After an HBO documentary identified Peter Todd as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin BTC/USD, speculation beyond the cryptocurrency community abounds about the veracity of the claims.
What Happened: POLITICO’s Senior Finance Editor Izabella Kaminska argued in a reaction on social media platform X on Tuesday that the immediate dismissal of Todd as a potential Satoshi candidate by the crypto community may be premature.
She points out that many who are now ridiculing the documentary were recently convinced that Len Sassaman would be named Satoshi, demonstrating the community’s susceptibility to social engineering.
Addressing the criticism that Todd was too young to be Satoshi, Kaminska draws a parallel to Vitalik Buterin’s creation of Ethereum ETH/USD at a young age, stating, “Savants are like that. Not a credible counter criticism in my opinion.”
Todd himself took to X to deny the claim stating that "this might be crazier than before."
Kaminska also highlighted the logic behind documentary’s argument, suggesting that Todd’s youth and lack of clout in the community could have been reasons for assuming an alias. She notes, “Even if Todd mostly wrote the paper and was the one who engaged in key development comms as Satoshi it doesn’t exclude the possibility that he also got a lot of wing support from the OGs, and the whole thing was really a group effort.”
Kaminska finds the body language in the documentary compelling and questions whether Todd or Adam Back could pass a polygraph test regarding their involvement with Satoshi’s identity.
She also points out several factors that align Todd with the Satoshi profile, including his Canadian nationality explaining Britishisms in Satoshi’s writing, his early interest in solving the “money problem,” and the mysterious scrubbing of his old CV from the internet.
While acknowledging that none of these points definitively prove Todd is Satoshi, Kaminska argues that the theory is not “laughable” and is “just as plausible as any of the other key pantheon suspect members.”
What's Next: These discussions will be central topics at the upcoming Benzinga Future of Digital Assets event on Nov. 19.
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