The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of the creator of Bitcoin, remains a long-running mystery. But according to a new investigation published in the New York Times, Satoshi could be Adam Back, a British cryptographer who conducted influential early research about digital assets. Back denies that he is Satoshi.
People have been trying to track down the father of Bitcoin for decades, without much success. Based on Back’s denial, it’s not clear if the Times’ tech journalist John Carreyrou, known for his reporting that took down Theranos, got much further than anyone else.
Back fits the profile of the kind of person you might suspect would create the first cryptocurrency. He created Hashcash, the proof-of-work system that Satoshi used to mine Bitcoin, and he is now the co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, a company building infrastructure for blockchain-based payment systems. Back even agreed with Carreyrou that he’s a reasonable suspect, and it’s probable that Satoshi is — like him — a fifty-something-year-old British cypherpunk. (In that case, yes, the use of a Japanese moniker is odd.)
But Carreyrou doesn’t have any undeniable evidence to seal the case shut.
To stake his claim, he collected archives of emails sent in three cryptography listservs between 1992 and 2008, during the time that the pseudonymous Satoshi was active in these forums. Carreyrou fed the archive into an AI to identify commonalities between how Satoshi and other active posters wrote. For example, Satoshi did not put hyphens in compound nouns, and sometimes mixed up “its” and “it’s.”
Back was the best match but wrote on X that the evidence is a “combination of coincidence and similar phrases from people with similar experience and interests.”
The Satoshi case isn’t closed, but we have to admit, Carreyrou’s use of AI was pretty clever.
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