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.
The NYTimes infamously doxxed Slate Star Codex[1], despite him basically begging them not to because it would upend his psychiatry practice, back in 2020 for no reason other than because they could.
One of their journalists also doxxed Naomi Wu, intruding on her personal life, making her lose her income, and possibly getting her in trouble with Chinese authorities:
https://x.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1209815150376574976
Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven't been on their mind for a long time, and them preaching to anyone about ethics is rank hypocrisy.
> A third tweet posted by Jeong in 2014 said, “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”
I moderated a large Reddit community (circa 2014). She threatened to have articles written about how we were racist/misogynistic, unless we removed comments she didn't like.
Honestly these loudmouths are usually quite privileged themselves. These theatrics are either to deflect from themselves, or they are delusional about how tough their life is.
for a good counterbalance to those just finding out the nyt is a state dept mouthpiece at best, read about real journalists and why there seem to be so few of them, read Pegasus by laurent richard. Spoiler alert, real journalists who expose powerful peoples' wrongdoings simply get killed.
Btw I don't know how closely you follow Naomi Wu, but take that with grain of salt.
(def. not defending bad journalists)
Naomi has huge youtube and she is very public figure in Shenzhen.
She has very weird opinion on Chinese government, she acts to like it but on the other hand with her sexual orientation (which was public knowledge, plastered all over reddit, twitter etc. way before any articles) and her admitting to bypass Chinese firewall etc. which is illegal.
Kinda weird, to do this, when you're public person.
And weirdest of all, she has/had Uyghur girlfriend and she basically said, that because of us (US/EU people) boycotting China for Xinjiang concentration camps for Uyghurs, nobody in Shenzen wants to hire Uyghur people, so WE are to blame.
I don't know if she really meant it, or she'd post it to twitter to suck Chinese government, you know what.
Imho, with grain of salt too, I think she was partially managed by Chinese agency way before any articles, and they got angry because she was unable to steer the article to "China great, West is bad".
Because I have experience what Chinese agencies are willing to pay for mediocre influencers in my small EU country (10mil. people) just to visit China and make videos how they're "great". And they have 1/10 following of what Naomi has.
I am not sure this is that clear cut. Naomi Wu agreed to interview then didn't want to answer some of the questions - instead of just saying no… she wrote social media threads and blogposts about how she can't talk about this because it's big bad china and all these western journalists are unprofessional not knowing her risk. For some reason then she tried to actually dox one of the journalists in her video.
Unfortunately looking back it seems pretty plausible that chinese gov censored her exactly because of her blogposts about how she is in danger in china.
Are you able to explain in 1 short sentence what Vice did wrong to her? Because I can't. I remember reading Wu's explanation and couldn't find anything in there, like at all. It was filled with prejudice.
Although people repeatedly say this, NYT did not in fact dox Slate Star Codex. He revealed his own information because he said they were going to reveal his name based on a draft of the article he says he saw. The verge apparently reported that no draft had been written and the NYT was still in news gathering stage. Who knows what the truth of that is, but factually he released the information.
> The New York Times published an article about the blog in February 2021, three weeks after Alexander had publicly revealed his name.
Funnily enough, in the blog post you linked Scott Alexander also ruminates about how he never previously questioned journalistic attempts to dox Satoshi Nakamoto.
I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him.
It was upending his psychiatry practice because he blogged, albeit in anonymized fashion, about his patients without disclosing it to them which I'd say is unethical but at the very least in the interest of his patients to be made known to them. I would be pretty pissed if I recognized something I told my psychiatrist on an internet blog. Frankly given how strongly one has to consent to even legally process clinical data I've never been sure if that was at all legal.
When someone's identity is in the public interest an investigative journalist isn't doxxing anyone, they're doing their job. Both true for Nakamoto and arguably Scott
This is a journalistic publication with a foundational value of transparency. If you study the history of institutions that favor transparency, they rarely ever need to further justify efforts of transparency beyond that underlying value. Transparency needs no further analysis of second order effects.
