In the documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, filmmaker Cullen Hoback put forth the theory that developer Peter Todd was Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. In this episode, I talk to cryptocurrency expert Jeremy Clark about this theory, with a focus on the language and behavior of Peter Todd. We discuss: the 2010 forum post by Peter Todd that forms the backbone of Hoback’s theory; Peter’s behavior in the film when confronted, which many people saw as suspicious and strange; the difficulties of relying on nonverbal behavior for clues; and how simple, neat, and exciting stories can attract us.
Peter Todd watched this episode; links to his thoughts are below in the show notes. Also below is a transcript and resources related to this talk.
Episode links:
Notes about this episode:
- Peter Todd looked at this episode shortly it came out. Here are Peter Todd’s comments in reaction.
- Several people (including Peter) misunderstood my point about the forum post language. My point, which I elaborated on at the end, was that I thought the language itself was unusual/rare, not the fact that he was correcting him. I would predict that if you were to study instances of people correcting other people’s points (even when correcting people rather bluntly or rudely), the phrase “to be specific” would be rare. That’s something that could be studied (could run an analysis of many forums/threads maybe). But again, even if I’m right (which I might not be), people do say unusual phrasings all the time, so it wouldn’t mean much on its own. It might become interesting if you could prove it was extremely rare, though.
- Here’s Peter saying he thought his “to be specific” language was softening the tone of his correction
- Here’s one person’s thoughts on why he thinks the forum post language supports the idea that Peter isn’t Satoshi. I include this as a way to emphasize that there are clearly many ways to interpret the totality of evidence.
- Towards the end, it might have come across like I was saying that the filmmaker, Cullen Hoback, was being a bit conspiratorial with regards to ideas that Peter Todd may have worked for the CIA. To clarify that: I don’t think that’s what Hoback was doing; I think he was talking about theories that are out there as a way to get to his theory about Peter.
Resources mentioned in or related to this talk:
TRANSCRIPT
(transcript may contain errors)
Zach Elwood: A few days ago, I got an email. It read:
Hi Zachary, HBO recently aired a documentary on Bitcoin titled Money Electric (covered in NYT, New Yorker, etc.). As you might know, Bitcoin was invented by an anonymous individual. The film ends with the filmmaker confronting the man he suspects, a developer named Peter Todd. A lot is being made of Peter’s body language and behavior, which is admittedly strange. The director keeps retweeting people saying they believe it is Peter because of his reaction. I would love to hear your take. The concrete evidence is very thin, so his reaction is a main piece of evidence.
That email came from a cryptocurrency expert named Jeremy Clark. This episode will mostly consist of a talk I had with Jeremy about this after I watched the Money Electric documentary based on his recommendation. Jeremy and I discuss a statement Peter Todd made on an early bitcoin forum, which is the primary piece of evidence in Hoback’s theory that Peter is Bitcoin’s creator. And we discuss Peter’s behavior when he was confronted by the film maker.
This is the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding people. You can learn more about it behavior-podcast.com. If you like my work, please hit subscribe and share it with others; that’s how you can encourage me to spend more time on these projects.
A few notes on this:
- This episode will make the most sense if you’ve seen the Money Electric documentary first. I think you’ll be able to follow it either way, but it will probably just be the most enjoyable if you’ve watched the movie.
- I want to emphasize that I went into this knowing almost nothing about bitcoin or theories about who Satoshi was. After Jeremy sent me the email, I watched the documentary, read a couple articles online, and jumped on a call with him. As you’ll notice, I am quite ignorant about these topics. But I thought this minimal research approach would work out because it gave me a chance to share reactions and thoughts that a lot of people probably had watching this, and gave Jeremy a chance to push back on and correct some of my more ignorant reactions.
- One interesting thing about this episode to me is how my initial confidence in the film maker’s theory gave way, as Jeremy educated me, to more doubt and uncertainty. This meta-level point is something Jeremy and I talk about, too; how we can be drawn to stories that make us feel we’ve understood something, even when our understanding is quite wrong, or quite partial. We can be especially drawn to stories that are exciting, or stories that make us feel we’re in possession of some secret, special knowledge. I’m honestly a little bit embarrassed of some of the things I say towards the beginning of this talk with Jeremy, as in hindsight it seems obvious to me that of course many smart people have been pouring over this topic for many years, so it’s rather silly to think that this film maker or I would have amazing insights that others very close to this hadn’t already carefully considered by now.
- To be specific, I’m embarrassed at my saying to Jeremy that I found the evidence quote “really persuasive,” because in hindsight my confidence was partially due to my immense ignorance in this area. Another thing I’m a bit embarrassed about was my initial excitement, after watching the documentary, at the idea of closely analyzing the language patterns found in Peter’s and Satoshi’s posts. As I talked to Jeremy I quickly realized that of course people have already looked into that in depth.
