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Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

• ChrisMarshallNY 6mo ago
  By now, this is a snipe hunt. If "Satoshi" were to ever try cashing out some of "his" BitCoin, I suspect that things could get interesting.
• xvxvx 6mo ago
  He’s not one person but a front for a US law enforcement task force dedicated to tracking down cyber criminals and anyone who would need anonymity online. It started, alongside TOR, as a way for drug dealers, weapons dealers, and pedophiles to do business. Neither cryptocurrency nor TOR are actually anonymous. They’re part of a pretty impressive honeypot ecosystem. What I’m interested in is the pivot when crypto tried to go legit. Some spook or suit decided that it would be used for other reasons also. Now it has some semblance of legitimacy. Before anyone asks: social media is another part of the same ecosystem. Nurtured and protected by the government and law enforcement, despite any number of practices that would bankrupt most companies and sent people to jail.
  • someperson 6mo ago
    The FBI created the purportedly encrypted "AN0M" messaging app [1] as part of a sting operation running between 2018-2021 used to catch drug-traffickers. Creating a fake app that people believe is secure or anonymous is an easier way to run a police sting operation than first making a significant breakthrough in Distributed Systems around the Byzantine Generals Problem. For your conspiracy theory to be true, at some point a honeypot/sting operation must actually end and arrests be made and the evidence be used in court. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield
    • jahnu 6mo ago
      Would make a good tv show where a small group in a secretive TLA org started this but then made so much money they decided to keep it to themselves and get rich. "Sorry director, the experimental project was a failure. We deleted it all now to clean up and free resources. Oh and yeah unrelated, I need to hand in my notice. Want to spend more time with my ...er... family. Thanks."
      • cucumber3732842 6mo ago
        People who've seen what the nation state can do to those who draw it's ire don't do such things. But other than that it would make a good show.
        • muddi900 6mo ago
          What are you talking about? The feds cant even prosecute arson against minority religions https://revealnews.org/podcast/trial-and-terror-rebroadcast/ https://revealnews.org/podcast/trial-and-terror-rebroadcast/
  • WhereIsTheTruth 6mo ago
    That's my theory as well, but not just to catch digital criminals, but it's a test bed for the digital wallet / ID I don't think it's exclusively american tho, it's a consortium between US/EU/ASIA, to establish the foundation of the world government, digital first
  • Lammy 6mo ago
    It also locks us all down to just the computers that are in our possession and the big tech silos, because now nobody can offer any computer resources free to the public without crypto miners immediately getting dropped on them. Even GitHub Actions got used this way, for example. Now every-goddamn-thing is sign up, log in, Know Your Customer, show us your ID, move your head like the arrows on screen, enter the digits from your authenticator app, check your email for the unique code.
• kaladin-jasnah 6mo ago
  > I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. > So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains. > How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed. I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims. To my knowledge, asymmetric cryptography is widely used. I have no opinions on the rest of the article, though.
  • kgeist 6mo ago
    >I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims The rest of the arguments is as weak: 1) both released open-source software 2) both don't like spam 3) both like using pseudonyms online 4) both love freedom 5) both are anti-copyright etc. Basically, the author found that Adam Back used the same words on X as Satoshi did in some emails (including such rare words as "dang," "backup," and "abandonware") and then decided to find every possible "link" they could to build the case, even if most of the links are along the lines of "Both are humans! Coincidence? I think not."
    • tovej 6mo ago
      I think this misses the point. The point is that interests and writing style matches, which means there's a higher chance they are the same person. The more similarities you find, the closer the match. It's in no way proof, of course. But it does provide good reason to look closer
      • rcxdude 6mo ago
        Only if those similarities are indicating more than 'generic internet hacker' for both of them. You only need 23 bits to identify a person but those are 23 uncorrelated bits, and all the 'similarities' presented here are extremely strongly correlated with themselves.
• vintermann 6mo ago
  You can't sell books or articles from saying something that's been said before, but Nick Szabo remains the best Satoshi candidate by a mile. He had developed the system closest to Bitcoin, he was actively seeking collaborators to turn his system into a practical offering briefly before Bitcoin was released, and he was the only cipherpunk who conspicuously said very little when the system he'd been trying to realize for a decade suddenly appeared. Satoshi credited all his inspirations except for the most obvious one, Szabo's. No one in the cipherpunks mailing list thought any of this was odd, probably because it was obvious to them who Satoshi was. In contrast to a certain convicted Australian fraudster who got caught trying to backdate his statements, Szabo got caught trying to front-date them. His politics are a match to Satoshi (tbf. true of all the cipherpunks), his coding style matches Satoshi, his writing style matches Satoshi if you disable the British English spellchecker. For good measure his initials match Satoshi. I view articles like these as a good test of which investigative journalists are hacks indifferent to the truth - except for that Wired guy, who I think knows better but thinks it's righteous to lie a little to protect Satoshi's anonymity.
  • triage8004 6mo ago
    Szabo is definitely top 3 candidates or on team
  • chistev 6mo ago
    > In contrast to a certain convicted Australian fraudster who got caught trying to backdate his statements, Who?
    • greazy 6mo ago
      This embarrassing wanker https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-28/craig-wright-not-satoshi-australian-bitcoin-fraudster/103642038 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-28/craig-wright-not-sato...
  • dist-epoch 6mo ago
    Nick Szabo doesn't know how to program enough to deliver the original bitcoin source code.
• donkeylazy456 6mo ago
  another pointless debate. who cares who satoshi is. only TV and magazines.
  • jmkni 6mo ago
    Who doesn’t like a good mystery?
    • themafia 6mo ago
      I don't. It's a tool used by modern "journalism" to distract and detract from a story. If you have something reliable to report, then by all means, report it. If all you have is a "compelling narrative" then put it on the shelf and do NOT waste my time with it. If you can't manage that then publish fiction books.
      • ghost-of-dmr 6mo ago
        You already wasted your time bringing yourself into the conversation.
        • deleted 6mo ago
          [deleted]
        • themafia 6mo ago
          Why? You've expressed no more meaningful of a position than I have. Perhaps you're confused as to the purpose of a "forum?"
    • donkeylazy456 6mo ago
      I like good mysteries too but satoshi mystery articles come out with same thing everytime.
• ChrisArchitect 6mo ago
  Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto-identity-adam-back.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ZVA.w6Eu.5G_bq5_h6ezB&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-...
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• triage8004 6mo ago
  Hal Finney
• chistev 6mo ago
  If Satoshi is still alive (I believe it's a single guy), then it's incredible the amount of self-control he has to not reveal his identity after all these years. Not needing the wealth or the fame and ego-stroking that comes with being behind such a revolutionary technology is enviable. Not many people are like that. If he is still alive and just moved on to other things as he said, I can't applaud that kind of personality enough.
  • cucumber3732842 6mo ago
    If I were Satoshi I'd keep my head down. I wouldn't want my life f-d up by outing myself. Think about the kind of world view you need to have to decide to dedicate the necessary time to develop a system for transacting outside of approved channels. Dude's probably worried about polonium finding its way into his tea or whatever. Assuming he is even an individual.
    • chistev 6mo ago
      What would killing him achieve? The Bitcoin technology is out of his control.
      • cucumber3732842 6mo ago
        You probably won't get killed, but of course you might by someone looking to make a point, in any case your life is gonna get turned upside down, various interests are going to want you to do things for them, people will want to hire you to say things or confer them legitimacy, people will want you to opine on things, etc. If you're in a nice enough place to dedicate the time to a project like Bitcoin is that something you really need? If you have sufficient frame of mind to develop Bitcoin that's probably not something you want in the first place.
        • chistev 6mo ago
          Good point
      • 6mo ago
• manarth 6mo ago
  https://archive.is/iRBng https://archive.is/iRBng
  • nickvec 6mo ago
    thank you!
• instagraham 6mo ago
  I don't think this reveals Satoshi's identity, nor that any prior piece of reporting may have done so. But I do think there's a high probability that Satoshi lurks or has lurked on HN, and perhaps reads these posts with an initial sense of apprehension followed by a chuckle at the inevitable misidentification.
  • szmarczak 6mo ago
    > misidentification We don't know if that's misidentification either. The author provides good evidence that the writing style matches, which doesn't provide a strong proof, however it's a good clue of who might it be.
• gertop 6mo ago
  I'm surprised that this is the best NYT investigative journalism could do. It's well written and comprehensive, but it also contains no new information. And I truly mean it, all the proofs listed here are so well known that you're likely to learn just as much by watching one of the hundreds of "Adam is Satoshi!!1" YouTube videos. Given the title (a quest!) I would have expected some personal findings to be added to the shared narrative, not just rehash of the first 2 pages of a Google search.
• hnsdev 6mo ago
  Particularly I believe that Satoshi Nakamoto is a nation-state who created Bitcoin to bypass sanctions. Simple as that.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • exabrial 6mo ago
    I've subscribed to the nation-state theory as well, but intentions unknown.
  • Jackpillar 6mo ago
    It was the CIA and anyone who aren't starry eyed tech dorks has known this forever
    • Aboutplants 6mo ago
      Occam's razor in this case is most likely true
      • hatthew 6mo ago
        Isn't occam's razor that he's just some guy who doesn't like being famous
    • newsclues 6mo ago
      The skills would be at the NSA for this project
      • Jackpillar 6mo ago
        The CIA has been involved in cyber operations since like the 50's and more offensively post 9/11 and it's only grown since. Google Vault 7, and the Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) which has over 5,000 employees which has been coined the departments "own NSA" but with even less accountability. This is obviously that which we know of and we're both essentially agreeing as the NSA/CIA work together often and in secret ala Stuxnet.
• lancewiggs 6mo ago
  I like it. In particular the descriptions of how he reacted when confronted. The public key anecdote is a red herring - there is far more convincing evidence in the article.
