The New York Times (NYT) published an investigation that claims to unveil the true identity of the anonymous creator of bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Journalist John Carreyrou, known for the book Bad Blood about the company Theranos, which is considered the largest fraud of modern times, spent a year analyzing internet archives and concluded that Satoshi is the British cryptographer Adam Back.
Adam Back, co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, as well as a cryptographer and computer scientist, is widely known for inventing Hashcash in 1997 — a proof-of-work system that underpins bitcoin mining. As a developer, he was involved in the early development of bitcoin.
Back has long been considered one of the main contenders for the role of Satoshi, but he has repeatedly and publicly denied it. For nearly 20 years, no one has been able to provide actual evidence of the true identity of Satoshi. Moreover, there is not even an understanding of whether it is one person or a group of individuals using a common pseudonym.
On the path to concluding that bitcoin was developed by Adam Back, Carreiro built a multi-stage analysis system, applying linguistics and artificial intelligence, comparing Satoshi's and other developers' messaging habits. He also found strange coincidences in Back's correspondence and behavior during key moments in bitcoin's history.
The basis for the start of Carreiro's investigation was the 2024 documentary film Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery by HBO, which named Canadian developer Peter Todd as the creator of bitcoin. Todd and Back are personally acquainted and even appear together in the film, where both directly deny that either of them is Satoshi.
Carreiro found HBO's version "unconvincing." After all, Todd was 23 years old at the time of the publication of the bitcoin white paper in 2008, and after the film's release, he showed photos of himself snowboarding during the hours that Satoshi was posting on the forum. Moreover, the journalist deemed Back's reaction in the film as "suspicious," as he noticeably tensed, laughed nervously, and asked to leave the conversation off the record when his surname was mentioned.
Over more than a dozen years, the community has put forward dozens of candidates for the role of Satoshi, but Carreiro highlights only a few. For everyone except Back, he noted possible reasons for exclusion. In the journalist's opinion, only Adam Back fits the age criteria (55 years) — he is alive, technically competent, has British origins, and there is no documented evidence against such a hypothesis.#BinanceWalletLaunchesPredictionMarkets $BTC
