alternative to cash—a supposedly surveillance-resistant tool for the digital world. At a conference in 2023, I watched as Todd, participating in a panel, said “fuck you” to the audience unless they exercised their right to make cash purchases that cannot be monitored by government or bank. Todd has conceded to having previously tried to develop a technology similar to Bitcoin, before Satoshi beat him to it.
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