• jmkni 6mo ago
  I can’t get past the fact that Hal Finney lived around the corner from someone called “ Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto” I know coincidences happen but that’s one hell of a coincidence
  • DeliciousSeaCow 6mo ago
    Given Back and Finney's close-ish relationship, that same fact could have permeated to Back, and would be a further reason for him to use the name. That said, it's all pure speculation so :shrug:?.
  • IncreasePosts 6mo ago
    Is it a coincidence? Or is it really bad opsec from someone who was otherwise pretty good at it? Or was it really good opsec and someone wanted to plant little clues that it was finney?
  • levocardia 6mo ago
    Yeah this one seems absolutely insane, how many Satoshi Nakamotos are there in the world? It's very plausible to see the name on a mailbox (or meet the person) and think "that'd be a cool handle." And it's so wildly improbable that someone else would make up exactly the name of a neighbor of one of a small clique of obscure internet cypherpunks. It's not like the name was "John Smith" or anything. But I don't know how to square that with the "Finney was running a marathon while satoshi sent emails" claim.
    • xhkkffbf 6mo ago
      Crontab?
    • paulnpace 6mo ago
      > It's very plausible to see the name on a mailbox (or meet the person) and think "that'd be a cool handle." Indeed. Would anyone on the short list have known of this neighbor?
• raphlinus 6mo ago
  I found this article about as compelling as all the other attempts at identifying him. Half of the cypherpunks (I was pretty active) had the same set of interests in public key cryptography, libertarianism, anonymity, criticism of copyright, and predecessor systems like Chaum's ecash; we talked about those in virtually every meeting. The most compelling evidence is Adam Back's body language, as subjectively observed by a reporter who is clearly in love with his own story. The stylometry also struck me as a form of p-hacking—keep re-rolling the methodology until you get the answer you want. It's entirely possible Adam is Satoshi, but in my opinion this article moves us no closer to knowing whether that's true or not. He's been on everybody's top 5 list for years, and this article provides no actual evidence that hasn't been seen before.
  • lumirth 6mo ago
    What struck me in particular was the fact the reporter noticed that Back had theorized how to evade stylometry. Obviously, if one of the people in question had specifically come up with ways to evade methods, you’d want to re-roll those methods to account for that. That, alongside a number of other tidbits (Back’s activity and inactivity patterns lining up with Satoshi’s appearance and disappearance, his refusal to provide email metadata, his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law) makes the case a lot more meaningful than just “likely p-hacking.”
    • Lerc 6mo ago
      >his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law I don't think you can attribute this to financial incentive. The actual Satoshi could forfeit 90% of their BTC and still have more than they could know what to do with. At those kinds of levels I can see personal security being a higher consideration. Either way it would give no indication who might be Satoshi because all candidates would have a similar incentive if they were Satoshi, and you are measuring the absence of information.
      • philistine 6mo ago
        why does everybody assume that whoever is Satoshi still has access to their wallet? It's absolutely possible whoever is Satoshi has simply lost the key. We're talking new technology where you're running fast and loose. It's absolutely possible, and I'd say a big reason why someone would not want to admit to being Satoshi. I'm Satoshi, but I also lost billions because I messed up a Debian upgrade.
• n0um3n4 6mo ago
  Len Sassaman with contributions from others through time. We already know that.
  • toby- 6mo ago
    We also "know" it's Hal Finney, James A. Donald, Elon Musk, Paul Le Roux, Adam Back, ...
• djao 6mo ago
  The refusal to provide email metadata is the most damning evidence. Adam Back clearly has the emails; he is the one who provided them in the first place during the previous court case. Everyone knows he has the emails. If Adam Back and Satoshi are two different people, the metadata should be exculpatory, and easy to share. There's literally no reason whatsoever to hide the metadata unless he is the one. In a court of law, self-disclosure of inculpatory information cannot be compelled, so this analysis does not pass muster in a court of law. The court of public opinion, however, is quite different.
  • ShowalkKama 6mo ago
    >There's literally no reason whatsoever to hide the metadata unless he is the one. privacy?
    • neffy 6mo ago
      Time? He´s busy starting a company, taking the time to drag out decade old emails and digging out the meta data for a journalist who is borderline stalking (assuming he even has them somewhere). I wouldn´t give that the time of day either.
      • storystraight 6mo ago
        not saying you’re wrong or right here, but you’re the type to believe that a girl’s not responding to you because she’s “busy”
    • djao 6mo ago
      If privacy were such a big concern, then why did he release the messages (without metadata) in the first place? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to keep the messages completely private?
  • ianferrel 6mo ago
    The thing is, most of the people heavily involved in early Bitcoin are fairly characterized as cryptoanarchists, a group strongly devoted to the principle of privacy and liberty effected through technological means. The refusal to provide personal communications metadata by such a person is evidence of nothing but their steadfast commitment to the philosophy that presented them with the opportunity to be part of those email conversations in the first place.
• leroy_masochist 6mo ago
  Regardless of whether Carreyrou is right, Mr. Back's life has now changed massively. The article points out that the market value of Satoshi's wallet is north of $100bn. Time to invest in some personal security.
  • sonofaplum 6mo ago
    He was already the CEO of a billion dollar company and the article describes him traveling with security.
    • nullc 6mo ago
      Yet another example of how the article failed to do basic research.
      • mikeyouse 6mo ago
        Blockstream is mentioned multiple times, as is Back's wealth; > It was the beginning of an era in which Mr. Back quickly amassed influence and became a ring leader in the still small Bitcoin community. To staff Blockstream, he poached the top Bitcoin Core developers from their day jobs at companies like Google and Mozilla, giving him tremendous sway over the digital currency. He also became very wealthy: Over the next dozen years, Blockstream and its affiliates would raise $1 billion in funding and Blockstream would reach a valuation of $3.2 billion.
        • nullc 6mo ago
          Yes, and that claim is just nonsense.
      • storystraight 6mo ago
        more like yet another example of someone not reading the article but being over confident. His wealth is mentioned
        • 6mo ago
• int32_64 6mo ago
  If you've ever seen Back's twitter you would know he's not Satoshi. I'm still firmly in the Finney camp. Every couple years one of these articles shows up focusing on one of the core Satoshi suspects, at least do a Wei Dai one next time.
  • Ancapistani 6mo ago
    I’m also in the Finney camp. The most important bit to me is that doing something like this would be entirely in-line with his personality. Also, I think he truly believed there was a good chance he’d eventually be brought back. The most likely case in my mind is that he died with the private keys in his head, and that we’ll never get confirmation.
  • mijoharas 6mo ago
    So I just searched the article for Finney to see why it claimed it wasn't him. It claims Satoshi was active after Finney had died? What's that about? I used to be of the opinion that it was probably hal, but haven't paid too much attention. What's the counter evidence here? And why do we disregard that?
    • int32_64 6mo ago
      Satoshi's email accounts were presumably hacked in 2014 and the emails sent from them later were presumed fake because they lacked PGP signatures.
    • cloche 6mo ago
      Do you have a link for Satoshi's post after Hal had died?
      • rowanG077 6mo ago
        It's literally in TFA.
        • cloche 6mo ago
• 4oo4 6mo ago
  Someone already found this years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g I haven't read the full article yet but I'm guessing they didn't give credit, as the New York Times tends to do. Not definitive but it's a very convincing case.
  • sambaumann 6mo ago
    This video is linked in the article
• sambaumann 6mo ago
  This article is convincing, but ultimately still no true evidence, it's all circumstantial. After reading this, Back does seem like a pretty likely candidate, but maybe you could run the same kind of investigation on every other candidate and find similar matches. The filters they used for the text analysis did seem pretty arbitrary to match up with Back's language
• meonkeys 6mo ago
  fascinating. John Carreyrou is the guy who broke the Theranos story! But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Electric%3A_The_Bitcoin_Mystery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Electric%3A_The_Bitcoin_... is a bit more compelling. Satoshi is Adam Back and Peter Todd.
• stevenalowe 6mo ago
  Why does it matter? Changes nothing except doxxing someone
  • blast 6mo ago
    Humans are social animals, so any mystery about another person is interesting, and wealth and fame multiply this.
  • functional_dev 6mo ago
    true, but reading this made me learn something new. Turns out HashCash (system Bitcoin borrowed), was originally built to fight email spam in 1977 - https://vectree.io/c/hashcash-the-proof-of-work-system-cited-in-the-bitcoin-whitepaper https://vectree.io/c/hashcash-the-proof-of-work-system-cited...
• armchairhacker 6mo ago
  Why do journalists try to doxx innocent people, putting their personal (and here actual) lives at risk? Bansky, Scott Alexander... Spend this effort investigating corruption.
  • lumirth 6mo ago
    If you read the article there’s an interesting bit where Mr. Back has an active incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi: US securities law, which requires disclosing things which’d be material to investors. Like, for example, a stash of bitcoin which if sold could crash the price of the thing. And also, from my understanding, Back allegedly had some not-insignificant ties or meetings with Epstein? Point being, journalism like this is morally complex, and not as simple as “doxxing innocent people.” Of course, we are biased, as hackers on a web forum, we naturally relate with Satoshi, who was also a techie on a web forum.
  • HDThoreaun 6mo ago
    Journalists job is to get clicks on their article.
  • creato 6mo ago
    If this guy was still just a guy on a mailing list and otherwise living a private life, this article would be inappropriate to publish IMO. However, he's a significant public figure in the Bitcoin world (apparently). Still a gray area I guess but I don't think he's off limits from this kind of scrutiny.