“What is gained…?” is simply not a question asked, for the same reason that advocates for privacy rarely if ever circumstantially ask the same question.
No one defending privacy is claiming situation like a pedophile keeping a slave children in their basement should be undetectable because privacy should be an absolute barrier that let people whatever atrocities they want within private doors.
On the other hand, those who seriously care about privacy won’t believe it’s fine to have some laws supposedly enacted to protect the children but actually just implement general presumption of guilt and everyone being spied permanently.
As someone currently working there (in tech, not the newsroom), this is partially correct.
Second order effects can become a consideration, but the bar is high. Usually “will this place someone in immediate, specific danger of harm” vs potential risks.
As a recent example, journalists covering Iran in the past week had sources confirming the downed airman was located, but that the extraction planes had been unable to take off, and held off on publication. Same for advance knowledge of the Maduro raid. Both examples have been confirmed publicly by those journalists.
Not defending this particular decision at the moment, but someone who potentially controls Satoshi’s wallet has much more ability to protect themselves, and their desire to remain anonymous wouldn’t factor in.
My mind goes to the science fiction novel Footfall by Larry Nivel and Jerry Pournell, in which Earth is attacked by aliens and, at one point, a journalist figures out about a secret project to carry out a counter-offensive and is going to run a story on it, obviously against the wishes of those involved with the project.
Another character drowns the journalist in a toilet.
I get that, but it's difficult to reconcile this with media's second principle of protecting/anonymizing sources. I don't think it's reasonable for them to have it both ways, especially when exposing an anonymous subject could result in physical danger.
> Transparency needs no further analysis of second order effects.
Everything needs analysis of second order effects. Otherwise you wreck lives without even realizing that's what you're doing. It's the negligence of a drunk driver.
On the other hand, this also applies to Bitcoin. Satoshi, if he is real and alive and in control of his wallet, is a billionaire. Billionaires need to be kept under careful watch unless they, too, wreck lives without realizing.
At least Adam Back is already publicly known to be worth at least tens of millions anywyas. Many of those dozens/hundreds of other guesses are not so lucky.
If the private key still exists, the BTC would be worth more like 10s of billions though. I choose to believe the key is long gone from this world though, whoever originally had it.
I think the wallets go well beyond "hundreds of millions". Aren't there like a million Bitcoin in dormant wallets associated with Satoshi? Personally, I'd assumed that whoever the person or persons were, they're dead because nobody can resist the pull of tens of billions of dollars regardless of their ideological position on cryptocurrencies. But that's just a guess.
There's absolutely a public interest in this. Sorry. This is a trillion dollar market now. Was this a state actor? If so, why? what was the plan here exactly? I see absolutely no reason to respect anonymity here. You don't get to sit on $50 billion and have people respect your desire to remain hidden.
You mean, why is it worth noting that someone who frequently speaks at conferences about Bitcoin, has businesses that utilise Bitcoin and is influential in the Bitcoin community is - the inventor of Bitcoin?
And the "evidence" they presented includes things like, body language.
> I presented my evidence piece by piece. In his soft British lilt, Mr. Back insisted he wasn’t Satoshi and chalked it all up to a series of coincidences. But at times, his body language told a different story. His face reddened and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat when confronted with things that were harder to explain away.
Yes, they unironically wrote this.
Everyone knows that if you already believe someone is lying, you'll see all the signs that he's lying. It's confirmation bias 101, and this is unashamedly published on a so-called credible journalism outlet.
I think if something bad happens to Mr. Back (I hope not), the NYTimes is at least morally responsible.
I think what makes this a little murkier is that this Beck guy appears to be already a well known figure in crypto circles. (I don't really follow the space). It feels more like uncovering the secret director of a film to be an established film producer.
For the last point, I agree there's a sort of "who cares" aspect to the piece. There is no artistic intent to interpret. The product speaks for itself making BTC the default crypto coin instead of any of the other millions of coins. The wealth from the founder, from what I can tell, has not been instrumentalized in any significant way.