- These points about the allure of exciting and simplistic stories is something I think about a lot in my work on political polarization-related topics. The truth is that we’re drawn to simplistic stories in all aspects of our lives; from stories about our politics and political groups, to stories about how the world in general works, to stories about our own personalities and personal lives. And simplistic stories are tempting and can draw us in, but simplistic stories come with prices, because they’re often quite inaccurate and misleading, and can even lead us down dangerous paths sometimes.
A little bit about my guest Jeremy Clark: he’s an Associate Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His website is www.pulpspy.com that is “pulp” “spy” .com. Jeremy’s website bio says that he mostly works on quote “security and cryptography with real-world applications to finance and democracy.”
Okay, without further adieu here’s the talk with Jeremy Clark…
Zachary Elwood: Yeah. Hey, Jeremy. Yeah, thanks for showing me this story. It’s very interesting and I wonder do you want to start by giving your thoughts about whether Peter Todd is Satoshi and then I can give my thoughts, or do you want to do it that way?
Jeremy: Sure, happy to. Yeah, so this documentary came out from HBO and it pointed to someone called Peter Todd as potentially the person who invented Bitcoin. I know Peter; I’ve met him before at various events very long time ago. There’s even a picture with a bunch of people around a dinner table, and it’s in the film just for a split second. I am in that picture, but it frames me out. I wasn’t sitting close enough and it wanted to zoom in on Peter. But yeah, let me just say a high-level way of how I think about the question. So, I think of everyone sort of walking around with a needle that’s somewhere between 0% and 100% chance of being Satoshi. Right? And so Peter’s needle is definitely a lot higher than an average person that you’re going to pick off the street. He does have experience on the development side, he has a longstanding interest which you can see through forum posts and things like that on digital cash. He has developer experience, and so he ticks a lot of those boxes. The problem for me is that there’s probably, by my count, maybe 10,000 other people that would kind of tick those boxes as well. You also have a reverse causation where if you do a project like Bitcoin, you’re going to attract those people. Those are the people who are going to come. Right?
Zach: Right. So they’ll be involved with it early on and be around it. Yeah.
Jeremy: Exactly, exactly. So, the fact that you’re involved early isn’t necessarily evidence that you’re Satoshi. It just means that the project drew you into the spotlight. And then, of course, you’re going to have lots of people around the project that are very capable of creating it. What I would say is just that from what I saw of the film, it didn’t move the needle. Okay? I’m not saying he’s not Satoshi, I’m not saying he is.
Zach: Right, it wasn’t convincing.
Jeremy: Yeah, whatever his needle was at before, they brought forward a bunch of evidence and it didn’t change it.
Zach: Gotcha. Do you want me to talk about my thoughts now?
Jeremy: Yes, I’d love to hear them.
Zach: You had contacted me about behavior, which as I was telling you via email—and I’ve said many times on my podcast and such—I’m quite skeptical about drawing major conclusions from nonverbal behavior. I am much more a believer in statement analysis and analyzing statements, which is not about really behavior at that point, it’s just about analyzing and making logical deductions of what people say and the way they say it and the way they phrase things. So, yeah, what really stood out to me… I was skeptical going in because I read a little bit about it and I was like how much could this very clearly smart person give away—considering he hasn’t been a major suspect so far. So, I was skeptical. But I will say the thing that stood out to me was the forum post itself. And I’ll actually share the screen here because it probably helps us talk about it. One second. Let me just make sure I have that up.
Yeah, can you see my screen?
Jeremy: Yeah.
Zach: Yeah, so the part where they talk about this thing where Peter Todd’s account on an old Satoshi post in a forum, Peter Todd follows up with the post. It was apparently a minute and a half after Satoshi posted or something, or maybe it was an hour and a half. I can’t remember offhand.
Jeremy: Yes. Yeah, 90 minutes roughly.
Zach: Yeah, 90 minutes. Yeah. This, to me, really just stood out. I find this really persuasive evidence that Peter Todd is Satoshi because, I mean, he didn’t even get into the documentary but the language here. Of course, to be specific, that to me does not sound like something somebody responding to someone would say. Just thinking about how anybody would respond or how I would ever respond to somebody who is well-known in the community and is clearly extremely smart and you’re saying, “Of course, to be specific…” It’s like you’re clarifying something like it’s a continuing thought, which is what they say in the documentary, like this seems to be a continuing thought and he was logged into the wrong account, and he had only recently made the Peter Todd— Or Peter Todd only recently made his account on that forum, apparently, so it makes sense that he might have confused the accounts, that to me really stood out as like I really find that hard to explain other than Peter Todd being Satoshi. This is not to say I’m certain, but I do find this really persuasive evidence. So, this brings up other lines of questions for me.
Zach: Just a note that I edited out some of our talk here. I’d gotten confused by the fact that in the documentary the film maker had added ellipsis to both Satoshi’s and Peter’s posts. I had thought there was potentially some clue in the use of the ellipsis, but the ellipsis weren’t present in the original posts. This gets back to what I was saying in the intro: I was getting excited thinking, “what various clues might be present in the language?” when of course all this stuff has been poured over in excruciating detail already. Back to the talk.