• apeace 6mo ago
  I have always thought Satoshi must be dead (as a couple of past suspects are). How could someone not want one hundred BILLION dollars? There is no person alive who could resist that. I'm sorry, there's just not. To be fair, if Back was Satoshi, he would need to hide it so his company can go public, or whatever. Because that way he might make -- who knows! -- hundreds of millions of dollars? Even if moving the coins crashed the Bitcoin price by 90%, Satoshi would still be a billionaire. Generational wealth.
  • DeliciousSeaCow 6mo ago
    Back has earned generational wealth already, and the wealthy borrow (at rates lower than capital appreciations) against capital to fund all their living. If I were Back, that's exactly what I'd be doing to preserve anonymity.
    • browningstreet 6mo ago
      The billionaires ruining the world right now are certainly satisfied with their respective hauls.
  • lofaszvanitt 6mo ago
    He (or the enterprise) could have ample bitcoin, on other accounts... the main account is just bait for people.
  • lesostep 6mo ago
    Let's say you designed the bitcoin specifically as a currency that can only go up in value. And then it did get up tremendously in value. If you already have a lot of money (and Adam has) then why would you cash out early? Your money is already in asset specifically designed (by you) to beat markets and be bubble resistant
• bnjemian 6mo ago
  It's funny because the author notes a prior attempt to uncover Satoshi's identity and giving up because an implied lack of technical depth. I guess this time they were undaunted. Perhaps they received an AI assist and felt validated by AI sycophancy. Much of the technical evidence cited is weak (e.g. strong knowledge of public-key cryptography, both used C++, etc.). Still, the (somewhat lazy) forensic linguistics is interesting.
  • toby- 6mo ago
    The hyphenating patterns are particularly curious, to me. Some supposed idiosyncrasies ('bugfix', for example) are just standard renderings amongst programmers/tech types; using those as evidence somewhat betrays the author's lack of familiarity with the field/community (as if the C++ and public-key cryptography 'evidence' didn't make that plain enough...).
• danso 6mo ago
  Pretty compelling story. Not necessarily for its revelations, but for the fact that John Carreyrou and the NYT decided to publish it at all. If it were by anyone else, I would have stopped reading after the first thousand words of meandering narrative, but Carreyrou is staking his massive and impeccable investigative journalistic reputation on this mountain of circumstantial evidence and statistical analysis. Him torching his reputation (especially with Elizabeth Holmes fighting hard for a pardon/clemency!) would be as interesting as a story as actually finding Satoshi's real identity. The evidence is good. What was more interesting to me is the section where he explains how he eliminated all the other asserted and likely candidates. Since the story is already a very long read, I imagine much of this section got left out. So some of the reasons for eliminations are too brief to be convincing on their own. For example: > What about other leading Satoshi suspects, I wondered? Were there any who fit the Satoshi profile better than Mr. Back? A 2015 article in this newspaper put forward the thesis that Satoshi was Nick Szabo, an American computer scientist of Hungarian descent who proposed a Bitcoin-like idea called “bit gold” in 1998. Mr. Szabo remained at the top of many people’s lists until recently, but a heated debate that played out on X about a proposed update to the Bitcoin Core software exposed his ignorance of basic technical aspects of Bitcoin. A 2015 article in this newspaper — Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin, by Nathaniel Popper [0] [Szabo] proposed a Bitcoin-like idea called “bit gold” in 1998 — Szabo's post on his Blogger site [1] but a heated debate that played out on X about a proposed update to the Bitcoin Core software exposed his ignorance — links to a Sept 29, 2025 tweet by Adam Back replying to Szabo, who had tweeted: > Good info thanks. Follow-up questions: (1) to what extent is such an OP_RETURN-delete-switch feasible in practice? (I know it is feasible in theory, but there are many details of core that I am not familiar with). (2) has such a thing been seriously proposed or pursued as part of Core's roadmap? exposed [Szabo's] ignorance of basic technical aspects of Bitcoin — links to another reply tweet by Back in October 2025 [3]: > Nick, you're actually wrong because there is a unified weight resource. eg byte undiscounted chain space reduces by 4 bytes segwit discounted weight. no need for insults - people who are rational here are just talking about technical and risk tradeoffs like rational humans. Szabo's tweet was: "Another coretard who thinks their followers are mind-numbingly stupid." ---- Can someone explain why this relatively recent tweet fight is convincing evidence that Szabo is too ignorant to have been behind Bitcoin? I know he went silent for a bit when Bitcoin first got big, but he hadn't revealed his ostensibly overwhelming ignorance until a few months ago? [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/business/decoding-the-enigma-of-satoshi-nakamoto-and-the-birth-of-bitcoin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/business/decoding-the-eni... [1] https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html [2] https://x.com/adam3us/status/1972888761257415129 https://x.com/adam3us/status/1972888761257415129 [3] https://x.com/adam3us/status/1981329274721149396 https://x.com/adam3us/status/1981329274721149396
• gridder 6mo ago
  Barely Sociable already explained it 5 years ago: https://youtu.be/XfcvX0P1b5g https://youtu.be/XfcvX0P1b5g
  • dang 6mo ago
    If people want rabbit holes https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=XfcvX0P1b5g&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22adam%20back%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  • an0malous 6mo ago
    tl;dw?
  • ex-aws-dude 6mo ago
    The article literally mentions that in the beginning
• talkfold 6mo ago
  The guy who took down Theranos spent a year on hyphenation patterns. Respect the commitment.
• themafia 6mo ago
  Every couple of years they convince some "intrepid" reporters to go make up a story about /the/ creator of bitcoin. Which I find highly suggestive about the true nature of the creator(s) of bitcoin.
• modeless 6mo ago
  I don't believe anyone claiming that Satoshi is still alive. There is zero chance any human who put so much effort into creating something would remain silent while it became a $2 trillion phenomenon that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Satoshi is certainly dead.
  • cbxyp 6mo ago
    This is a ridiculous argument "zero chance" that completely discounts the possibility (or in all likelyhood, probability) that the creator may be compelled to stay silent, in jail, etc.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • kleene_op 6mo ago
    > There is zero chance any human who put so much effort into creating something would remain silent while it became a $2 trillion phenomenon I'd argue this is the best reason to remain silent as much as one can.
  • Dove 6mo ago
    I once became so famous that a community of several hundred people knew and recognized my name for a few years. At the time, it was very ego-flattering, and I was delighted to have done something that had such a big and positive impact. However, as an experience it really did not agree with me, and even this very minor level of fame has left me resolved to never, ever, ever become that famous again if I can help it. I don't think I am unique in that. In fact, I perceive that it is very normal for public figures, not merely to fade from public attention, but to actively seek out seclusion. While I'm not Satoshi, I would put the odds of someone in such a position of maintaining radio silence far from "zero chance". I would put it more around 70 or 80 percent. And at any rate, it is certainly what I would do.
  • 6mo ago
• 348asGaq7 6mo ago
  It would not surprise me. Adam Back seems to have good connections to the deep state people, too. His company is merging via a SPAC with a Cantor Fitzgerald (Lutnick owned) company. Cantor Fitzgerald also handles the collateral for Tether, which relocated from the Caribbean (where it was associated with a CIA bank) to El Salvador. Bitcoin is very handy for avoiding awkward Iran Contra schemes for covert ops. You no longer need Lutnick's friend Epstein to handle the laundering.
• c83n2d8n39c9 6mo ago
  what if satoshi is not one person but a phenomenon, a group of minds... the interesting thing about the technology is that it is a public ledger and everything that goes along with that when you tie it to the metadata trails across the networks people use it on... ohh the implications
• hardwaregeek 6mo ago
  A fun counter factual: try “proving” that famous scientists are their collaborators based on this methodology. Obviously Hardy and Littlewood are the same person. They’re both British mathematicians who use analysis and number theory and have similar sensibilities in politics and math.
  • refulgentis 6mo ago
    The Hardy-Littlewood comparison cuts the other way. Two collaborators in the same subfield sharing terminology is the baseline, not evidence of anything. What makes the Back case interesting is convergence on things that have nothing to do with cryptography: the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, the same obscure FDR gold ban interest, the same weird hyphenation errors. Pick any two cypherpunks at random and you won't find that kind of overlap on non-technical quirks. Then add the negative space. Back was one of the most prolific voices on these lists for a decade, especially on digital cash. Satoshi shows up, Back goes quiet. Satoshi leaves, Back comes back. Hardy and Littlewood never had that problem.
    • kgeist 6mo ago
      >the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, the same obscure FDR gold ban interest, the same weird hyphenation errors Dunno it assumes their cypherpunk group must always discuss strictly cryptography and never discuss anything else. It could be just some off-topic ideas floating around in their community. For me, the only solid, damning evidence would be statistical methods of text analysis like they do to prove authenticity of a literary work.
    • jsnell 6mo ago
      > Pick any two cypherpunks at random and you won't find that kind of overlap on non-technical quirks. That could be a valid methodology if you pre-registered the list of quirks before doing the investigation. But in this case the journalist clearly didn't do that, but tweaked the set of quirks until they produced the desired outcome.
• Simulacra 6mo ago
  Every time I see one of these articles about "unmasking" Nakamoto, I always wonder the same thing: why? I don't really see a compelling reason to unmask this person. Surely there are other more important things a journalist can spend their time looking into. It's the same with Banksy: why?
  • afavour 6mo ago
    I agree about Banksy. But in this case Satoshi controls a huge about of bitcoin. If, whoever they are, they did something with it, it would absolutely move markets.
    • Simulacra 6mo ago
      I can see that, but would that not also apply to other people who hold large amounts? And to play devils advocate for a moment, isn't one of the points of a decentralized currency is the inability to be tracked ?
  • toby- 6mo ago
    People love a mystery. And people love to solve mysteries. Don't look for any deeper motivation than that.
• afpx 6mo ago
  I always thought it was Argonne that built it. Interestingly it seems that Adam Back did work with them. So maybe?
