Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous name of the inventor of bitcoin, has never been publicly unveiled. The New York Times believes it may have finally nailed the right guy, but said guy says it’s not him.
In a video report from the New York Times, investigative reporter John Carreyrou argues it is British cryptographer Adam Back. A member of the cryptography group Cypherpunks, CEO of blockchain company Block Stream, and inventor of Hashcash, Back is fairly well-known in the crypto scene.
The first bit of evidence is a nitpick of grammar. Carreyrou says both Back and Nakamoto are “pathologically incapable of using hyphens correctly” and that “they tended to hyphenate compound nouns, which you’re not supposed to do, and to not hyphenate compound adjectives, which you are supposed to do.”
He also notes that, in a Cypherpunks list back in 2004, Back uses the term ‘partial pre-image’, and Nakamoto appears to have used that same phrase in 2008. Carreyrou reports using AI to analyse a database of over 30,000 users who could be Nakamoto, and it labelled Back’s grammar as the closest to the Bitcoin creator.
Carreyrou notes that Adam Back is the first person Nakamoto spoke to, via email. He also argues that Back’s own paper lays out principles found in the Bitcoin white paper a decade later, and Back started to talk about Bitcoin when Nakamoto went silent in 2011.
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Satoshi Nakamoto also references Adam Back’s Hashcash in Bitcoin’s foundational white paper. Carreyrou states that Back was patient and polite with him when they first met, but he ‘went dark’ after Carreyrou asked Back to provide the metadata of his interactions with Nakamoto.
“Looking at all the evidence I’ve collected over the past 18 months, I became more and more convinced that they were actually emails Adam Back had sent to himself. “
Carreyrou says, “Adam’s chalked all of this up to one big series of coincidences”
i’m not satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash, privacy tech on cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas.April 8, 2026
Adam Back has since taken to X to share his side of the story and to deny the allegation. (Via The Guardian). Back says, “I’m not Satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash [and] privacy tech on Cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas.”
Back argues that Carreyrou’s findings are an example of confirmation bias, and that one would naturally link comments together when lots of people have a similar interest, He continues to argue that the rest is simply a “combination of coincidence and similar phrases from people with similar experience and interests – inference Satoshi needed specific skills and experience to discover bitcoin, where myself and others got ‘so close yet so far’ in design discussions the decade before.”
Back claims “I also don’t know who Satoshi is, and I think it is good for Bitcoin that this is the case” and that he prefers to look at Bitcoin as something that was “discovered”. He seems to prefer the idea of no one really knowing who invented Bitcoin, and it’s hard to say if that’s something someone who invented Bitcoin would say or not.