If I say that I think you are Satoshi, what are the ethical implications of that? Should I not speak or write opinions that you find annoying or inconvenient? How does that scale to everyone?
This is why the first item in the U.S. Bill of Rights is freedom of speech and of the press. Who knows what objections anyone will have to any given statement, and forcing everyone to accommodate everyone leads to a claustrophobic dystopia.
This one is challenging I think because the article itself is so thin. The evidence seems really shaky.
That said, clearly a lot of people really do seem to care who Satoshi is, so it doesn't seem like its out of the question for a newspaper to print an article claiming to answer that question.
> Do they just not care about the ethical implications?
Did Satoshi not care about the ethical implications of creating bitcoin? Mr Back may not be Satoshi, but he's also made a career driving the adoption of bitcoin and bitcoin itself has enabled many, many terrible crimes. It seems like special pleading to argue that Mr Back is not responsible for any of the consequence of bitcoin in the world, and also that the NY Times is morally responsible if someone harms Mr Back because they think he is Satoshi. Either we have an ethical responsibility to consider the consequences of our actions or we don't.
While in general you are right, there is a reason why developed countries are usually publicizing information about government officials and private entrepreneurs. This creates sense of accountability and allows for proper oversight by the journalists and law. And among those are plenty of rich or very rich people and no one is kidnapping or shooting them in the streets despite knowing exactly where they live or work.
Arguably a person who can at whim with a single click destabilize half the world economy (simply by moving a single sat from the creator wallet to another, among other things) necessitates such oversight too and can't claim to be a private insignificant individual who is abused by transparency.
PS: even though I'm a lowly QA on a relatively small salary, as an entrepreneur my private info like contact, full address, tax returns and other is completely and legally public for anyone in the world to see on my government portal. And it is a good thing.
I was thinking along the same lines. Isn't it just doxxing? Going deep into someone's online history and making hypothesis about who they are in real life, then publishing their name and what they do?
Adam Back is already a high profile target. Unmasking him as Satoshi doesn't really change that for the guy that founded that company that leads bitcoin core development.
I think of journalism like any other job where there's an expectation to produce results, where the main objective here is to write an article that lots of people read. It's a topic that catches a lot of people's attention, so in a sense they've succeeded by getting a lot of people to read and talk about it.
Exactly right. Unfortunately, this is likely a reporter who is just looking for something that will get attention. I remember a time when reporters wrote things based on importance, not chasing clickbait like everyone on social media. Whoever Satoshi is/was, they wanted privacy. Let them have it and move on.
By definition, if they’re not concerned about the ethics, they are not journalists and their occupation is not journalism. Nor does your employer’s reputation[1] allow them to claim such titles simple because they sign your pay cheque. You can’t inherit the title like that.
Journalist/journalism is like leader/leadership… too often used inappropriately, too often used to mislead, too often used inappropriately. Words such as reporter, hack, or NYT agent are more appropriate and more accurate.
Put another way, if your pet barks, would you still call it a cat? Of course not! If these people and entities aren’t fulfilling the baseline of the definition why do we continue to call them something they are not?
Journalist is a verb. It’s the decisions made and the actions taken. We’d be doing the collective a favor if we stopped giving credit where credit is NOT due.
[1] editorial: Most of us would agree that the NYT has lost its way. That it’s getting by on the fumes of integrity long gone.
Easy - they don't care. Major institutional publications have lacked journalistic integrity for a very long time now. I can't really think of any exceptions there anymore.
>> 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.
Sure there is. A whole system of unregulated finance has been setup and it's very useful for criminality. How is not in the public interest to know who set it up and for what purpose? If it turned out Satoshi was actually a nation state and this was done for some nefarious purpose you think that's not in the public interest?
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.
>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.
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?
> 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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416
The journalist themselves is a real piece of work: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/463503-sarah-jeong-out-at...
Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven't been on their mind for a long time, and them preaching to anyone about ethics is rank hypocrisy.
> A third tweet posted by Jeong in 2014 said, “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”
It's not like she's any browner..