I would wonder also to look at this specific post for Peter Todd, like the asterisks around exactly, I would wonder if Satoshi often did that. I would even look for the phrase ‘to be specific’ because there’s little minute things like that that if you can find people often using them, it can be a clue to whether it’s the same person.
But just alone the “of course, to be specific,” I’m just imagining putting yourself in Peter Todd’s position. He claims to have barely been in the Bitcoin space at that time—and that was the other thing that he mentioned in the documentary, the fact that he claims to have not really been that detailed about the thinking then—so for him to clarify Satoshi’s post of all people soon after Satoshi posted about a very minute technical detail is pretty strange. And then you added in that the surrounding things about like Peter Todd’s new account, the fact that both of them went silent on that board for really long after that at the same time, all these things… But even just this—leaving aside all these other things—just this post is so strange to me. T he language of ‘of course, to be specific,’ to me it sounds like someone clarifying their own language and not something you would ever say to a third party, especially somebody who’s much more respected. I don’t know. What do you think of that language choice there? Do you think I’m making too much of that?
Jeremy: Well, let me say a few things about everything. First off, in the film, they do show the long version of the post but then later on to sort of stylistically emphasize it, they kind of pull that thought closer to what it looks like he might be correcting from Satoshi. I would say you have to put yourself in a bit of a time machine here in 2010. Bitcoin, I don’t know what it’s worth and how much a Bitcoin is worth—probably less than a dollar or something like that. So, yes, Satoshi did invent the system and it’s attracting a lot of attention. But at the same time, it’s not the Bitcoin that we know today and Satoshi is not the Satoshi that we know today.
Zach: So people speak more informally to them and correct them… Disagree with him, correct them.
Jeremy: And for computer scientists especially, they tend to be very informal and sometimes a little hostile. And Peter Todd has a reputation for being a bit of a troll.
Zach: Right. Yeah, I get that, and those are reasons why I am far from certain. But I do just find this specific phrasing to be specific. And maybe that’d be something interesting to look into it. Like, has he used that language when correcting people in the past or in other places, and maybe it’s a Canadian thing or something? You know? These are reasons why I don’t drawing really firm conclusions. But I do just find the immediate follow-up and this specific phrasing like “To be specific,” I just can’t imagine myself ever saying ‘to be specific’ to somebody else. It’s possible, especially if you’re being—like you say—he’s rather troll-like and often corrects people. Right? So I can see where he’s almost like speaking for him like, “Well, you know, what you meant to say was this.” I could kind of see that. I just find that, combined with some of the other details, I do find quite strange. I don’t know if you want to respond to that more or…
Jeremy: I’ll just sort of dilute your confidence a little bit more. One person I did see on Twitter, I didn’t reconfirm this but I expect it’s probably true, they did look to see whether Satoshi ever put things in asterisks—like the word ‘exactly’— and never did.
Zach: Oh, nice. Okay. Well, that’s…
Jeremy: So, that was one thing. The other thing is—this is where I could actually contribute something because I kind of understand the conversation at a technical level—in the film, it was presented as a continuation of thought. Right? But I want to put the emphasis that this is a correction. Like, Satoshi said something wrong and this is a correction. And it’s not even… If I say correction, usually you fix it. You’re like, “Oh, you said this wrong, so this would be what would be right or this is what you could do instead.” And in this case, it’s like, “You’re wrong,” without the correction. Right? And so it seems weird that you would just be like… If you followed up and you saw that you said something wrong, you would probably actually correct it. Whereas this is just sort of like, “Oh yeah, that’s not right.”
Zach: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Are you saying if Satoshi had made a mistake, he would just correct it himself? As I was saying.
Jeremy: Yeah, he could edit the post as well. The problem is it leaves the issue hanging. Right? Satoshi says, “Oh, we could do it this way,” then Peter Todd comes along and says, “Oh, actually, basically you can’t do it that way.” But then what is the way that you do it? And so neither Satoshi nor Peter say like, “Well, what could you actually do?”
Zach: Got you.
Jeremy: And then one other thing I’ll pour a little more cold water on it. This is also something I haven’t confirmed, but Peter Todd himself said it, and a few people in the documentary. Right now, the post has Peter Todd’s name on it, on that post. And that’s because at some point he changed his screen name and we’re looking at the website as it exists today. But at the time that that post was made, he was using a pseudonym and the pseudonym wasn’t like, “This is my understanding from what was said,” it was that it wasn’t strongly tied to his identity. And so if it were a mistake and he realized it was a mistake-
Zach: He could have deleted it.
Jeremy: He could have deleted it and never posted with that again, not come along later and actually changed it to his real name.
Zach: True. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Yeah.
Jeremy: Some people thought, well, maybe it wasn’t completely disconnected.
