This weekend I finally got around to watching Money Electric, the HBO documentary that “reveals” Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd as the true identity behind Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s three weeks old by now and already forgotten by the 24-hour social media cycle, but as someone who wrote a book on the origin story of Bitcoin I still felt I had to hear them out— perhaps just to comment on it in a Take. (As I am indeed doing now.)
Even watching it for that purpose was a waste of my time. Sure, I could tell you that the evidence for Todd being Satoshi is very thin and circumstantial at best, but Rizzo has already done a sufficient job at that. I could also tell you that Satoshi’s real identity is irrelevant to begin with, since Bitcoin is a free and open source protocol that stands on its own, but that’s obvious too. Or I could emphasize once again that even if Satoshi really owns the roughly million bitcoin that are commonly attributed to him (itself a contested claim), he mined these coins fairly by investing computing power in mining, just like anyone else could have done.
But I didn’t have to watch the documentary to tell you that. The film just doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Indeed, the biggest insult to Money Electric is that Vivek accurately predicted its contents about a week before it even aired: “someone claims they know […] Satoshi, theories start swirling, but no convincing evidence ever materializes. Inevitably it ends with embarrassment for the accuser.”
Or, as Todd put it in the documentary himself: “The point is to make bitcoin the global currency,” but the people behind Money Electric (who, to their credit, left this part in), “are being distracted by nonsense”.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
