What is the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin? Is it actually a brainy Japanese man, or just someone LARPing as one? And are they sitting on a stockpile of Bitcoin worth billions of dollars today?
These questions have swirled since Nakamoto published a 2008 white paper outlining Bitcoin’s underlying framework, giving birth to a multitrillion dollar industry. Now, the New York Times claims to have identified a contender for the person behind the pseudonym: British cryptographer Adam Back.
In the investigative piece, reporter John Carreyrou — the journalist who took down Theranos back in 2015 — homed in on a trove of emails Satoshi wrote to the Finnish programmer Martti Malmi. Malmi chose to release these as part of a civil trial against an Australian man who was sued for falsely claiming to be the Bitcoin creator, providing the largest corpus of Satoshi’s communications to date. After extensively analyzing the writing style and uncovering other clues, it led him to Back.
A word of caution, however, since claims of Nakamoto’s true identity are as old as the pseudonym itself. Carreyrou, in fact, was inspired to conduct his investigation after watching an HBO documentary which claimed Nakamoto’s true identity was Canadian crypto pioneer Peter Todd, and finding its conclusion “unconvincing.” Instead, he was intrigued by a scene in which Back visibly tensed up after the producers told him he was suspected of being Satoshi.
As he did on the show, Back denied the claims to the NYT — more than half a dozen times, in fact. But Carreyrou is still certain he has the right guy.
To build the case, he points to a number of overlaps between Back’s background and Satoshi’s.
Based on his writings, it’s widely believed that Satoshi was part of the Cypherpunks, an anarchist movement formed in the early 1990s dedicated to using cryptography to undermine government surveillance and censorship. They were also concerned with creating an electronic payment system that didn’t leave a digital paper trail.
Back was a self-avowed Cypherpunk. And when Carreyrou searched through the tweet history of numerous Satoshi suspects, he found that only one consistently used a number of phrases that Satoshi did, most notably “a menace to the network.” That person was Back.
Back had also described an electronic money system called Hashcash in 1997 that was remarkably similar to what Bitcoin would become. Back proposed using this to combat email spam, a niche use case that Nakamoto also advocated for. In particular, he is only one of a handful of Cypherpunks who discussed using a method known as “b-money” for anonymizing user accounts, an idea Nakamoto would combine with Hashcash to create Bitcoin.
Back also expressed enthusiasm for Japan around that same time after a Japanese Cypherpunk alerted him about the country’s first remailer, a service for anonymizing online messages and email exchanges. Beyond the Japanese name, Satoshi used a service for anonymous web hosting provided by a company with a Tokyo address.
And Back both and Nakamoto were horrified by the shutdown of Napster, a peer-to-peer software used for sharing music.
The similarities are undeniable, but could easily arise between two likeminded individuals who identified with the same movement and worked in the same area. “Bitcoiners love sleuthing but coincidences do happen and don’t necessarily mean anything,” Back told the NYT.
But Carreyrou also analyzed Nakamoto’s emails, and found the language to be strikingly similar to Back’s. He enlisted an expert who used stylometry software to compare Nakamoto’s writing with a number of suspects. It showed Back as the closest candidate, but only by a fine margin, and the results were inconclusive. The expert noted that Nakamoto could have delibrately styled his prose to foil stylometry, something Back expressed interest in. Undeterred, Carreyrou conducted his own eye-test analysis, concluding that they shared a lot of written tics, such as their unique usage of hyphens and alternating between the British and American spellings of the same words, like “cheque” and “check.” A forensic linguistics expert agreed that what Carreyou focused on were the same patterns he’d would look for when trying to identify an author.
On Wednesday, after the NYT piece, Back issued his umpteenth denial.
“i’m not satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash,” he wrote on X, “hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash, privacy tech on cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas.”
“I also don’t know who satoshi is,” he stressed, “and i think it is good for bitcoin that this is the case, as it helps bitcoin be viewed a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity.”
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