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Cypherpunks Write Code: Peter Todd, Bitcoin Core, and Satoshi

by ObyteOctober 21st, 2024

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Too Long; Didn't Read

HBO launched a whole documentary signaling the cypherpunk Peter Todd as the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. That’s very debatable, though.

featured image - Cypherpunks Write Code: Peter Todd, Bitcoin Core, and Satoshi

As a group of activists fighting for online privacy, most cypherpunks go unnoticed by most people, and they often don’t become popular in mainstream media. That was also the case of Peter Todd, a prominent developer in the Bitcoin community but also a nebulous figure outside of it. At least until October 2024, when HBO launched a whole documentary signaling him as the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. That’s very debatable, though.

There aren’t a lot of things we know about Todd beyond his technical proposals or his public tweets, but we can mention a few. For starters, he’s a self-taught Canadian programmer of around 39 years old. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree and dropped out of a physics program. It was around 2010 when he first learned about Bitcoin. Indeed, he registered on Bitcointalk (the first-ever Bitcoin forum) in December 2010, but he wasn’t very active on it until much later.

By that time, Todd was employed as an analog electronics designer at a geophysics startup, while also attending college for physics. So, in his own words, he didn’t have a lot of free time and didn’t pay enough attention to the Bitcoin beginnings. He started to work on it almost full-time in 2013 because he believed he could contribute something more meaningful.

“There's no way I could've ever contributed anything meaningful to analog electronics, I'm not smart enough, and analog electronics is far too old holding a field for that to happen (...) whereas in Bitcoin there are multiple terms we use where I'm actually the guy who came up with the name for the term”.

He wasn’t on the original cypherpunk mailing list (that we know), but he’s considered a cypherpunk nonetheless, thanks to his code contributions to privacy-enhancing tools. Besides, as we’re about to see, he has some deep connections with other cypherpunks as well.

On Bitcoin Core

Todd has been a prominent figure in Bitcoin Core (the main Bitcoin implementation), contributing to several key features and improvements. One of his notable achievements is Replace-by-Fee (RBF), a method that allows users to replace unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions with new ones that include a higher fee. This mechanism helps speed up transaction confirmations when the network is congested. This system is formalized in the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 125, giving users the flexibility to adjust fees while ensuring recipients can wait for confirmed payments before considering a transaction final.

In addition to RBF, Todd proposed Stealth Addresses to enhance privacy in Bitcoin —although this work has been considered for other networks. These addresses make it harder for third parties to trace transactions by using one-time-use addresses for each transaction. This ensures that users’ identities are better protected on a public blockchain, even when they reuse the same wallet. By leveraging elliptic-curve cryptography, Stealth Addresses would allow only the intended recipient to detect and access their payments, adding a critical layer of privacy.

Todd also contributed to several other BIPs. For example, BIP 9 improved how protocol upgrades are signaled, BIP 65 introduced a new way to lock transactions until certain conditions are met (CheckLockTimeVerify), and BIP 111 enhances Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer protocol by allowing nodes to advertise whether they support Bloom filters, which help reduce the amount of transaction data sent to lightweight (SPV) clients.

On Zcash

Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency in which Todd has been involved. In 2016, he played a crucial role in Zcash's "initiation" ceremony, which involved creating cryptographic keys that were essential to its security. Todd, as one of the participants, took extreme measures to ensure that his part in generating these keys remained secure.

He ran computations from a laptop that was shielded inside a foil-lined box while traveling across Canada, and afterward, he destroyed the laptop with a propane torch to ensure no traces remained. “It was my goal to outdo every other station in Canadian cypherpunk glory,” he declared about it. His enthusiasm wouldn’t last, though.

Soon enough, he wouldn’t refrain from harshly criticizing Zcash security and its team. Todd has criticized the Zcash team for poor record-keeping, suggesting potential incompetence or even fraud. He recalls sending important data via a hard drive, which was reviewed by a journalist hired by Zcash, but later, the team claimed they "forgot" about it, which he finds absurd.

Todd also pointed out that after a critical bug was fixed in 2019, the team avoided admitting they had lost the files. He seems frustrated by the lack of proper auditing of Zcash’s ceremony, which he says was never truly verified despite the team’s claims. Additionally, Todd believes his reputation was harmed, alleging that some Zcash members spread false information about him behind his back. Despite acknowledging that Zcash’s technology has merit, he warns of risks due to the team’s supposed dishonesty and has also criticized the lack of privacy use cases by most holders.\

Peter Todd & Satoshi Nakamoto

The documentary film “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery”, produced and directed by Cullen Hoback, was released on HBO on October 8, 2024. After interviewing several key figures in Bitcoin and crypto (including especially Adam Back and Peter Todd), Hoback concluded that Peter Todd could be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious Bitcoin creator. He presented some circumstantial evidence for it.

In chronological order, it’s been proved that Todd has been in communication with the cypherpunks Adam Back and Hal Finney (before he passed) since he was around 15 years old. By Todd’s own words, he was “a young libertarian” actually trying to develop his own version of decentralized money since then, using the Hashcash system created by Back in 1997 —and later cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Hoback also pointed to Todd’s Canadian accent, his reported lack of professionalism in programming, and the academic schedule shared with Satoshi’s posts back then (when Todd was in school). However, the main piece of ‘evidence’ presented is the second-ever post that Todd wrote on Bitcointalk. It was in December 2010, when he barely joined, and he was correcting Satoshi himself about transaction fees.

Hoback found the heavy technicality strange for a newcomer. His working theory is that Satoshi himself logged out previously from his official account and logged back in from Todd’s account by mistake to continue with his own idea. Mere days after this correction, Satoshi would send his last message on Bitcointalk, and Todd’s account remained dormant for two whole years.

For his part, Todd denied being Satoshi Nakamoto. He insisted that we all are Satoshi and said that, in any case, if he was indeed Satoshi, he would have destroyed all the ways he could possibly prove to be Satoshi.

Freed Digital Currency

Satoshi or not, Todd has been a very dedicated cypherpunk in the crypto industry, and not only for Bitcoin. He’s declared that open-source is “the only way to do software” and that the goal in crypto shouldn’t be a specific coin, but the closest we can get to really decentralized and free money.

“What matters is not Bitcoin per se, but rather freed digital currency. That’s what matters. And if Bitcoin’s architecture proves to not quite work right, well other things can come along later. Bitcoin is as free as it gets in terms of freedom. But if it’s something that was technologically better, if that genuinely came around… but currently I don’t see anything that is with all things considered.”

Maybe that something isn’t here yet, or maybe it’s still in development. In any case, there actually are more decentralized networks than Bitcoin or Ethereum. In these platforms, there are still middlemen between sending a transaction and its ultimate approval —be it miners or ‘validators’. In the end, your transaction is in their hands, and they could approve it, or not, depending on their own interests. Such as a higher fee, like the RBF proposed by Todd himself, which allows for

On the other hand, a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) network like Obyte doesn’t suffer from those issues since it eliminates all middlemen in transactions. There are no miners or ‘validators;’ instead, users are their own ‘miners’. Every valid transaction sent to the DAG is automatically approved, and only the order of transactions is established with the help of a set of reputable and non-powerful nodes.

This way, Obyte has proven to be a more decentralized, censorship-resistant, and freer alternative to most blockchains. The cypherpunk goal to have fully free money in the hands of people all around the world may not have materialized yet, but the next step is already here.

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