Zach: Maybe he felt he had to leave it there and it would be suspicious to delete it if there was something tying him to the account. He felt he couldn’t delete it theoretically.
Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah, so it leaves you just with uncertainty. But that’s a bit more color around the issue.
Zach: I’m curious, is it unusual to you that his post was only an hour and a half later and quickly to the next one? I was looking back at the post before that and it seemed like they were regular people. The other thing, it was pretty late at night for what I assume was their time zone. It was like Satoshi’s post was at 12:00 and Peter’s was at 1:30 AM. I don’t know, that’s a little unusual too. But, obviously, computer people are late-night people. He’s young, so it doesn’t mean much in itself. Yeah.
Jeremy: Satoshi, actually, people have done analysis on when he posts. And so there is a sort of time spectrum. And late at night Eastern, we don’t know what time zone he was in either so we don’t know what it corresponds to. But if he were in Eastern Time zone, it sort of looks like someone that maybe worked during the day and worked on Bitcoin at night. And then Peter Todd, I guess was a student at the time and so he might have a similar one. If it had come 30 seconds later or a minute later, that would be very natural. But then you probably wouldn’t have the logout and the login to a new account either. Right?
Zach: Yeah, you make good points. You make good points throwing cold water on it, which is important. Yeah. Getting back to the idea that a lot of times in these cases, I see so many people just jumping on narratives about it is, or definitely it isn’t… But it’s good to be uncertain and to embrace uncertainty. I was curious, is it strange the documentary maker framed it as strange that Peter Todd said that he wasn’t really in the Bitcoin community that early or kind of downplayed his knowledge? Do you think it’s strange, knowing what you know about the technology, that he made such a correction or comment on Satoshi’s post back then when he wasn’t doing that otherwise?
Jeremy: Yeah. There was probably a greater conversation that got cut, so you don’t really know. If someone asked me like, “When did you get into Bitcoin?” It wasn’t like I woke up one day and I went from zero to a hundred. You sort of get involved and you maybe post things. That post would suggest that he understands a lot of the details. There’s a very technical detail called the UTXO, Unspent Transaction Output, and that whole post—the technical premise of that—is based on properly understanding that piece of Bitcoin. And that piece is one of the last pieces that people understand. I teach Bitcoin, so when I teach them or if I give a simple talk, I’ll simplify that model. I won’t go there because… So, it’s one of the last pieces that you would sort of learn. So yeah, at the time he made that post, he definitely understood the protocol quite well.
At the same time, I don’t know what he actually said in the documentary about when he got in. Adam Back was also present in the documentary, and that question also tried to frame that he also was sort of being elusive about how much he knew at certain times. So, I don’t know how much of that was meant for Adam as opposed to Peter or both of them.
Zach: Yeah, and to your point, I often don’t like documentaries because they often do have such bias and it’s such a short format so you often just find that it’s storytelling. Like, people are telling a story so they have to go through dozens of hours or more of footage and pick and choose what they want to show. That’s honestly why I find a lot of documentaries just really misleading when you actually learn what happened. There’s a lot more nuanced compared to what they’re trying to show. So I totally agree with you there. I would love to see the unedited footage, if you ever… And hopefully, you would think he would decide to release that because that’s theoretically more information for people to sift through. I don’t see why he wouldn’t. But yeah, there’s often a lot occluded in a documentary and that’s something you really have to be aware of when you’re watching these shows.
Jeremy: Agreed. Agreed. Peter also tweeted something. He said, “I met the filmmaker four times and it wasn’t obvious what his motive was until the very last meeting.”
Zach: Right. Okay, that’s a good segue into when it comes to the behavior—and I want to preface this by how I often say I find that all these so-called behavior experts, which I’ve talked about recently on my podcast, these people who try to claim you can get all these firm findings from all these different behavioral nonverbal things, I just find that people who claim that you can get a lot of stuff frequently out of nonverbal behavior are just bullshitting you, in my opinion. Behavior is very hard to interpret.
I thought at this point I could basically read the interaction that the film maker and Peter Todd had in the film. I would include the video but often including video means that YouTube will give you a copyright infraction. This interaction comes near the end of the movie, when the film maker gets Peter and his colleague Adam Back out for one more recording and confronts Peter. I want to emphasize again that, we don’t know how this interaction was edited. It’d be much better to see the original footage. I also want to point out that I might have some minor errors as some of the words were a bit unclear.
Here’s the transcript of the final confrontation:
Todd: Satoshi’s last post was like one week after I signed up for Bitcoin Talk, but …
Hoback: Right. And then you disappeared.
Todd: Yeah. Then I disappeared. (laughs)
Hoback: And Satoshi disappeared at the same time.
Todd: Yeah. I really should have paid more attention to Bitcoin early on but, you know, I had other stuff to do.
Hoback: You corrected Satoshi, but it kind of looks more like you were continuing a thought of Satoshi.