• Lerc 6mo ago
  I found this amusing. >P.G.P., a free encryption program used by antinuclear activists and human rights groups to shield their files and emails from government surveillance. I find it fascinating to see how the users of a program change, based on how a reporter wants to build or diminish. At least it's going in a positive direction today.
  • 6thbit 6mo ago
    that's such a loaded statement.
    • chii 6mo ago
      This is the power of language. The bias is built into it.
  • torben-friis 6mo ago
    >Water, a drink consumed by nobel price winners and European kings...
    • Lerc 6mo ago
      Oxygen, an element serial killers need in order to kill again.
      • deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
      • konfusinomicon 6mo ago
        [dead]
      • MikeNotThePope 6mo ago
        Nearly all air molecules were once part of a dinosaur fart.
        • 6mo ago
• coppsilgold 6mo ago
  The author has collected more than enough entropy to single out Mr. Back, especially when the anonymity set of who could be Satoshi is so small. It's either Back or someone who tried to frame him, long before Bitcoin was even remotely successful. Generally, framing someone like this is a poor strategy because it places you in the person's radius as opposed to being absolutely anyone.
• WalterBright 6mo ago
  My dorm room was next door to Hal Finney. He was a freakin genius at every intellectual endeavor he bothered to try. My fellow students and I were in awe of him. But you had to get to know him to realize what he was. To most people, he was just a regular guy, easy going, friendly, always willing to help. He was also a libertarian, and the concept of bitcoin must have been very appealing to him. And inventing "Satoshi" as the front man is just the prankish thing he'd do, as he had quite a sense of humor. I regret not getting to know him better, though I don't think he found me very interesting. My money's on Hal.
  • deleted 6mo ago
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  • ProllyInfamous 6mo ago
    Hal was likely part of the Satoshi team — even receiving the first ever bitcoin transaction (on the main blockchain). Hopefully his children got to open extremely rewarding bankboxes, after his death (whether or not containing bitcoin — but likely so). If it were myself, I'd also keep quiet about such a miracle. For my own meager holdings, I'll keep waiting (over a decade strong HODL, now).
• mithrilskeleton 6mo ago
  Satoshi supported big blocks in his writings and empowered the pro-big block Gavin when he disappeared. Adam is a well known supporter of small blocks, ultimately the "winning" side of the debate. They are not the same person.
  • cloche 6mo ago
    I haven't read the article yet but I remember this as well. IIRC Adam went the route of more towards a centralized group controlling Bitcoin's future during the BTC/BCH debates/fork. It seemed against what Satoshi would have pushed for. Plus Adam's group seemed like a catalyst for Gavin stepping back as a result of the political in-fighting and mud-slinging. It would be a huge surprise if Satoshi were Adam. Personally, I think Satoshi was Hal Finney.
    • cloche 6mo ago
      Adding on now that I've read the article and this situation is covered: > The following year, in 2015, the Bitcoin community fractured over a proposal to increase Bitcoin’s block size. A faction led by two Bitcoin developers, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, wanted to make the blocks much bigger to accommodate more transactions. But this was controversial... > Mr. Back fiercely opposed increasing the block size. In a series of posts on the Bitcoin-dev list, he warned against Mr. Andresen and Mr. Hearn’s proposal in increasingly strident tones. > Then, out of the blue, Satoshi appeared on the list with an email that neatly dovetailed with Mr. Back’s position. It was the first time Satoshi had been heard from in more than four years, other than a five-word post the previous year denying a Newsweek article’s claim to have unmasked him. > Many in the Bitcoin community questioned the new email’s authenticity since another of Satoshi’s email accounts had been hacked. But Mr. Back argued that the email sounded real. In a series of tweets, he called Satoshi’s observations “spot on” and “consistent with Satoshi views IMO” and took to quoting from the email. I now realize that the Satoshi email was after Hal Finney's death so that changes my opinion. From OP: > Satoshi supported big blocks in his writings and empowered the pro-big block Gavin when he disappeared This isn't correct. In fact, the linked email in the article says the opposite https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/6EC9DDF352DC4838AE9B088AB372428A25E1F42A@DS04/ https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/6EC9DDF352DC4838AE9B088AB37...
• opengrass 6mo ago
  Congrats to the author citing a troll on a Vistomail account anyone could re-register when AnonymousSpeech was around.
• dboreham 6mo ago
  I'm going to call BS on this. Not that this guy couldn't be Satoshi, but the article has some serious nonsense in it. Ha said he learned to program on a "Timex Sinclair". It wasn't called that in the UK. Did he know the alternative name and auto-translate in speaking to a US journalist? Seems unlikely. Then he used C++! Amazing. So did everyone at that time. He took an interest in PK cryptography. So has every single serious software engineer since the 1990s. It's the same thing as Bitcoin! Seriously. I stopped reading when the next piece of evidence was that he used the word "libertarian".
• gorfian_robot 6mo ago
  this and the recent banksy 'umasking' by major news outlets is sad in our era of huge US governmental crimes and coverups.
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• uxhacker 6mo ago
  Using the articles logic. Obviously Satoshi and Banksy are the same person. They are both from the same era and British. There are so many people I know from that Era who believed the same things that Mr. Back believed in. Half my work colleagues at the time where interested in distributed computers, Postage pay, and algorithmic payments. I am not convinced
• throwaway85825 6mo ago
  Satoshi is the guy with the PhD in distributed computing who took a sabbatical during which bitcoin was published.
  • nly 6mo ago
    Len Sassaman?
• sho_hn 6mo ago
  This was a fun article, but also an oddball collection of strong and weak claims. Some of the "isn't it interesting ..." type coincidences would, as people on this forum would know, be commonplace among the subculture or even just technologists, and often lack the comparison to the overall Cypherpunk corpus - for example: no, studying public-key cryptography in grad school certainly isn't a high-signal differentiating tell for Satoshi-ness. For some he does provide that though, and they're certainly compelling. What I like best about the Back attribution is that it totally makes sense in context of my operating model of humans and passes the Occam's Razor test: Still actively involved, interested in the governance, interested in acclaim/prestige, built up wealth masking his other wealth, etc. Ego and "Tell me you're Satoshi without telling me you're Satoshi" written all over it.
  • levocardia 6mo ago
    Interesting: my Occam's Razor test is "$100B sitting around untouched, how can that be?" Well, simplest answer is that satoshi is dead.
    • toby- 6mo ago
      Or he doesn't have the keys or never owned the wallets attributed to him.
• BobbyTables2 6mo ago
  Seems like the IRS would have an enormous vested interest in tracking him down too…
• BobbyTables2 6mo ago
  Would be darkly hilarious if Santoshi lost his wallet long ago… I’ve certainly lost a lot of the small scripts and utilities I wrote long ago. Can’t remember any usernames, much less passwords, from 20 years ago…
  • paulnpace 6mo ago
    This was my thought. I mined Bitcoin super early in the project on a spare computer. It sat for at least a week before I went back to it and discovered that it was unresponsive. Formatted the drive and tried some other nerd thing.
• dools 6mo ago
  This is the most compelling "who is Satoshi?" post I've found: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=628344.msg48198887#msg48198887 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=628344.msg48198887#m... "I contend that James Simons put the team together that made up Satoshi Nakamoto and that Nick Szabo was the main public-facing voice behind the nym."
  • IncreasePosts 6mo ago
    Why would he do that surreptitiously, instead of just being clear that they were working on it? Why wouldn't they cash in the million or so bitcoins that were pre-mined? How did they get the whole team to communicate in a unified style? How did they get everyone to stay quiet after Bitcoin took off?
• nitwit005 6mo ago
  Looking at some of the linked examples, I did not feel convinced at the style similarity. For example: > In the spirit of building something in the public domain, Mr. Back and Satoshi also both created internet mailing lists dedicated to their creations — the Hashcash list and the Bitcoin-dev list — where they posted software updates listing new features and bug fixes in a format and style that looked strikingly similar. That paragraph links two release notes: https://www.freelists.org/post/hashcash/hashcash113-released#google_vignette https://www.freelists.org/post/hashcash/hashcash113-released... https://web.archive.org/web/20130401141714/http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=bitcoin-list&max_rows=25&style=nested&viewmonth=200912 https://web.archive.org/web/20130401141714/http://sourceforg... They do have a similar "release notes rendered with Markdown" feel, but the actual text has some obvious capitalization and tone differences.
• dnnehgf 6mo ago
  satoshi: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=showPosts https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=show... adam back: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=101601;sa=showPosts https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=101601;sa... page through each of those profiles and search for the following strings: ")." "(i" "(e" "nor" you find: 1. adam back is constantly writing full sentences in parentheses with a period standing outside the end parenthesis. so, for example: "To review it will be clearer if you state your assumptions, and claimed benefits, and why you think those benefits hold. (Bear in mind if input assumptions are theoretical and known to not hold in practice, while that can be fine for theoretical results, it will be difficult to use the resulting conclusions in a real system)." that is non-standard, and satoshi never does it. when he (very rarely) uses parentheses for full sentences he either (a) (in a few cases) does not use a period at all (which is also non-standard), or (b) (in a single case) he puts it on the inside of the parentheses. back can barely get through a single long post without a full-sentence parenthesis. satoshi very rarely uses a full-sentence parenthesis. 2. back uses "(ie" and "(eg" very often. satoshi never uses these. 3. satoshi never uses "nor." back uses it very often.