Her being nasty elsewhere doesn't surprise me...
Naomi has huge youtube and she is very public figure in Shenzhen.
She has very weird opinion on Chinese government, she acts to like it but on the other hand with her sexual orientation (which was public knowledge, plastered all over reddit, twitter etc. way before any articles) and her admitting to bypass Chinese firewall etc. which is illegal.
Kinda weird, to do this, when you're public person.
And weirdest of all, she has/had Uyghur girlfriend and she basically said, that because of us (US/EU people) boycotting China for Xinjiang concentration camps for Uyghurs, nobody in Shenzen wants to hire Uyghur people, so WE are to blame.
I don't know if she really meant it, or she'd post it to twitter to suck Chinese government, you know what.
Imho, with grain of salt too, I think she was partially managed by Chinese agency way before any articles, and they got angry because she was unable to steer the article to "China great, West is bad".
Because I have experience what Chinese agencies are willing to pay for mediocre influencers in my small EU country (10mil. people) just to visit China and make videos how they're "great". And they have 1/10 following of what Naomi has.
Unfortunately looking back it seems pretty plausible that chinese gov censored her exactly because of her blogposts about how she is in danger in china.
> “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” Jeong said in one tweet from 2014 that has since been deleted.
You weren't messing, she seems lovely.. /s
> Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories.
People can opt to not read and pay such people.
Much like the "unmasking" of Banksy or Belle de Jour. Why do it other than nosiness?
Is the person committing a crime? No? Then leave them in peace.
This is just a journalist using the resources of NYTimes to show off that they can exert control over someone else.
> The New York Times published an article about the blog in February 2021, three weeks after Alexander had publicly revealed his name.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#The_New_York_...
It was upending his psychiatry practice because he blogged, albeit in anonymized fashion, about his patients without disclosing it to them which I'd say is unethical but at the very least in the interest of his patients to be made known to them. I would be pretty pissed if I recognized something I told my psychiatrist on an internet blog. Frankly given how strongly one has to consent to even legally process clinical data I've never been sure if that was at all legal.
When someone's identity is in the public interest an investigative journalist isn't doxxing anyone, they're doing their job. Both true for Nakamoto and arguably Scott
“What is gained…?” is simply not a question asked, for the same reason that advocates for privacy rarely if ever circumstantially ask the same question.
No one defending privacy is claiming situation like a pedophile keeping a slave children in their basement should be undetectable because privacy should be an absolute barrier that let people whatever atrocities they want within private doors.
On the other hand, those who seriously care about privacy won’t believe it’s fine to have some laws supposedly enacted to protect the children but actually just implement general presumption of guilt and everyone being spied permanently.
Second order effects can become a consideration, but the bar is high. Usually “will this place someone in immediate, specific danger of harm” vs potential risks.
As a recent example, journalists covering Iran in the past week had sources confirming the downed airman was located, but that the extraction planes had been unable to take off, and held off on publication. Same for advance knowledge of the Maduro raid. Both examples have been confirmed publicly by those journalists.
Not defending this particular decision at the moment, but someone who potentially controls Satoshi’s wallet has much more ability to protect themselves, and their desire to remain anonymous wouldn’t factor in.
Another character drowns the journalist in a toilet.
> Transparency needs no further analysis of second order effects.
Everything needs analysis of second order effects. Otherwise you wreck lives without even realizing that's what you're doing. It's the negligence of a drunk driver.
On the other hand, this also applies to Bitcoin. Satoshi, if he is real and alive and in control of his wallet, is a billionaire. Billionaires need to be kept under careful watch unless they, too, wreck lives without realizing.
> Transparency needs no further analysis of second order effects.
By that logic we don't need judges.
Just read what the resp. law says and 'apply' it.
Bizarre.
If the private key still exists, the BTC would be worth more like 10s of billions though. I choose to believe the key is long gone from this world though, whoever originally had it.
