Who is Bitcoin's Satoshi Nakamoto? We didn't find out last night
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What would happen to the price of bitcoin if the true identity of its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, were finally revealed?
Zoom in: Not much, apparently. Of course 39-year-old Canadian software developer Peter Todd, the person accused of being Satoshi in director Cullen Hoback's HBO documentary "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery," likely isn't Satoshi anyway.
What they found: There's no smoking gun in Hoback's film for Todd = Satoshi.
- His case for Todd, an early Bitcoin project contributor who was just 23 when Satoshi wrote the project's whitepaper, is highly circumstantial.
- It's based mainly on a potentially suspicious sequence of posts on a Bitcoin talk forum in 2010; a leaked email chain that Todd may or may not have staged; and his habit of sarcastically admitting to be Satoshi on camera, which to Hoback attributed to his penchant for "perverse game theory" on the subject.
Todd himself denies that he's Satoshi.
The impact: The price of bitcoin hardly moved following the documentary.
The big picture: Who Satoshi really is could be relevant for several reasons. The most important one for crypto investors is that he or she could be sitting on a $68 billion pile of coins.
- Bitcoiners have long stared at the 1 million or so coins collecting dust in Satoshi's blockchain wallets, looking for any sign of movement.
- If Satoshi is alive, still has access to those coins and one day tried to move them, that could have a sizable impact on bitcoin's circulating supply, which today is just under 20 million.
The bottom line: Many have tried to out Bitcoin's creator before. Others have claimed to be him. None of the cases have been convincing.
