During the two months I spent covering the Wright trial, several Satoshis also appeared in my inbox. “The world is not ready to learn more about Satoshi Nakamoto, and it never will unless certain conditions are met,” one wrote in a truncated message.

Hell, I even met a future Satoshi in person, in the waiting room outside the courtroom. The man, who introduced himself as Satoshi, sat in the public gallery to hear closing arguments. Soon after, he fell asleep, his chin slumped against his chest. One of the other spectators anointed him “Sleeptoshi.”

Many bitcoiners welcome this strange encrypted version of “I Am Spartacus”, preferring that the identity of Bitcoin’s creator forever remain a mystery. Freed from the dominating influence of one founder, Bitcoin evolved in a system of untouched anarchy, they say, in which no one’s opinion is worth more than another’s. Everyone is Satoshi and no one is Satoshi.

“Satoshi’s greatest gift to the world was Bitcoin,” Jameson Lopp, an early Bitcoiner and founder of cryptocurrency custody company Casa, told me earlier this year. “His second greatest gift was to disappear.”

The main evidence provided in the documentary to support the theory that Todd created Bitcoin is a December 2010 thread in which Todd appears to “finish Satoshi’s sentences,” as Hoback puts it. The topic of this thread – a way to prioritize transactions based on fees paid – is something Todd would later integrate into Bitcoin as a contributing developer.

As corroborating evidence, Hoback points to similarities in the grammar and syntax used by Todd and Satoshi, as well as the timing of Satoshi’s communications, many of which were written over the summer, when Todd would not have had classes universities to attend. (Todd disputes the characterization of his availability during the affected summers.)

Todd is well known in crypto circles for his contributions to the Bitcoin codebase and his advocacy for the technology as an alternative to cash, a supposedly surveillance-resistant tool for the digital world. At a conference in 2023, I saw Todd, on a panel, say “fuck you” to the audience unless they exercised their right to make cash purchases that couldn’t be monitored by the government or the bank. Todd admitted to having previously attempted to develop technology similar to Bitcoin, before Satoshi beat him to it.