  • nneonneo 6mo ago
    1. I do something similar quite frequently in informal contexts, and have to catch myself before posting such text to more formal settings. If Satoshi was as aware of stylometry as the article claims, it stands to reason that he would edit those out of his writing. The article is clear that Satoshi’s writing is generally more concise than Beck’s, which may have been highly intentional; parenthetical sentences are generally the opposite of concise (they’re often used to go on a tangent or ramble, etc.). 2. Similar to 1 - a quirk that is easily caught by editing, if your goal is to sound more refined and precise. Academics know it’s i.e/e.g but the dots may get omitted when writing quickly. 3. Interesting observation. That’s a fairly stark difference! Are there other posters who do not use “nor”? If Satoshi doesn’t use “nor”, does he use a grammatically incorrect alternative, or are his sentences just structured to avoid it?
• nodesocket 6mo ago
  Seems most probable it was Hal Finney. Hal passed away in 2014 which explains the no movement of the Satoshi coins which are currently valued at a staggering ~$75 billion
• dyauspitr 6mo ago
  Maybe this is something to set Claude Mythos loose on. This seems like the kind of thing it would be good at.
  • adi_kurian 6mo ago
    Yep def the lexical pattern piece.
• malbs 6mo ago
  When did Satoshi make an appearance in 2015? I couldn't find the spot in the article where the author cites it. Everywhere I've read it states his last interactions were 2010, and his wallet hasn't been touched since then either. Based on everything I've read, I think Satoshi is Len Sassaman
  • cloche 6mo ago
    Search for this section: > Then, out of the blue, Satoshi appeared on the list with an email that neatly dovetailed with Mr. Back’s position
  • lateforwork 6mo ago
    Here it is: https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/6EC9DDF352DC4838AE9B088AB372428A25E1F42A@DS04/ https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/6EC9DDF352DC4838AE9B088AB37... Satoshi came to Adam's rescue when it seemed like Adam is going to fail to prevent the fork.
  • malbs 6mo ago
    Thanks for those, but I can't trust that a random post to a mailing list from a compromised email address, to provide backing to someone else's argument is proof of life
• deleted 6mo ago
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• joshrw 6mo ago
  Terrible article. The real Satoshi is Nick Szabo and no one else is even close. Hal Finney, Wei Dai, etc. New York Times’ quality has really gone downhill.
• niobe 6mo ago
  Steeped in confirmation bias.. the whole article - and apparently author's methods - are written from the point of view of trying to prove that Satoshi is Adam Back. This cannot be trusted, no matter how many times Back is mentioned in a single article
• blindriver 6mo ago
  Anyone who has access to Satoshi's account is worth $100B. If Satoshi were still alive some of the BTC would have been moved at least a little but they haven't. Whoever Satoshi was is now dead.
  • cloche 6mo ago
    There was no guarantee that Bitcoin would take off. It may be tough to imagine looking back in retrospect but, in another world, Bitcoin could have turned out to have been another digital currency with limited value. Many people lost their keys in the early days when Bitcoin was worthless. It's not unreasonable to think the same wouldn't have happened to Satoshi. He may have also thrown them away on purpose.
• olalonde 6mo ago
  All you need to know about this "quest": https://xcancel.com/austinhill/status/2041986130871251141 https://xcancel.com/austinhill/status/2041986130871251141 Plus, the most obvious reason that Adam Back is not Satoshi is that he'd absolutely take credit for Bitcoin if he could. And he would have put an end to Craig Wright's legal circus. The most plausible explanation is that Satoshi is either dead or incapacitated.
  • eddiewithzato 6mo ago
    Look at his comment here, then you will realize why it’s definitely Back. And why he certainly would never claim to be satoshi https://xcancel.com/adam3us/status/2041816020776611935?s=46 https://xcancel.com/adam3us/status/2041816020776611935?s=46
    • olalonde 6mo ago
      I didn't realize anything. Everyone and their mother has been saying that about Satoshi since day one... Also, Adam would have infinitely more to gain from being Satoshi than from Satoshi remaining unknown. He's been trying to take credit for Bitcoin ever since he realized that Bitcoin was actually worth something (he initially dismissed it). All his actions point to someone who's largely motivated by financial gain whereas Satoshi hasn't touched a single of his 1M+ BTC. If you're interested in serious research about Satoshi's identity, try this paper instead: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.10257 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.10257
      • adastra22 6mo ago
        And your HN account was created right between the release of the white paper and Bitcoin 0.1. Coincidence? Are you Satoshi?!? That’s about the level of investigative journalism performed by NYT here. Thanks for being sensible.
        • olalonde 6mo ago
          Maybe :) But seriously, Satoshi is most likely a relatively unknown dude. Why would you spend so much effort hiding your identity and then become a very public figure of the Bitcoin community?
• Svoka 6mo ago
  Wouldn't Satoshi own some bitcoin in first blocks? Like about 60 billion worth of bitcoins, the largest wallet in existence? For me this is necessary and sufficient proof of their persona.
• nullc 6mo ago
  Bad science, -- article contains a litany of points that are true for many other people (myself)-- and a number of the bits of I have personal experience with are just flatly untrue or misleading, e.g. citing Back's name at the top of a paper I coauthored as evidence of his importance to it, -- the names were alphabetic. Not that it was an important point, but I think failing to notice the names being alphabetic and including it speaks to the bar being held to the other 'evidence' there. That said-- I guess credit goes for naming someone who is essentially credible in the sense that they had the relevant interests and aptitudes, a lot of the journalists writing on this stuff have picked ludicrous names out of a hat. But so did a lot of other people. And unfortunately, the real person was clearly trying to obscure their identity and so they easily could have been adding chaff similarity to other people. (which may explain why there are good matches with multiple of the highest visibility ecash authors). For the few journalists that don't finger absolutely absurd people they keep going over and over again to some of the most visible people from the cypherpunks community, but in reality it may well have been a lurker that never posted or only posted pseudonymously. Probably the research on this stuff tends to not be very good because people who would do good work realize that it's a pointless effort and care that incorrectly implicating them causes harm by putting their safety at risk... and so they don't publish. In any case I would be extremely surprised if it were so-- I've known Adam for a long time, and he's been consistently straightforward and guileless. When he came into Bitcoin he had a number of significant misunderstandings that Satoshi couldn't have had, (unless Bitcoin was developed multiple people, of course). To have consistently played dumb like that would be entirely inconsistent with the person I know, and perhaps outside of his capability. Fundamentally the article ignores the base rate and the correlations... as in yes this or that thing is true about adam and satoshi, but it's also true of a large number of odd people who have the other prerequisites. Normal people don't talk about pre-images but cryptographers do. When you use correlated characteristics you overweight the underlying common factor. You also basically hand Satoshi a win on hiding if he was in fact copying visible characteristics from other people. In any case, at least I haven't yet heard rumors that this was a paid piece by someone with an agenda ... sad that I can't say that about all NYT writing. Aside, the comments about Adam's body language and emphatic denial: I can tell you what that is straight up: He's afraid of being harmed because of these accusations and he's afraid of being criticized for not denying it if he doesn't do so directly and clearly enough doubly so because some actual Satoshi fakers have accused him of being one himself, and tried to dismiss the respect Adam has earned as an unearned product of being suspected of being Satoshi. This is absolutely a witch-test where you're dammed one way or the other: In the HBO documentary, Peter Todd gave a cutesy demurring response which was the polar opposite of Adam's and in that case the program used that as evidence of the same. That kind of subjective judgement is just a coat-rack to hang your preconceived notions on.
• kinakomochidayo 6mo ago
  Why are journalists giving this guy exposure? He doesn’t write anything like Satoshi.
• SilentM68 6mo ago
  Satoshi has many contributors. In my view, he/she is not one person but many. Why, because it would take a genius with multiple skills, e.g. engineering, programming, cryptography, mathematics, financial knowledge and a lot of time, a lotta time to come up with something like this. It is more plausible that Satoshi was a rogue AI, ET, the Illuminati or future time traveler instead of one single person :)
  • toby- 6mo ago
    Bitcoin wasn't anything extraordinarily revolutionary; it built upon others' work over decades of collaborative progress, and introduced few truly novel ideas. Very impressive work by all means, but it didn't require genius-level skill or knowledge.
    • SilentM68 6mo ago
      Perhaps I am not as smart as I led myself to believe but the sound and words of the voice at the other end of the phone that called my then sff company job's tech support line (when IT jobs were more abundant) were way over my head. With that being said, you are correct about "BTC being built upon others'" work over decades of collaborative progress, e.g. Hashcash (proof-of-work from 1997), B-money (1998), Bit Gold (1998), Adam Back's Hashcash, Wei Dai's b-money, Nick Szabo's Bit Gold, with the core tech involving public-key cryptography, Merkle trees, blockchain concept (from Haber/Stornetta 1991), etc. I used AI just to get a summary of previous tech BTC is based on. Though I am a technical person, or at least that's what I tell myself, most of the above concepts and technology is beyond my reach. I would think somebody that knows that kind of stuff, either has a lot of time on their hands, has a lot of resources or has a lot of talented and technical friends. But what do I know. I am just a "Brain Sturgeon" :)
• tclover 6mo ago
  Satoshi Nakamoto is CIA
• Syzygies 6mo ago
  That's funny. My paper on digital timestamping is one of eight references in the original bitcoin paper. You'd think if anyone was serious about unmasking her they would have asked me.
  • D-Coder 6mo ago
    So... who is Satoshi?
• suzzer99 6mo ago
  > Ancestors of today’s message boards, mailing lists were large group emails in old typewriter font that subscribers received in their inbox. To communicate, respondents replied-all. There was no HTML email in the early 90s. The font was the display font of whatever you read it on. Sheesh NYT.
• gxd 6mo ago
  Believe it or not, but the answer is revealed in this videogame: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/ Spoiler: it's not Adam Back!
• tgtweak 6mo ago
  Has Back not produced any c++ code from his thesis or days in University? That would be more useful for satoshi-profiling than his written prose, I would think.