There's absolutely a public interest in this. Sorry. This is a trillion dollar market now. Was this a state actor? If so, why? what was the plan here exactly? I see absolutely no reason to respect anonymity here. You don't get to sit on $50 billion and have people respect your desire to remain hidden.
Bitcoins across old unused wallets worth $30B to $80B depend of how you count it.
> I presented my evidence piece by piece. In his soft British lilt, Mr. Back insisted he wasn’t Satoshi and chalked it all up to a series of coincidences. But at times, his body language told a different story. His face reddened and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat when confronted with things that were harder to explain away.
Yes, they unironically wrote this.
Everyone knows that if you already believe someone is lying, you'll see all the signs that he's lying. It's confirmation bias 101, and this is unashamedly published on a so-called credible journalism outlet.
I think if something bad happens to Mr. Back (I hope not), the NYTimes is at least morally responsible.
For the last point, I agree there's a sort of "who cares" aspect to the piece. There is no artistic intent to interpret. The product speaks for itself making BTC the default crypto coin instead of any of the other millions of coins. The wealth from the founder, from what I can tell, has not been instrumentalized in any significant way.
This is why the first item in the U.S. Bill of Rights is freedom of speech and of the press. Who knows what objections anyone will have to any given statement, and forcing everyone to accommodate everyone leads to a claustrophobic dystopia.
> What is gained by “unmasking” Satoshi other than satisfying one’s curiosity?
Those sweet, sweet clicks, and the eyeballs they bring along with them, of course
That said, clearly a lot of people really do seem to care who Satoshi is, so it doesn't seem like its out of the question for a newspaper to print an article claiming to answer that question.
> Do they just not care about the ethical implications?
Did Satoshi not care about the ethical implications of creating bitcoin? Mr Back may not be Satoshi, but he's also made a career driving the adoption of bitcoin and bitcoin itself has enabled many, many terrible crimes. It seems like special pleading to argue that Mr Back is not responsible for any of the consequence of bitcoin in the world, and also that the NY Times is morally responsible if someone harms Mr Back because they think he is Satoshi. Either we have an ethical responsibility to consider the consequences of our actions or we don't.
Arguably a person who can at whim with a single click destabilize half the world economy (simply by moving a single sat from the creator wallet to another, among other things) necessitates such oversight too and can't claim to be a private insignificant individual who is abused by transparency.
PS: even though I'm a lowly QA on a relatively small salary, as an entrepreneur my private info like contact, full address, tax returns and other is completely and legally public for anyone in the world to see on my government portal. And it is a good thing.
> hundreds of millions
More in the range of 100 billion
Journalist/journalism is like leader/leadership… too often used inappropriately, too often used to mislead, too often used inappropriately. Words such as reporter, hack, or NYT agent are more appropriate and more accurate.
Put another way, if your pet barks, would you still call it a cat? Of course not! If these people and entities aren’t fulfilling the baseline of the definition why do we continue to call them something they are not?
Journalist is a verb. It’s the decisions made and the actions taken. We’d be doing the collective a favor if we stopped giving credit where credit is NOT due.
[1] editorial: Most of us would agree that the NYT has lost its way. That it’s getting by on the fumes of integrity long gone.
>> 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.
Sure there is. A whole system of unregulated finance has been setup and it's very useful for criminality. How is not in the public interest to know who set it up and for what purpose? If it turned out Satoshi was actually a nation state and this was done for some nefarious purpose you think that's not in the public interest?
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.
>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.
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-eni...
[1] https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html
[2] https://x.com/adam3us/status/1972888761257415129
[3] https://x.com/adam3us/status/1981329274721149396
> 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.
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").
> 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.
adam back: 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.
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.
> 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... 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I know coincidences happen but that’s one hell of a coincidence
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.
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.
Two of the problems with this article, among others:
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. 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/XfcvX0P1b5g
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
> 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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwVXC1Lf00k
[2] https://bitslog.com/2020/08/22/the-patoshi-mining-machine/
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.
> "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"
* I'm extrapolating this timeframe from the quotations compared in the article.
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.
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.
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.