This weekend I was finally able to watch Money Electric, the HBO documentary that “reveals” Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd as the true identity behind Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s now three weeks old and already forgotten by the 24 hour social media cycle, but if someone wrote it a book about the origin story of Bitcoin I still felt like I needed to hear them – maybe just to comment on them in a Take. (As indeed I do now.)
Even viewing it for that purpose was a waste of time. Sure, I could tell you that the evidence that Todd is Satoshi is very thin and circumstantial at best, but Rizzo has already done some research. enough 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 alone, but that’s also obvious. Or I could emphasize again that even if Satoshi actually owns the roughly million bitcoin typically attributed to him (himself a disputed claim), he mined these coins fairly by investing computing power in the mining industry, just like anyone else could have done.
But I didn’t need to see 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 is accurate predicted its contents about a week before it even aired: “someone claims they know (…) Satoshi, theories start swirling, but no conclusive evidence ever arrives. It inevitably ends in shame for the accuser.”
Or, as Todd himself put it in the documentary: “The point is to make Bitcoin the global currency,” but the people behind Money Electric (who, to their credit, left this part in), “are distracted by nonsense ‘.
This article is a To take. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.