Todd: Well, Satoshi made a little brain fart on, like, how exactly transactions work. And I corrected him on that very boring thing.
Hoback: Why didn’t you delete the 2010 post?
Todd: Why would I?
Hoback: Well, I mean, cause it, it just makes you look like you had these deep insights into Bitcoin at the time and then –
Todd: Well, yeah, I’m Satoshi Nakamoto.
Hoback: I mean, it’s sort of the last thing you’d expect Satoshi to say.
Todd: Ah, but that’s it. That’s like the meta level, right? Because I know you’d expect Satoshi Nakamoto to delete the post. You just said, why didn’t Satoshi Nakamoto delete the post?
Adam Back: The post that was corrected?
Hoback: Yeah, yeah, the correction post.
Todd: Right? But then I did the next level of meta. And then didn’t delete the post to throw off people like you.
Back: Yeah, I don’t know. You’re feeding him, like, footage that’s just gonna be…
Todd: Oh, it’s gonna be great.
Later on in the documentary it returns to their interview.
Hoback: So here’s what I think happened. Possibly.
Todd: Possibly.
Hoback: Okay. I think that John Dylan was created, so that you would have an excuse to make ReplaceByFee, a concept which you had envisioned years earlier, but you needed some kind of cover in order to make. And you also needed some cover for that 2010 post.
Todd: 2010 post. Yeah, because I was Satoshi?
Hoback: I mean, yeah. You know, you’re very concerned about all the privacy stuff, uh, so you reach out to your old buddy Adam Back, who said, we need to do something about this, but we need to pay the devs. But you can’t join Blockstream because it would look too, uh, suspicious. So, you don’t.
Todd: I will admit, you’re pretty creative. You come up with some crazy theories. It’s ludicrous. But, it’s the sort of theory someone who spends their time as a documentary journalist would come up with. So yeah, yeah, I’ll say of course I’m Satoshi, and I’m Craig Wright. And yes, I was definitely covering that little bit about, you know, fees to go pretend to be Satoshi. Or not Satoshi, one or the other.
Hoback: Well, why make up the whole John Dylan thing?
Todd: Well, like I said, I’m not John Dillon.
Hoback: Okay.
Todd: Sorry, I’m not John Dillon. I don’t know who that is. I’ll warn you, this is going to be very funny when you put this into the documentary and a bunch of Bitcoiners watch it.
Hoback: Well, I don’t think they would be very happy with this conclusion. Because you’re pretty controversial within the community at this point.
Todd: No, I suspect a lot of them will be very happy if you go this route. Because it’s going to be like yet another example of journalists really missing the point in a way that’s very funny.
Hoback: What is the point?
Todd: The point is to make Bitcoin the global currency. And people like you being distracted by nonsense can potentially do good on that.
Zach: Back to the talk…
Zach: So let’s take specifically this example of clearly Peter was uncomfortable. But what does that really mean? It’s like if he’s innocent or guilty, he’s going to be uncomfortable in that spot basically suddenly being set up to be accused of this of this narrative on camera. Anybody would be uncomfortable. So, there’s that element. Then you have to add in the fact that Peter is kind of a troll and a contrarian, and he’s liked to play with the idea that he is Satoshi. So whether he’s innocent or guilty, we can understand why that makes results in a weird behavior dynamic where he’s kind of trying to have it both ways and kid around like, “Maybe I am,” but clearly he’s very uncomfortable by the idea. And you could see why he would be uncomfortable, even if he tries to make light of it. It’s like that’s theoretically a life-changing accusation to be thrown at suddenly. So he’s like even if he was innocent—I guess innocent’s not the word—if he wasn’t Satoshi, then you can see why he’d have all these conflicting ideas that would make him behave in unusual ways.
That’s just to say for this and for many spots where so-called behavior experts sometimes try to get a lot of information, it’s like this is a very complex dynamic and you can imagine all sorts of things running through his head at that moment that make him behave in uncomfortable strange ways that make him say strange things that you’d be like, “Why would he say that?” Right? And especially with this dynamic of people liking to say that they’re Satoshi, that clearly adds another level of weirdness to it. But I’m curious, what do you think of all that?
Jeremy: Actually, this is why I asked you because I wanted to hear your thoughts on it. I have no expertise in reading people or trying to figure out if someone’s bluffing or not. What I do know, though, is that the filmmaker was promoting his reaction as positive evidence that he was Satoshi so he tweeted some things to that effect or retweeted other people saying that he sort of talked a bit about… One thing I thought was good is he said in an early interview that he didn’t think the case could be solved just by internet facts. Like, “Everyone’s poured over everything you can learn online and so I’m going to go and meet people face to face and just see where it goes and I’ll get their reactions. And that’s what I can do sort of as a documentary filmmaker that a lot of other people wouldn’t do or couldn’t do.”
Zach: Yeah, I saw one tweet the filmmaker made where he was pointing to Todd looking at—what’s his name? His mentor.
Jeremy: Adam Back.