  • ifwinterco 6mo ago
    Also whether he primarily used Windows as Satoshi seems to have done - Back feels like more of a GNU/Linux kind of guy, but I could be wrong
• vlatoshi 6mo ago
  Adam fits better as someone Satoshi respected, not who Satoshi was... Bitcoin explicitly cites hashcash. If Adam was so careful, why would he name himself in the paper; tongue-in-cheek? hide in plain sight? I don't buy it... Hal Finney is the strongest alternative, but even there, I’m not fully convinced. Hal had the technical profile, mined early, and received the first transaction. But he also feels almost too obvious. I believe, just as Adam Back's hashcash, Hal's RPOW was a precursor. I lean toward Len Sassaman, who was deeply embedded in the exact world Satoshi seemed to come from: remailers, anonymity systems, OpenPGP, and privacy-first engineering. Same things that got his conversations with Adam and Hal going... Adam here is probably just protecting his friend's legacy
  • colordrops 6mo ago
    You could game theory this out forever. Maybe he put his name in there because people like you would only use first order logic and conclude that it wasn't him because it would be crazy to "hide in plain site". I always had Adam Back as my main candidate because HashCash somehow had the same energy and thought to it. But I have no concrete reason to believe it was him.
    • eleventen 6mo ago
      So clearly I cannot choose the wine in front of me!
  • lexandstuff 6mo ago
    I had always assumed that all of them shared the pseudonym of Satoshi, along with Nick Szabo. Back wrote the white paper with input from Hal and Nick Szabo. Sassaman did the coding work on the client. Sassaman had the keys to the Satoshi wallet, hence it never moving since his passing. Since Satoshi is a collective, it means that each of them individually can claim, without lying, that they're not Satoshi. That's my uninformed guess.
    • ak_111 6mo ago
      This very interesting hypothesis and solves multiple issues at once, has anyone attempted debunking it?
• jojobas 6mo ago
  Why would a newspaper openly try to doxx someone who did nothing wrong? Clearly the guy doesn't want to be public and there is no public interest in figuring him out either.
• hombre_fatal 6mo ago
  The simplest filter to exclude potential Satoshi candidates is to read Satoshi's early posts discussing bitcoin which never seems to come up in these convos. He had a calm, cool, consistent, professional demeanor. Always worlds different than the people people claim him to be. You'd have to believe these public figures were playing 4D chess where they invented a persona and spent a couple years impeccably roleplaying it with no mistakes only to abandon it. Aside from it being incredibly difficult, unlikely, and premeditated to do that, you can read the posts of Szabo et al and see they literally don't have it in them. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of that Show HN 10 years ago that deanonymized all of our HN alt accounts with a basic trigram comparison or whatever it was, even alt accounts with three short posts.
  • random2026 6mo ago
    This comment rings true to me as someone who contemporaneously read Satoshi's posts (not from the very beginning but on bitcointalk.org). People are underestimating how difficult (and probably pointless) it is to create and maintain a whole personality in aid of subterfuge. There are so many other easier and less risky ways to achieve the same goal than to adopt a consistent persona that's far from your own; you could, for example, release the code with one anonymous paper and then disappear completely, and then create three or four random new personas as needed to push it along publicly. That's more plausible (and less work) than sustaining a "Satoshi" with a very different personal style from yourself and then also, as it happens, speculatively fashioning fake email conversations with yourself, years in advance, in order to throw people off the scent in the future. Among people who try to guess Satoshi's identity, there is also a surprising bias toward fame or at least well-known people. There is literally zero reason to think that Bitcoin came from a person anyone had heard of or has heard of since. It's a big world. Many (most?) interesting and novel open-source contributions, hash algorithms, cipher algorithms, key-exchange protocols, and so on come from previously unknown figures. Pick any random open-source project and try to guess who created it as if you didn't know; most people wouldn't do a good job, and thinking "oh, it has something in common with Twitter so it must have been Jack Dorsey" would have a terrible success rate. And, as it happens, well-known people tend to like fame and don't try to stay anonymous. I could name hundreds of smart, experienced, and relatively unknown tech-company employees, professors, and open-source contributors who would have all the necessary broad skills to have written Bitcoin. It's not that rare. The contribution itself is rare but that's like lightning; the insight of invention strikes unpredictably. Assembling high-level systems that use cryptography isn't something that requires that you post to mailing lists or message boards of cryptography enthusiasts. And even if that weren't true, there are hundreds of useful, moderately used cryptosystems that most people haven't heard of and that would never make the radar of a NYT author who (evidently) thinks it's a coincidence that two different cryptosystems might use asymmetric ciphers. The NYT article boils down to "I had a hunch from this person's body language and, out of a community of a few hundred identified figures, I found a methodology to confirm that it was him." It's a hair better than that and honest with regard to some of its own limitations, but in the end it's no more convincing than that. The upshot is that there's some circumstantial evidence in favor of a particular person, although there's significant circumstantial evidence in the other direction too. It's astonishing to me that the NYT published this piece.
• ex-aws-dude 6mo ago
  Its a good story but it sorta seems like the author decided on Adam Back then was working backwards to prove it by the end
• dmfdmf 6mo ago
  My working hypothesis has always been that Satoshi was a CIA or NSA working group partly to fund black ops. Also, it could be that Bitcoin was a psyop to get people used to digital currency followed by the bait and switch to CBDC. Seem to be working.
  • toby- 6mo ago
    Reality is seldom as fun as people's theories.
• tavavex 6mo ago
  Can I just ask why people are so fixated on revealing Satoshi's identity? This article phrases it as some pure, innocent and almost academic pursuit, driven by curiosity and the mystique itself. But the amount of effort spent on trying to find Satoshi is immense. He must be the internet's most doxxed person by now. Is it just because of his wealth? Is someone trying to exact revenge on him? Or is he wanted by the authorities of some country? Why is finding him so important?
  • farfatched 6mo ago
    I'm curious about his life, in the same way I might read a biography or the Early Life section on a Wikipedia page. Some people like mysteries.
    • wpm 6mo ago
      So am I. I presume I can read if after he passes away, if I am still around. Otherwise I am content to respect people's wishes for anonymity and privacy, as there are plenty of other interesting things to learn about.
      • farfatched 6mo ago
        I agree. I'm interested, but think Satoshi should keep his anonymity. I was articulating why someone might want to know, as tavavex asked.
    • tavavex 6mo ago
      What I'm saying is that the overall amount of effort being spent on this isn't very proportional to sheer curiosity. Curious people may go out of their way to do something difficult, but years-long research campaigns with a single person in the crosshair feel like a step too far. Not even the perpetrators of famous unsolved crimes receive this much scrutiny. I don't doubt there's many people in the mix who are just curious about this, like you are, but I feel like people who spend months of their lives on this could be trying to get at something bigger. Maybe hurting him or trying to profit off of the knowledge somehow, or even just becoming famous for being the person who found Satoshi Nakamoto.
• ChaitanyaSai 6mo ago
  Here's my armchair two cents: Whoever it is, has to be British. The language is unmistakeably British or Commonwealth. It's likely him. I'd wager if there was a polymarket bet. But I also feel for him. Does this make him a target for both half-wit criminials and rogue nation states?
  • ifwinterco 6mo ago
    This is notable as it argues against a lot of the candidates who are American, but I would say this is relatively easy to fake if you were privacy minded. It would be somewhat harder the other way (American pretending to be British) as American English is much more prominent, but I think I could convincingly pretend to be American in text if necessary if I was only participating in generally technical discussions (and nobody asked me about cultural stuff like NFL etc.)
  • toby- 6mo ago
    The British English could be a misdirection. Satoshi was always quite inconsistent, sometimes using US spellings ('color', 'check', 'optimize'). One that always stood out to me was his use of 'gotten' – we don't typically use that word in British English, but an American English speaker attempting to disguise themselves as a Brit most likely wouldn't be aware of that fact.
• connorboyle 6mo ago
  > And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software. I know the author isn't claiming this is definitive evidence, but I think it's so comically weak it is probably not worth mentioning at all.
  • piekvorst 6mo ago
    It seems like this “journalist” speaks English. Guess who also spoke English? That’s exactly right, Satoshi did.
    • shalmanese 6mo ago
      Did you know Back had an interest in Japan? A rare and unusual trait within the cypherpunk community! /s
    • nickvec 6mo ago
      I heard through the grapevine that both Satoshi and Back were human beings. Coincidence? I think not. /s
  • bjackman 6mo ago
    To me this was just the cherry on top though, there's a huge list of such correlations that seem wildly unsurprising.
• voldacar 6mo ago
  The common linguistic quirks are interesting and extremely convincing at first glance, but the article doesn't investigate C++ coding style, which as others have mentioned, seems quite different between Back and Satoshi. And Satoshi didn't believe the blocksize should be set in stone, the notion that he just casually changed his mind on that isn't impossible but deserves a closer look than the article gives it.
  • Topfi 6mo ago
    The fact that both knew that C++ is a programming language at all, must suffice as evidence, at least for the purposes of this Article. Weirdly a real divergence from the Theranos reporting, which on top of that, also was absolutely in the public interest as it affected both the health of patients and was on actual fraud. Here it it exposure for exposure sake and not well reasoned to boot.
• gyomu 6mo ago
  Simple question for anyone who’s familiar with this world of journalism: how does the author and the NYTimes cope with the fact that making such claims paint a huge target on the person they claim to have “unmasked”? Satoshi’s wallets are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and there have been kidnappings/torture/murders for much less than that. Do they just not care about the ethical implications? And really, for what? What is gained by “unmasking” Satoshi other than satisfying one’s curiosity? There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good or anything like that.
  • eleveriven 6mo ago
    Yes, this seems like one of those cases where "the public is curious" and "the public has a right to know" are being blurred together
  • idontwantthis 6mo ago
    I was just wondering the same thing.
