Repeatedly in the course of the documentary, Todd confesses to being Satoshi, before retreating from the admission. “By the way, everyone is Satoshi,” says Todd, after one such confession. “I was trolling the shit out of him,” Todd says, of the moment Hoback confronts him with the theory that he is Satoshi.
In the time since the documentary aired, Todd has moved to counter Hoback with evidence of his own. He provided WIRED with images of himself participating in outdoors activities, like skiing and spelunking, which a superficial look at the metadata would suggest were taken at roughly the same time that Satoshi was posting to the BitcoinTalk forum. (WIRED has not had the images forensically analyzed for signs of tampering, so cannot attest to their value as an alibi for Todd.)
The idea that Todd mistakenly completed Satoshi’s forum post from a personal account, instead of logging in as Satoshi, he rejects as “ridiculous.” Only later did Todd change his personal account to his full name; at the time of the supposed slip-up, he was using yet another pseudonym for the account. “If I had actually replied to myself by accident, the obvious thing to do would have been to just abandon that account and make a new one,” says Todd.
Todd’s urgent dismissal of the documentary reads to Hoback like an attempt to throw Satoshi-hunters off the scent. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that Peter would go on the offense. He’s a master of game theory—it’s what he does. He has spent a lot of years now muddying the waters,” says Hoback. “He’s an unbelievable genius.”
“[Todd] throws so much shit at the wall that nothing sticks,” alleges Hoback. “It’s a pretty effective technique—it’s hard to pin down someone who’s a contrarian and constantly makes opposite statements.” (Todd rejects Hoback’s assessment as “wooly conspiracy thinking.”)
But just as Todd’s “trolling” insulates him, it also exposes him. Though Todd has not been proven outright to be Satoshi, he knows a denial alone is not enough to convince the world he is not. “If you assume a sophisticated enough Satoshi, practically any theory is possible,” says Todd. “It’s a useless question, because Satoshi would simply deny it.”
This story originally appeared on wired.com.
