Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery review - a well-produced documentary with a surprising outcome

Cullen Hoback's documentary is an entertaining watch, and uses the same tactics as a crime drama to keep his suspect hidden until the very end.

Cullen Hoback’s HBO documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery has finally dropped, and it does exactly what it set out to do — identify Satoshi Nakamoto.

The film begins by explaining how a trailer released by HBO promised to finally unmask the pseudonymous Bitcoin founder.

And in explaining why this is so necessary, Hoback argues that Satoshi’s stash of one million BTC makes it a matter of urgency as crypto becomes integrated with traditional finance.

The suspects

In some ways, Money Electric comes across like a “whodunnit,” featuring interviews with some of the best-known faces in the industry.

There’s a chat with JAN3 CEO Samson Mow, who’s depicted as a “Bitcoin ambassador” as he flies from country to country, encouraging governments to adopt it as legal tender.

Mow describes fiat as “a house of cards built on a house of cards built on a house of cards” while sitting on a private jet — ammo for critics who would say he could be talking about BTC.

That then leads us to Blockstream co-founder Adam Back, described as Mow’s boss, who claims he might be the first person that Satoshi Nakamoto contacted about his big idea.

The filmmaker notes how the cryptographer moved to Malta around the time BTC was created — a country that coincidentally happens to be a tax haven.

Back’s also British — and that’s significant given how Satoshi appeared to use U.K. spelling, and included a headline from the London Times in Bitcoin’s genesis block.

Even though he claims to be a latecomer to BTC — claiming he was the “embarrassing late guy” by joining the BitcoinTalk forum four years after the cryptocurrency was created — Hoback points out that Back was editing the Bitcoin Wikipedia page long before then. Why? To name those who potentially could be Satoshi Nakamoto, without naming himself.

At one point, Back looks physically uncomfortable when Hoback bluntly asks who Satoshi could be. There’s another awkward moment at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, when Mow teases Back by suggesting that he’s the one who brought BTC into being.

Unmasking the ‘culprit’

But just like a good crime drama features a scene with the actual murderer long before they are caught — meaning the viewer is aware of who they are but doesn’t suspect them — Hoback spends a little time with Peter Todd as he goes caving in an abandoned WWII bunker.

An early part of the documentary shows how he learned to code at a young age and became a controversial figure in the Bitcoin space — with Todd jokingly telling Hoback that he is Satoshi. Todd’s controversial emails with a man called “John Dillon” also emerged, who claimed he worked in a relatively high position in intelligence. Watching this, he didn’t seem like a serious suspect… until the documentary’s finale.

For someone who’s well-versed in Bitcoin, you could argue that it’s only the last 20 minutes of Money Electric you need. It features Back and Todd exploring steelworks ruins in the Czech Republic and Hoback confronting the pair about everything he’s learned during filming.

There’s a cut to Hoback making a dramatic realization while scouring the BitcoinTalk forum, which appears to show Todd finishing one of Satoshi’s sentences — days after he opened an account on the website. The filmmaker speculates that Todd may have posted using the wrong profile, meaning a simple human error would have blown his secret wide open.

Hoback goes on to claim that Peter Todd and John Dillon could be the same person — a theory that Todd dismisses as “ludicrous.”

A final piece of evidence shows a message where Todd describes himself as a “world-leading expert on how to sacrifice your Bitcoins” — perhaps an admission that he no longer has access to Satoshi Nakamoto’s stash — with Hoback suggesting Todd turned to this pseudonym over fears Bitcoin wouldn’t be taken seriously because of his young age.

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