    • thehappypm 6mo ago
      Exposing the wealthy is pretty standard journalism
      • anamax 6mo ago
        And if this guy isn't Satoshi? And if he comes to harm as a result of someone believing the NYT?
        • righthand 6mo ago
          Then the person who harmed him will be prosecuted. And life will go on. The NY Times isn’t calling for violence.
          • Topfi 6mo ago
• potsandpans 6mo ago
  > I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. >So does Bitcoin... > And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software. This is such poor quality writing, I'm kind of shocked to see it in nyt. It reads like a family guy cutaway lampooning a whodunnit. I honestly can't believe this warranted a full piece. I was wondering if this a symptom of the author going down some llm psychosis rabbit hole? _youre absolutely right, you've repeatedly shown signs that back is satoshi. The pattern is clear: back isn't just some cypherpunk, he's Satoshi._
• rurban 6mo ago
  Aba wouldn't have said: "Send X bitcoins to my priority hotline at this IP and I’ll read the message personally." Because aba knew about how email worked, unlike Satoshi. A hotline is not at in IP, it is at a domain with an MX record. Satoshi was a Windows guy.
  • toby- 6mo ago
    The early Bitcoin client could send Bitcoins to an IP address. That's all he meant, no?
• DeathArrow 6mo ago
  What if Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he is, lost the key to his wallet? I've read somewhere that there are some very big bitcoin wallets nobody has touched since long ago. So it's safe to assume the keys are gone. Does it matter if a large proportion of bitcoins are gone from the network?
• sagoshi 6mo ago
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• sergiotapia 6mo ago
  john mcafee already unmasked who it is years ago. "Now, there are only two of the accused who were British and only one of those has two spaces in every one of his papers. Figure it out people. It'll take you 15 minutes." british guy. the paper has two spaces after periods, and only one of these two british guys has two spaces after each period. seems pretty conclusive. it's Adam Back
  • toby- 6mo ago
    It's common for older writers to insert two spaces after a full-stop. In fact, go through the cypherpunk mailing list (and many others) and you'll see it was the norm. As for Satoshi being British, he used predominantly British English but occasionally used American spellings and terms; it easily could've been intentional misdirection. Adam Back doesn't write at all like Satoshi. Back's writings are filled with grammatical errors and he often makes spelling mistakes, which Satoshi seldom did.
• tomsop 6mo ago
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• tomsop 6mo ago
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• johnnienaked 6mo ago
  I thought bitcoin was cool for about 6 months back in 2014, and read everything I could about it. For the life of me I simply can't understand how people are still so interested in it or who created it.
• acjohnson55 6mo ago
  I think there's a pretty good chance Adam Back is Satoshi, but I don't think this is a great article. Perhaps he's rendering a careful scientific process in a way that makes for a readable narrative, but as written, it sounds like a lot of gut feel and confirmation bias. The biggest new contribution to the Satoshi question seems to be ad hoc stylometry. To have faith in his methodology, he should be testing it on identitying other people. If he were to show me that a repeatable methodology that doesn't require hand tuning can identify other people with low error rate, and it said Back=Satoshi, that would be much more convincing. Like so much tech writing done by non engineers, there are many places where mundane things are made to sound remarkable (e.g. Black's thesis used C++, the "heated debate").
  • mike_hearn 6mo ago
    It seems very unlikely to me. I've had personal correspondence with Satoshi, and met Adam Back in person, and I can't see it. Actually I don't see how anyone involved with Blockstream could be identified as Satoshi. They never believed in what Satoshi was doing and built their whole company around the claim that Satoshi had screwed up the core of the system's design, despite that nothing about the design or its assumptions had changed. They spent years raising investor capital (why would you do that if you were rich?) specifically to build a system designed to replace Bitcoin for end users. The last time I met Adam he was trying to convince me to not continue working on Satoshi's original design, and none of his arguments were technical. Satoshi had a totally different approach.
    • Thorrez 6mo ago
      >why would you do that if you were rich? Satoshi can't spend any of his bitcoins without tanking bitcoin's price. So Satoshi needs to find some other way to support himself. Creating bitcoin related companies is one way.
      • olalonde 6mo ago
        He could tank the price to $1000 and still be a billionaire. There's a much more plausible reason for why Satoshi's coins haven't moved.
• iamankur 6mo ago
  I think the NSA is Satoshi Nakamoto. That makes most sense.
• diiaann 6mo ago
  After reading the article, my first thought was it is both Finney and Back posting under Satoshi. Others may have been involved too but not necessarily posting.
• Uptrenda 6mo ago
  It seems like the main "evidence" is linguistic oddities. If this were a police investigation they would use this to get a warrant and then find the real smoking gun. They wouldn't put someone in jail for spelling errors. It's not quite the same here: but they went and published an article in the New York Times. I think its naïve to have done that.
• abbassix 6mo ago
  Should we believe that intelligence agencies like CIA or FBI doesn't know her/him?
• trolleski 6mo ago
  It's Epstein, brah.
• kshacker 6mo ago
  Do we think CIA/NSA/FBI know who is Satoshi? Maybe not all of them, but someone in the government has to know, no?
• nothinkjustai 6mo ago
  This article makes me think we are too generous to journalists.
• thomasfl 6mo ago
  Not directly related but still interesting. The fellow who came up with the ide for the Architectural Uprisings we have seen around the world, is still anonymous.
• shevy-java 6mo ago
  So, it is interesting to know who is behind bitcoin but ... ... why is it important? I mean, let's say it was not a state guy but some agency, like with the xz utils backdoor (that was most likely not a solo dev, the coordination, time and planning seemed to indicate a state actor; also peculiar to see western-style folks use asian names here). Would that change the situation with regards to bitcoins? Ultimately what should matter is whether xyz is secure or not. I just don't get the epic fascination with "who is mystery man 101".
• voidUpdate 6mo ago
  > "If its creator’s identity became known, government lawyers would know whom to go after. If it stayed concealed, there would be no one to sue" "Anyway, here's my article where I try to make the creator's identity known"
• democracy 6mo ago
  Wny does it even matter, there was no "Breakthrough" in the code, or in the whitepaper, it's a nice engineering combination of technologies, based on pre-existing attempts, nothing new - working software, admirable motivation - the fact that it became a creepy scamming industry is not his/her fault or achievment, I am not even sure why it matters these days. If he/she is still alive and not touching these wallets - I can only bow to the person.
  • p4bl0 6mo ago
    Chances are the key to those is simply lost forever.
• nusl 6mo ago
  This article is kinda bogwater. Repeating the same points, writing as if it were LinkedIn, pretending to be technically competent while obviously not. Over and over and over, reiterating the same points but ultimately getting nowhere. Changing requirements ad-hoc throughout the article, picking and choosing ideal matches rather than objective ones, etc. basically trying to make the data fit the problem by force. Author, over time, gets more desperate to be "the one that found Satoshi" and loses the plot entirely. I mean, what the hell is this bullshit? """ Adam Back: I did a lot of talking though for somebody, I mean … I mean, I’m not saying I’m good with words but I sure did a lot of yakking on these lists actually. To my ears, it sounded like he was saying that for someone who preferred code over words, he sure had written a lot of words. Implicit in that was an acknowledgment that he had been the one who wrote the quote. In other words, for a few seconds, Mr. Back had let the mask fall and turned into Satoshi. """
• enesz 6mo ago
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• karel-3d 6mo ago
  This is not really covering anything new - BarelySocial did the same thing in 2020 - and is circumstantial at best, but from all the candidates, Adam Back is by far the most likely. On the other hand, who cares.
• oliviabrown8710 6mo ago
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• jl6 6mo ago
  I just don’t find it plausible that there is a living human being who is capable of turning down a $70bn+ payday, hence Satoshi must be dead, hence it was probably Finney, and all the counter-evidence is easier to explain than a superhuman act of restraint.
  • toby- 6mo ago
    Or he just lost the keys. Or the analysis is wrong and those aren't his wallets; it was never definitive.
• sva_ 6mo ago
  > And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software. Dr Watson at work. Facepalm
• glenntws 6mo ago
  I have now read about 100 articles claiming to have found the Bitcoin creator.
• Retr0id 6mo ago
  > mailing lists were large group emails in old typewriter font lol
• uyzstvqs 6mo ago
  Anyone familiar with the matter knows that Adam Back is not Satoshi. It's interesting how those who are looking to expose Satoshi often ignore some pretty obvious clues and facts. Though given that I respect his/her anonymity, I'll leave it at that.
• ak_111 6mo ago
  It is getting to the point where all the top (living) credibly accused Satoshis are incurring all the cost of being outed as Satoshi without getting any of the upside. In other words it is almost irrational to deny it is you (if it is really you) if you are outted after a major investigation by the paper of record, so it is rational to take Back’s denial as honest. His security is already screwed anyone who is incentivised to harm him for billions will already do it for tens of millions (or if they think there is more than 50% chance Back is a multi billionaire), so he might as well take the credit for it and live with the consequenes if it is really him.
• 47282847 6mo ago
  Like in most cases that involve finance, I appreciate Matt Levines summary and comments in his excellent and ads free Money Stuff newsletter. Highly recommended! I wish there were more newsletters like his. In fact, it’s one of the few news sources I consistently read, and the only one I conveniently receive in my mailbox. Most other newsletters are just glorified advertisement. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-04-08/robot-retail-investors https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-04-08/rob... I can see how some people get more excited and want to follow stories more closely but as I get older I notice how most of the time I don’t value it as much, and like trustworthy sources that deal with the detail to provide useful summaries and highlights for me.
