NYT investigation suggests Adam Back may be Satoshi Nakamoto; he denies the claim

The New York Times on Wednesday published an investigative report suggesting British cryptographer Adam Back may be Satoshi Nakamoto, citing similarities in writing patterns.

However, the report, which draws on a database of 134,308 posts from cypherpunk mailing lists, stops short of declaring Back the inventor of the $1.4 trillion benchmark cryptocurrency.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou said he spent a year digging through thousands of decades-old internet postings, court records, and email caches to build the case. 

Carreyrou narrowed a pool of 620 early cryptographic mailing list users down to a single suspect using a range of writing tics, including hyphenation errors and spelling variations, he wrote in the report. 

The trail began with a scene in the 2024 HBO documentary “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery.” Back sat on a park bench in Riga, Latvia, and tensed up when the filmmaker mentioned his name as a possible Satoshi, the report said. 

Carreyrou, who said he has developed expertise in detecting deception, said Back’s demeanor, including his reaction in the interview, raised suspicions. That led him to the cypherpunk mailing list archives, where Back had been a vocal participant since 1995, he noted. 

Carreyrou said he discovered that Back had outlined all five core features of Bitcoin in 1997 cypherpunk posts, which went live a decade before the white paper. He proposed an electronic cash system “entirely disconnected” from modern banking that would preserve payer and payee privacy, operate on a distributed network, maintain built-in scarcity, and require no trust in any bank, Carreyrou wrote. 

Back also anticipated elements of Bitcoin’s solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem, wrote of nodes that could “come and go” without affecting network operations, and proposed using Hashcash, his own invention, to mint Wei Dai’s b-money coins, Carreyrou noted. Satoshi later cited both Hashcash and b-money in the Bitcoin white paper.

However, Back has consistently denied that he is Satoshi. In the earlier HBO documentary, he denied the claim and asked that the conversation be kept off the record. When Carreyrou later emailed Back requesting metadata from emails Back produced during the Craig Wright trial, Back did not respond to two separate requests.

The Block reached out to Adam Back for comment.

A 17-year mystery, multiple false claims, and one unsolved fortune

This is not the first time someone has claimed to have identified Satoshi Nakamoto. The HBO documentary, which aired in October 2024, singled out Canadian software developer Peter Todd. 

The film’s evidence centered on a 2010 Bitcointalk thread where Todd corrected Satoshi on a technical point, which the documentary speculated was Satoshi finishing his own thought. Todd quickly denied he was Nakamoto with a post on X.

Other suspects over the years have included Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, and Len Sassaman. Finney was photographed running a 10-mile race in April 2009 at the same time Satoshi was sending emails and bitcoins to another recipient, according to the NYT investigation. Both Finney, who died of ALS in 2014, and Sassaman, who died by suicide in 2011, were deceased when a message attributed to Satoshi appeared in August 2015, though its authenticity has been disputed.

Meanwhile, some individuals have falsely claimed to be Satoshi. Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist, spent years asserting he was the creator. In a May 2024 ruling, the High Court in London found that Wright lied “extensively and repeatedly,” deployed clumsy forgeries “on a grand scale” and used “technobabble” to support his claim. 

In December 2024, Wright received a one-year suspended prison sentence for contempt of court after he continued to sue Bitcoin developers in violation of a court order.

Satoshi Nakamoto has not been heard from publicly since an April 26, 2011, email. The creator is believed to hold 1.1 million BTC, more than 5% of the total 21 million supply.

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