Over the course of the documentary, Todd repeatedly confesses to being Satoshi before retracting from the confession. “Besides, everyone is Satoshi,” Todd says, after such an admission. “I was trolling him,” Todd says, just as Hoback confronts him with the theory that he is Satoshi.
In the time since the documentary aired, Todd has taken steps to contradict Hoback with his own evidence. He provided WIRED with images of himself participating in outdoor activities such as skiing and caving, which a cursory look at the metadata would suggest were taken at about the same time Satoshi posted to the BitcoinTalk forum. (WIRED did not have the images forensically analyzed for signs of tampering, and thus cannot testify to their value as an alibi for Todd.)
He dismisses as “ridiculous” the idea that Todd accidentally completed Satoshi's forum post from a personal account, instead of logging in as Satoshi. Only later did Todd change his personal account to his full name; at the time of the alleged mistake, he was using yet another pseudonym for the account. “If I had accidentally answered myself, the obvious thing to do would have been to just leave that account and create a new one,” Todd says.
Todd's urgent rejection of the documentary appears to Hoback as an attempt to unnerve Satoshi hunters. “It doesn't surprise me at all that Peter would go on the attack. He is a master of game theory; that's what he does. He has been muddying the waters for quite a few years,” Hoback said. “He is an incredible genius.”
“[Todd] throws so much shit against the wall that nothing sticks,” Hoback claims. “It's a pretty effective technique. It's hard to identify someone who is contradictory and constantly makes contradictory statements.” (Todd dismisses Hoback's assessment as “woolly conspiracy thinking.”)
But just as Todd's “trolling” isolates him, it also exposes him. Although it has not yet been outright proven that Todd is Satoshi, he knows that a denial alone is not enough to convince the world that he is not. “If you assume an advanced enough Satoshi, almost any theory is possible,” says Todd. “It's a useless question because Satoshi would simply deny it.”
This story originally appeared on wired.com.
