The Protocol: Peter Todd Wants to Fix Satoshi's Bitcoin Bugs

The HBO documentary turned the spotlight on an early Bitcoin contributor who recently has proposed an upgrade to fix all the bugs left in Bitcoin's original code.

HBO Doc May Have Uncovered Peter Todd's Secret Bitcoin Agenda

The recent HBO documentary on Satoshi Nakamoto's possible identity has sparked a lot of buzz in the crypto community. One surprising revelation is that early Bitcoin contributor Peter Todd may have been hinting at a plan to fix all the bugs in Bitcoin's original code.

In a scene from the film, documentarian Cullen Hoback confronts Todd with the theory that he is Satoshi. Todd vehemently denies the claim, calling it "ludicrous." However, he does go on to suggest that Satoshi made several mistakes when writing the blockchain's initial code.

"There’s a number of things that Satoshi got wrong in the initial Bitcoin protocol, in particular, scripting DoS attacks, the timewarp attack, and issues with the merkle tree," Todd says.

He then proposes a "consensus cleanup soft-fork" to patch these bugs. This move would be highly suspicious if not for Todd's well-known role in Bitcoin's development.

As we reported last month, Todd's analysis of Bitcoin layer-2 technologies acknowledges that Satoshi was far from perfect:

“There’s a several things that drove me to work on L2s. First, I think there’s a number of things that Satoshi got wrong in the initial Bitcoin protocol, in particular, scripting DoS attacks, the timewarp attack, and issues with the merkle tree. Second, I think there’s a lot of value in having a modular architecture for Bitcoin, where you can cleanly separate different concerns, like scaling from security.”

Could this be the beginning of a gripping sequel to the HBO documentary? Only time will tell.