Investigative filmmaker. Terms and Conditions May Apply, What Lies Upstream, Q: Into the Storm, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery
Digital Dystopia
Joined April 2009
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Fredrick Brennan has died, apparently in his sleep. Just hearing this.
We went through some crazy sh*t together filming Q: Into the Storm.
Fred was one of the most complicated people I’ve ever known, his flavor of genius unmatched. He was hilarious, occasionally dangerous and eccentric in all the best ways.
Fred was 32. Doesn’t feel real.
Cullen retweeted
I started using social media at age 12, talking to technically minded adults about programming and computers.
...and I was using social media at age 15, to talk to Adam Back and Hal Finny while trying to invent Bitcoin. The UK, Australia, and Canada all want to ban that.
Cullen retweeted
The New York Times claims Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto.
But @ericjackson said his AI system disagreed.
The advanced language analysis concluded that Satoshi is either Peter Todd or Hal Finney.
Cullen retweeted
Two independent methods. One filmmaker with a camera. One machine trained on earnings calls. No coordination. Same name.
Full analysis, including what the documentary revealed and what TIQ saw that human investigation missed:
open.substack.com/pub/eventh…
Cullen retweeted
We built TonalityIQ on 173,000 earnings calls. It was designed to detect when CEOs are lying.
Last week, after Carreyrou's NYT investigation named Adam Back as Satoshi, we tested it on Bitcoin's creator.
The system ranked Peter Todd first. We had no idea who he was.
Have often wondered if "we are all Satoshi" started as an inside joke (and cover) that became a cultish mantra.
Cullen retweeted
A correction from our initial piece: we described Todd as American. He is Canadian.
This error turned out to be informative. Satoshi's spelling is 84% American, 16% British. Not American. Not British. Canadian -- or more precisely, a Canadian writing alongside an American.
Carreyrou saw British spellings and thought British author. The machine saw Canadian.
Their ai analysis of 12 candidates for Satoshi lands on two names: Hal Finney and Peter Todd. “No one else is close.”
We solved the Satoshi mystery that Carreyrou couldn't.
He watched Adam Back's hands shake and knew in his bones.
I don't know TonalityIQ in my bones. I know it from AI, machine learning, and 173,000 earnings call transcripts.
We tested 12 candidates. Two separated from the field. Neither one was Back.
Here's @ericjackson's full analysis for Satoshi which "measured how Satoshi thinks." Peter Todd actually ranks first.
1. Peter Todd
2. Hal Finney
3. Gavin Andresen
4. Adam Back
5. Len Sassaman
6. Paul Le Roux
7. Craig Wright
8. Nick Szabo
9. Martti Malmi
10. Dave Kleiman (low corpus)
11. Wei Dai
12. Dorian Nakamoto (low corpus)
Substack: open.substack.com/pub/eventh…
In Wallace's book investigating Satoshi, he ran extensive stylometry on the Bitcoin code. Todd sent him a videogame he wrote in C++ as a teenager called Corporate Raiders. Todd ranked 1st against 12 seasoned cryptographers on node.h, the most Hungarian-dense file.
First place in code. First place in writing.
Neither analysis had any incentive to point his direction.
Cullen retweeted
If it's not Szabo and not Back, then maybe @CullenHoback got it right in his documentary after all..?
Cullen retweeted
and HBO on balance does a great job explaining bitcoin to a general audience, in an accurate and positive way. i'm also happy to talk about bitcoin, any time, any where. hence the "bitcoin bitcoin bitcoin" video of me saying it 100x from different podcasts, conferences, TV.
The @nytimes cites Money Electric as the inciting incident for their Adam Back investigation. But it's more than just a scene—Back is the main character. Much of the runtime is cat and mouse with him.
The film asks from the start whether Blockstream (his company) is an extension of Satoshi as they try to make bitcoin the global standard. A bit of context:
@JohnCarreyrou
And here's the moment in Money Electric that @JohnCarreyrou says he replayed (we sure did as well). There's a whole lot more with Adam Back in the film for those looking for additional context.
Ha, well, I'm glad you found Money Electric valuable @JohnCarreyrou. Wish you'd reached out. I thought Back was Satoshi for much of production. But there's some tough contradictions. The code is a huge one. Back doesn't use Hungarian notation. Satoshi uses it consistently throughout Bitcoin v0.1 (an unconventional dialect no less)
Hungarian notation is a variable naming convention that prefixes names with type codes: nFeeRate (integer), fValid (boolean), strError (string), pindexBest (pointer), hashGenesis (uint256).
Not aiming to do a debunk thread (and I think Back got involved waaaay earlier than he claims). There’s a reason the last line of Money Electric is "If Todd and his friends at Blockstream were in fact behind Bitcoin.”
But ya know, time will tell :)
This remains one of the most interesting tweets from Adam regarding Satoshi
xitter.cf/adam3us/status/1271970…
NYT journo watches Money Electric, notices Adam Back has shifty eyes. Back's obviously hiding something on camera. That's the point. When I confront @adam3us and Peter Todd in the conclusion, their behavior is telling. Just not in the way @JohnCarreyrou thinks.
The mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, has remained unsolved for 17 years. Not anymore. Read my 18-month investigation to find out who Satoshi really is. nytimes.com/2026/04/08/busin…
The NYT article dismisses Todd based on photos he sent to Wired. Even Wired didn't trust the metadata. The data is trivially editable. This should have been stated.
So if Adam Back sent photos where he was on a boat fishing while Satoshi was posting, you'd say case closed?
Hal Finney appearing in a public 10-mile race is an alibi. Len Sassaman speaking at a conference is an alibi. But personal photos sent from a suspect while they're engaged in some private activity?
wired.com/story/peter-todd-w…
Where's the code stylometry? In Wallace's own book — which Carreyrou cites — analyst Timmerman ran ML code stylometry on 13 candidates. Back wasn't the top match on a single file.
Todd ranked #1 on node.h, the most Hungarian notation-dense file in Bitcoin, matched to a game he wrote at age 13.
In other words, Todd's childhood code for a computer game beat every seasoned cryptographer tested. Why downplay this?