British author Adam Back denies NYT report that he is Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto

The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of the creator of Bitcoin, remains a long-standing mystery. But according to new research published in the New York Times, Satoshi could be Adam Back, a British author who did the original research on digital economy. Back denies that he is Satoshi.

People have been trying to track down the father of Bitcoin for years, without success. Based on Back’s denial, it’s unclear whether Times technology reporter John Carreyrou, known for the report that brought down Theranos, went further than anyone else.

The background is related to the history of the type of person you would think would create the first cryptocurrency. He created Hashcash, the proof-of-work system that Satoshi used to create bitcoin, and is now the founder and CEO of Blockstreama company building the infrastructure for blockchain payment systems. Back though he agreed with Carreyrou that he is a suspect, and it is possible that Satoshi is – like him – a British Cypherpunk of the fifties. (In that case, yes, using a Japanese moniker is odd.)

But Carreyrou does not have enough evidence to close the case.

To prove his claim, he collected the archives of emails sent in three cryptography journals between 1992 and 2008 during the time when the anonymous Satoshi was involved in these forums. Carreyrou fed the data into the AI ​​to detect similarities between the way Satoshi and other active characters wrote. For example, Satoshi did not put hyphens in compound nouns, and sometimes combined “his” with “is.”

Back then it was a great game, but wrote on X that the evidence is “a combination of coincidental events and similar expressions of people with similar experiences and interests.”

Satoshi’s case is not closed, but we have to admit, Carreyrou’s use of AI was very clever.