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By now, the story is so famous that 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, there have been countless theories on who the real Nakamoto, with no single candidate coming out on top.

It’s obvious why the search has endured over the past 15 years. Bitcoin is 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.)

And, 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’ real-time billionaires ranking. But Nakamoto doesn’t seem to have spent any of it — at least, not anything in their confirmed bitcoin wallets. 

Now, filmmaker Cullen Hoback, whose documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery premiered on HBO last week, claims that he has unmasked Nakamoto 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. Many bitcoin enthusiasts simply prefer it that Nakamoto remains an enigma.

So, who benefits if Nakamoto remains in the shadows — and who benefits if they’re revealed?

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 any kind of bank – able to reliably make and receive payments completely anonymously.

There was a clear ideological aim: to keep your financial record out of the surveillance and reach of powerful authorities, whether it’s large private banks or the government. 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.”

When Nakamoto created the very 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.”

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Nakamoto’s writings indicate that 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. For that reason, the most frequently named candidates for Nakamoto 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, and 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 that 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. 

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 that he’s Nakamoto. In an email to Vox, Hoback wrote that Todd stopped speaking to him after filming this scene.

Other commonly floated contenders include prominent cypherpunk figures. One wild suggestion claims that the Japanese etymology behind Satoshi Nakamoto can roughly translate to “central intelligence,” suggesting bitcoin was invented by the CIA as some sort of trap.  Even Elon Musk’s name comes up. (He denies it.)

Since 2011, Nakamoto hasn’t emailed or posted anywhere under their username. They also haven’t used the crypto wallets associated with that name. It isn’t clear whether Nakamoto is still alive, or even whether they’re one person rather than a group of people working together.  

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.

So, with Bitcoin now out of their hands, 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, a sell-off could be destabilizing for the cryptocurrency.  

Then again, there’s no proof that Nakamoto has spent any of their fortune, or that they would. We know this because all bitcoin transactions are part of a public ledger.  

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?

Many key figures in the bitcoin community unequivocally express a desire for Nakamoto’s identity to stay a secret. Nakamoto’s lasting anonymity is an ideological resistance to government authority in an increasingly surveilled digital world. There’s also the potential danger someone could be in if others think they’re Nakamoto. In a comment to the New Yorker, Todd told the publication that Hoback had put his safety at risk by accusing him of being a multi-billionaire, and that he would soon be doing “some unplanned travel.” (He has not responded to an email from Vox.) 

Toward the end of the Money Electric, Todd says that the hunt for 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, 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.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Trump’s economic policy platform, which focuses so heavily on tariffs and immigration restriction, and I wanted to delve into why it’s such a radical change for the conservative movement. Spotlighting Friedrich Hayek, a right-wing economist who helped define the 20th century right’s economic outlet, felt like a natural way to do so. Hayek is a libertarian (though he preferred the term “liberal”), and his work develops a deep social theory explaining why he believes government involvement in markets is so likely to backfire. It’s rigorous, challenging work that exposes ways that conservative tradition is more than whatever Trump is up to on a daily basis.

I explore Hayek in On The Right, my newsletter on the conservative movement. On The Right is designed to be a deeper engagement with the right, exploring what’s going on among right-wing intellectuals and writers that can help shed light on what we’re seeing out there in the world.  If you want to learn more about Hayek, I’d recommend picking up his study Law, Legislation and Liberty Vol. 1. It’s fairly abstract political theory, so it can feel like a bit of a tricky read at times, but I promise you there’s a reward for engaging with it. And then be sure to subscribe to On the Right here. 

—Zack Beauchamp, senior politics correspondent

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