• ninjagoo 6mo ago
  Science is hard. This reporter is no scientist, and not very good with logic, or managing context. The article feels like an amateur in a fever dream, whose conclusion is ultimately wrong. Two of the problems with this article, among others: > we identified 325 distinct errors in Satoshi’s use of hyphens. > Mr. Back was a clear outlier. He shared 67 of Satoshi’s exact hyphenation errors. The person with the second-most matches had 38. The fact that there is such a huge gap between Satoshi and Back, substantially more than the gap between Back and the next person, is a really strong indicator that Back is not Satoshi, rather than being an indicator that he is. > It was when I was walking him through the similarities between things he and Satoshi had written. > Implicit in that was an acknowledgment that he had been the one who wrote the quote. So this reporter Carreyrou is walking someone through similar quotes, and that person responds with why they may have made the statement, but Carreyrou's conclusion is that they were talking about the Satoshi quote and not their own? That seems a bit, silly. If I'm in a conversation comparing my similar quotes, and 2 or 3 deep into the list, do I even need to know my specific quote before responding with why I might have said something similar? The quotes in question: > Satoshi: I'm better with code than with words though. > Back: I'm better at coding, than constructing convincing arguments. Pretty sure a lot of folks in the tech community have said something along these lines, and very nearly exactly the first part. This article seems to conclude that a specialist in a domain sounds very much like another specialist in that domain, over the span of two decades, no less, cherry picking tiny bits of output over the two decades, so therefore they must be the same person. And on top of that, ignores evidence to the contrary, like the massive gap in hyphenation errors. LoL. Science & logic this article is not. I wonder, based on the large number of distinct hyphenation errors, whether Satoshi is even from the UK or the US. Add in the use of a Japanese alias, and the Tokyo-based anonymizer, and the evidence starts to point towards a non-UK/US origin. And then, not cashing out any of that massive hoard of wealth, how very Zen of them.
  • toby- 6mo ago
    > I wonder, based on the large number of distinct hyphenation errors, whether Satoshi is even from the UK or the US. How many native English speakers are truly familiar with hyphenating compound nouns and adjectives? I'd say a majority don't know how to consistently hyphenate correctly.
• bpiroman 6mo ago
  It is pretty obvious who wrote the white paper.
  • windowliker 6mo ago
    Satoshi Nakamoto?
• ak_111 6mo ago
  Anyone tried to run some stylometry to identify if satoshi-like comments appeared in any of the early post on hacker news discussing BTC? I would say there is a very significant chance he might have added to the discussion in say the first couple of posts before BTC went mainstream (or even mainstream within hacker circles).
• briandw 6mo ago
  This dude can seem to tell the difference between Newsgroups and Mailing Lists. Also described Newsgroups as being displayed in a particular font. What a weird mistake. It's almost like he doesn't care about the details. The article claims Adam Back "disappeared" on the cryptography mailing lists exactly when Satoshi Nakamoto became active (late 2008) and only "reappeared" around the time Satoshi stopped posting in 2011. Back's rebuttal: He was highly active, "a lot of yakking" on the relevant lists and forums during Bitcoin's early years. He points out that his high volume of posts on electronic cash and cryptography topics naturally makes him visible in searches, creating confirmation bias when filtering for "Satoshi-like" activity. The NYT analysis apparently missed or underweighted his continued contributions in developer chats, Bitcoin-related discussions, and other lists/forums. The stylistic argument is weak. In 1990s technical mailing lists and Usenet, Many cypherpunks showed similar inconsistencies. The article treats these as highly distinctive "fingerprints" rather than common artifacts of the era's informal technical writing.
  • windowliker 6mo ago
    >This dude can seem to tell the difference between Newsgroups and Mailing Lists. Also described Newsgroups as being displayed in a particular font. What a weird mistake. It's almost like he doesn't care about the details. It's full of clangers like that, showing that the author is woefully unversed in the subculture he's writing about. Hence why the main focus is on the personality of Satoshi and Back, trying to psychologise them into being the same person, instead of doing a technical analysis.
    • netule 6mo ago
      But they both used C++, a rare and obscure language rarely used in cryptography! /s
• windowliker 6mo ago
  Assuming Satoshi was Adam Back, then why would he take 10+ years* to release the white paper, which borrows much of the work he had already done on the problem of digital currencies? Someone with the perfect background, who was so active in theorising ways to make it work, who was so well versed in the prevailing ideas and was clearly working on the subject, wouldn't just drop it for 10 years, nor likely take that long to put it all into a workable system. That question is never posed in the article, and I think it's a very important one. * I'm extrapolating this timeframe from the quotations compared in the article.
• RustyRussell 6mo ago
  Adam is not Satoshi. In early days of Blockstream I remember him and Greg Maxwell spitballing ideas about Bitcoin, and he was clearly intellectually feeling out the constructions as novel concepts. I have spent my fair time with geeks, myself included, and this "shiny new thing" geek excitement is distinctive. And Adam is a typical nerd for whom guile does not come easy, if at all. I realize this is not a transferrable proof, but I stand by it, for what that's worth.
  • orsenthil 6mo ago
    This is RustyRusell of Linux kernel fame. This is kind of the evidence that he want for a claim. First hand. Not what we just read from the NYT article.
• dsmurrell 6mo ago
  Satoshi is not Adam Back. Satoshi suggested that the block size should increase when needed. Adam Back blocked this to profit himself.
• The-Old-Hacker 6mo ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/08/british-computer-scientist-adam-back-denies-he-is-bitcoin-developer-satoshi-nakamoto https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/08/british-c...
• eleveriven 6mo ago
  Back is one of the best candidates, but unless coins move or some cryptographic proof appears, this remains a well-argued theory, not a resolution
• Rover222 6mo ago
  Today's The Daily podcast has the author on as the guest, incase you want to hear him talk about his investigation.
• reactordev 6mo ago
  I doubt anyone who claims to be, to know, or to have seen evidence of, Satoshi Nakamoto. Journalists see this as their Moby dick story, their Jimmy Hoffa, as the real Satoshi knew that for Bitcoin to work and be taken seriously, he/she/it would have to be anonymous and take no part in it. Truly decentralized.
• msephton 6mo ago
  I find it interesting that they used computers (ai, etc) to analyse the text to reduce suspects in a way that gets them the answer they are looking for. Yet they didn't use computers/ai to analyse the corpus of texts. Seems like the wrong way round. I suspect they used it for everything, which is cool, but I'm wondering why not just say that.
• wslh 6mo ago
  If you're following the Satoshi "archeology", you should definitely check out Sergio Lerner's analysis of the early mining patterns. He provides a fascinating forensic look at the actual machines Satoshi likely used, using data like endianness and nonce-incrementing behavior to reconstruct the original mining environment [1][2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwVXC1Lf00k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwVXC1Lf00k [2] https://bitslog.com/2020/08/22/the-patoshi-mining-machine/ https://bitslog.com/2020/08/22/the-patoshi-mining-machine/
• presz 6mo ago
  I'm Satoshi Nakamoto. AMA.
  • cindyllm 6mo ago
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  • windowliker 6mo ago
    Are you Adam Back?
• smoovb 6mo ago
  Satoshi Nakamoto was likely created in response to the December 2005 raid of e-Gold in Florida by U.S. Secret Service/FBI, and other similar incidents. e-Gold was the largest Digital currency at the time clearly showed the dangers of centralization. Douglas Jackson's indictment occurred about 18 months before the Bitcoin whitepaper. So the risk of centrally founding another digital currency was clear at the time and e-Gold was discussed by both Back and Finney. Launching without a single point of failure, a single arrestable founder was critical to the success of Bitcoin.
• sporkland 6mo ago
  The article seemed full of weak rationale leading up to the conclusion which made me doubt the whole thing: 1. He kept citing things like PGP, C++ and distributed systems as things in common between Satoshi and Back, but would have described 75% of pragmatic comp sci folks at the time. 2. His end section about word correlations where he started with Back's weird isms and then started finding them in Satoshi's writings seemed like pure Texas sharp shooter fallacy. He started with broader scoring mechanisms and when those didn't work he started seeking out measures that fit his case better. All of this based on a vibe of how the guy seemed in a Netflix documentary. I have no idea if Satoshi is Back or not and would love to close this chapter. But this "reporter" seems to have started with a conclusion and then tried to find data that proved the conclusion.
• mfalcon 6mo ago
  I don't know what requires more skills: creating Bitcoin or avoiding getting identified after all these years.
• Rover222 6mo ago
  John McAfee figured this out in a couple days, and on moral grounds, decided not to name the guy. But he clearly came to the same conclusion. https://x.com/VentureCoinist/status/2042280068475474003 https://x.com/VentureCoinist/status/2042280068475474003
• orsenthil 6mo ago
  My problem with this article is, it came on the same day when Trump was shouting that "He will end an entire civilization". WTF are their priorities in the first place. Secondly, as a technical person reading this written for a non-technical audience, it reads like the journalist wanted his high for most and nothing else.
• godisdad 6mo ago
  You can’t post the GTA “here we go again” gif in HN or I would
• solsafe_dev 6mo ago
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• pkphilip 6mo ago
  It is me
• Frieren 6mo ago
  Taking into account the amount of crime that Bitcoin is allowing to be monetized it would be great to know more about its creator and motivations.
• butlike 6mo ago
  I've always assumed it was Hal Finney, the first recipient of bitcoin from Satoshi, who died of cancer. I mean, if your new creation shakes out, you have a way to pay your hospital bills. Also I feel the only person who wouldn't be tempted to withdraw the money would have to be the dead creator of the coin/protocol.
• flw_0311 6mo ago
  I just came across this article too! I'm so intrigued how true this is and if Adam Back is the creator of Bitcoin, OR did he get falsely identified and is now stuck with all this publicity that he didn't ask for LOL.
• chemmail 6mo ago
  NYT. Truly hilarious. The guy who had a hand in killing BTC and tried and utterly failed to create a layer on top of it. Why would the creator of BTC do such things lol.
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