Zach: Adam Back. And making the point that Todd seemed to be looking at Back as if he was a father figure who he needed support from and that was evidence that he was looking to this guy who helped him maybe hide his identity and were looking to him for support. That’s not conclusive. That’s not any sort of evidence for anything, because like I said, there’s reasons for Peter to be uncomfortable and you would look to somebody else for support and be like, “What do you think of this stuff?” That, to me, doesn’t mean much.
Zach: A note here: I made a mistake; that tweet wasn’t from the filmmaker but was from someone else responding to the filmmaker. But the point remains that many people were reading into Peter’s behaviors in various ways…
Zach: So yeah, I think we have to be very careful with not seeing what we want to see. Clearly, the filmmaker was painting a narrative that he believes. So we have to be very careful to not see what he’s telling us to see and then read in our interpretations of like, “He seems uncomfortable. He said something weird. I’m going to use that as a reason to highly trust this story or this accusation.” Right? I just think that for all these reasons, we really need to work against our desire for certainty or our desire to believe a narrative that someone else has told us. I think in the political realm and our personal lives, there’s all these narratives that we can find ourselves embracing that have much more nuance behind them.
But we like a simple story and we’re going to embrace that and then we’re going to use that belief in that narrative to filter for reasons for why the behavior adds up and for some reasons to believe that narrative. So yeah, I didn’t see anything. I might add more thoughts later. I think one thing that was clear was Peter seemed quite defensive and didn’t seem to really directly defend himself very well, but then you add in the fact like on the other hand, he’s being accused suddenly, he’s probably not making his best in the moment. He’s clearly somebody that has liked to play with the idea that he could be Satoshi so he’s not really going to feel the need to defend himself that strongly because he doesn’t want to sound defensive too. So for all these reasons, whether he is Satoshi or not, you can understand different reasons for why he behaved the way he did. That was my takeaway from that interview scene. Yeah.
Jeremy: Yeah, that’s great. I love that analysis. I think it probably did catch him off guard.
Zach: Yeah, I think so. He seemed very uncomfortable. Yeah.
Jeremy: Yeah. And Adam back, too, there was an earlier scene where they were sitting on the bench and he kind of did the same thing with Adam Back and Adam Back was like, “Oh, I was hoping that you wouldn’t ask me about Satoshi, because I’m not.” It felt like they had sunk a lot of time together and then he was getting around to the Satoshi question, almost kind of sabotaging it at the end, and so I don’t know if that happened with Peter but based on his tweet of doing about four recording sessions before understanding that that’s what the film was about, it was probably just a surprise question.
Zach: Right, a purposeful ‘gotcha’ kind of moment to put him on the spot, which I think is pretty clearly what he was trying to do. Do you have any other thoughts on the whole thing? One thing I’m curious about is say it came out that Peter was definitely Satoshi or definitely not Satoshi if it was proven to be somebody else, would you be that surprised either way with what you know, or do you just have an uncertainty range of it could be, it could not be?
Jeremy: I think I would be a little surprised that it was him. I just feel like the personalities don’t match. Now, maybe if he’s pretending to be Satoshi, the theory of the film is that he wouldn’t be taken seriously because he was so young and so maybe he’s adopting this persona of sort of more mature and stately and those types of things. But their personalities really seem quite different. That would be the piece that would sort of surprise me. But everything else could fit. I mean, he has the technical capability. He’s smart enough to have done it. The fact that his age was so young also doesn’t… There’s lots of people that have invented things in computer science as teenagers that were quite remarkable. So, yeah. But anyways, I would be surprised to learn that it was. And he could prove it, if he was Satoshi, that’s a provable thing. Satoshi has these keys that more or less he knows. If Peter Todd somehow knew them and was able to use them, he at least got them from Satoshi or someone who knew Satoshi, whether he is Satoshi. But you can’t prove a negative, so you can’t prove that you’re not.
Zach: Unless somebody else was proven somehow to be him.
Jeremy: Yeah, sure.
Zach: Accounting for the personality differences in the posting styles, do you think that could be… I mean, theoretically, if Peter Todd was Satoshi, could it be a factor of Peter basically working with Adam or somebody else to finesse this public image like it could be a group effort would help explain differences, and then they would do their best to remove any identifying language markers and things like that?
Jeremy: Yeah. The group hypothesis for Satoshi’s loaded and a lot of people think it could have been a group. I think it’s too complicated. Satoshi stuck around for a year or a year plus answering questions, and the idea of having two people do that is too complicated in my mind and you don’t remember who answered what. And the person who was answering, they answered questions about every aspect of the system. So they knew, in a consistent voice, they knew the system inside and out. So the simplest explanation is just that it’s one person.
Zach: Also, the kind of not professional-level coding would lend support that it was one person, probably. Right?
Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Satoshi wasn’t a superhero. He did something remarkable—like Bitcoin is a big technical achievement—but he wasn’t perfect across the board. His code wasn’t perfect. Even the idea, it was a unique combination of ideas, but it was existing ideas. It wasn’t invented completely from scratch. And so yeah, he’s not like a God-like figure.
Zach: Right. Two or more people would probably have resulted in better code and saw things that he wouldn’t have seen if he was one.
Jeremy: Yeah. But then you get into inconsistencies because like the one person that coded the one aspect, there’s a question about it. So that person has to answer that question and then the other person has to answer the other questions, and so you have this split personality that would emerge with all the emails and the forum posts and things like that. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s a much simpler example. And the only reason that people want it to be a group is just because they think it’s too big for one person. But my suggestion is that it’s not too big for one person.
Zach: Yeah. Okay, getting into the realm of the vibe of the documentary, how do I know you’re not running interference for Peter Todd and you weren’t hired by… I’m just mostly kidding here. [chuckles] That’s kind of a humor… I thought that was a humorous way. Maybe you’re working for Peter Todd or maybe you’re working for the government, the CIA, you know? [chuckles]
Jeremy: Yeah, the whole CIA thing was interesting because there was no logic to it, but they kept coming back to it. Like, maybe Peter worked for CSIS—which is our CIA in Canada—and, oh, Satoshi was mad that Gavin Andresen went to the CIA and talked about Bitcoin. And then there was this other persona that was invented that was like a government agent. Oh, sorry, sorry, no one knows this John Dillon. So maybe Peter invented John Dillon or it was a real person. And so it was like he was kind of trying to paint this intelligence into Satoshi’s story and into Peter’s story, and then somehow you were supposed to just think that that somehow leads to evidence that Peter is Satoshi. But there’s no logic to it. It’s just association, right?
Zach: Right. Again, that’s what I didn’t like about the documentary and a lot of documentaries in general. I would have liked to see the things that we’re talking about in here more in the movie. Like, what are the arguments against this as opposed to just like, “I’m going to paint my narrative.” Right? Or at the very least, nod to the fact that there are a lot of ambiguities and uncertainties and tell people where to find those ambiguities and uncertainties at the end. I feel like that kind of approach to documentaries is much more responsible than like, “I have this narrative, and even though people can clearly disagree with me, I’m going to paint this picture of why you should believe my narrative.” Yeah, I would have much rather seen some of the arguments that we got into in this talk in the movie. Right? But there is this incentive to create the grand narrative for these documentaries because it’s like that gets attention and that gets people talking. So I think even if I don’t know what the filmmaker really believes, but even if he had a lot of doubts about his suppositions, there is an incentive for him to draw those conclusions in the documentary to get people talking and to spark debate and get attention and make money. I’m not saying that’s why he did it, but I’m just saying there are those incentives and I think we need to draw attention to those and draw attention to the uncertainty more.
Jeremy: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that was the one piece that was missing was some critical thought about it. And then the other piece which I think someone brought up on Twitter too is that he didn’t really go back and interview family and friends and people that would have known him at that time. And this is in contrast to some of these other Satoshi… This isn’t the first documentary to suggest the name for Satoshi. There’s probably been 10 newspaper articles. One of the most famous was Dorian Nakamoto. This was—was it Newsweek that did it? I have it written down here. Yeah. Sorry, it was Newsweek. I actually listened to a podcast recently with a reporter who reported that story. I was wondering if did she change her mind? Because nobody believes it. In fact, I think in this documentary, they make fun of it too. I might be misremembering that. And she does. She still sticks to her guns. One thing she said is, “I just talked to his family so much. I talked to the parents and the siblings and no one could really account for what he did and he was always very secretive about work.” I didn’t find the reasons conclusive, but at the same time, she put a lot of effort into trying to interview people and try and understand the context of where that person was at that particular time. I didn’t see any of that. Maybe it didn’t make it into the film, but it seemed like there was this confrontation. And they talked to Adam Back but they sort of got to Peter Todd via Adam Back, but they didn’t talk to anybody else who knew Peter or did any sort of investigation of what his life was like at that time.
Zach: Yeah, I would really like these documentaries to end with like, “Go to this URL to see resources and counter arguments.” Right? That would be a responsible thing. I mean, especially if you’re making accusations that are life-changing about people. Show people where to go to or show whether there’s some nuance and more information and do your own looking at it or whatever. But yeah, it disappoints me that more documentaries don’t do that.
Jeremy: And then to answer your early question, there is no way I can prove that I’m not running interference for Peter or anything like that, but I do have a pretty long history working in this space and you can see that I have lots of publications and books. I even talk a little bit about Satoshi and we wrote a textbook—or some colleagues at Princeton University wrote a textbook on Bitcoin and I wrote the forward to it and I talk a little bit at the end, and so this is a question that I’ve been interested in long before I ever met Peter Todd way before this documentary came out. So, yeah, that’s my defense.
Zach: And to be clear, I was kidding with that.
Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Zach: Yeah. I do want to thank you, Jeremy, because this is something that was interesting. I actually watched the end of the documentary twice because it was so interesting and it’s something I probably wouldn’t have looked at for a while if it wasn’t for you reaching out. So, I just want to thank you.
Jeremy: Yeah, pleasure. I thank you also for looking at it. I think you’re well-positioned to comment on, and particularly, the sort of behavioral stuff at the end.
Zach: Thanks, I appreciate it.
Zach: That was a talk I had with cryptocurrency expert Jeremy Clark.
A couple more thoughts about Peter Todd’s behavior in the movie: Some people were reading a lot into Peter’s meta-level stuff, like when he was like “If I were Satoshi, I’d know you’d think that so I’d do this.” To me, it’s entirely believable that someone like Peter would engage in this kind of meta-level bantering and would enjoy messing with people’s minds, no matter if he was Satoshi or not. So to me, that doesn’t mean much.
Another thing people focused on was Peter getting upset. I myself went back and forth as to whether this was meaningful or not. In the end, I don’t find it a meaningful thing either way. I find it easy to imagine Peter in either scenario, whether he was Satoshi or not Satoshi, reacting in either angry or calm ways. The truth is, as with a lot of behavior, it’s just so easy for people to go down different emotional paths.
Now clearly there’s a lot of uncertainty in all of this. But I will say that one thing I keep thinking about after that talk with Jeremy is that forum post by Peter Todd: Of course, to be specific, the inputs and outputs can’t exactly match.
The phrase “to be specific” seems to me to be something that someone says to clarify something they themselves have said. Imagine hearing someone say a sentence starting with “To be specific” and imagine the context. To me, it’s really only a phrase I’d imagine someone saying to clarify something they just said; or else clarifying someone with whom they work closely with, or something. It’s hard for me to imagine someone following up something someone else said with “to be specific.”
That coupled with the other assorted coincidences strikes me as quite strange.
But the fact that other people don’t seem to make much of that, from what I’ve seen, makes me wonder if I’m just really off base with my instinct about that language. Maybe it’s simply more of an understandable and normal use than I think it is. That’s totally possible. Sometimes my instincts are quite wrong. But it does make me curious if anyone’s done work to see how common that phrase is when used to correct or clarify another person’s speech. I would predict that specific usage is rather rare.
I also wondered how often Satoshi followed up his posts with another short thought, versus just editing his first post. If there were almost no instances of Satoshi following up a post with a short clarifying post, that would be meaningful to me.
Another interesting thing that we touched on was the use of the asterisks around “exactly.” The fact that apparently Satoshi never used asterisks around words is important; you’d think you’d find at least one use of that if Peter were Satoshi. If it’s definitely true that that was Peter’s original post, and it’s known that it wasn’t edited in some way (for example, Peter adding the apostrophes shortly after posting to add a red herring), AND it’s known that Satoshi didn’t use asterisks around words in that way, that all seems like it almost completely absolves Peter for this evidence. If I wanted to show that this accusation wasn’t credible, that’d be what I would focus on. And it’s likely someone has already done this; again, I am not educated in this space and speaking very much as a noobie and speaking very much off the cuff.
In defending himself in more detail in an interview in Pravda, Peter says the following:
That claim specifically is especially ridiculous. He’s referring to this post. [and he links to it]
The thing is, that’s the second post I made with that account, and at the time, the account handle was set to a pseudonym.
If I had actually made that mistake, why on earth would I keep using that account rather than just discarding it and creating a new one? Why on earth would I change the account name to my legal name a few years later? It makes zero sense, and I think Cullen knows this.
End quote.
Peter’s defense here isn’t very solid, though. For one thing, if Peter knew his pseudonym account could be tied to his real name by internet researchers, he would be incentivized to embrace the account as his own. If he ignored it or stopped using it entirely, that would be incriminating, so he’d have an incentive to lean into it being his as a way to show he had nothing to hide. This is just to say that it’s not a really solid defense, unless there was a way to prove that his old pseudonym account had zero way to be connected to his name.
But again, as stated, I think this dynamic with Peter is rather unusual and not directly comparable to crime-related accusations. We know Peter may not, at heart, truly care about removing all beliefs that he is Satoshi. There are obvious positive incentives for not removing all doubt; Peter gets noticed, he gets fame. There are downsides, too, but just to say there are also many upsides. Also, Peter may simply believe, as he says, that it’s silly to focus on such things; he may not care about mounting a strong defense. Just to emphasize that the unusual dynamics and incentives in this case make it very different from a case where someone has every incentive to prove their innocence.
Again, in all of this, I’m not making any confident guesses. I am only just dipping my toe in these waters. I realize that, as an amateur in this area, I’m very much at risk of reading too much into what might be small pieces of evidence. But I thought some people would be interested in seeing some of the back and forths and thoughts I and Jeremy had about this.
Thanks again, Jeremy Clark, for reaching out with this idea.
Thanks for watching.