This weekend, I finally got to watch Money Electric, the HBO documentary that “reveals” Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd as the real identity behind Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s been three weeks now and I’ve already been forgotten about in the 24 hour social media cycle, but as a person I wrote A book about the origin story of Bitcoin I still feel like I have to listen to them, maybe just to comment on it in a snapshot. (As I actually do now).
Even watching it for that purpose was a waste of time. Sure, I could tell you that the evidence of Todd being Satoshi is very weak and circumstantial at best, but Rizzo has already done enough work on this. I can also tell you that Satoshi’s real identity is initially irrelevant, since Bitcoin is a free and open source protocol in its own right, but that’s also obvious. Or I can reiterate that even if Satoshi really does own the roughly 1 million Bitcoins that are usually attributed to him (per se Disputed claim), he mined these currencies fairly by investing computing power into mining, just as anyone else would have done.
But I didn’t have to watch the documentary to tell you that. The film doesn’t bring anything new to the table. In fact, the biggest insult to Money Electric is that Vivek accurately predicted its contents about a week before it aired: “Someone claims to know (…) Satoshi, and theories start swirling, but no convincing evidence is ever presented. It is an embarrassment to the accused.
Or as Todd himself says in the documentary: “The goal is to make Bitcoin the global currency,” but the people behind Money Electric (who to their credit left that part out), “are getting distracted by bullshit.”
This article is a takes. The opinions expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.