Ever since the unveiling of Bitcoin on Halloween 2008, the true inventor behind the revolutionary digital currency has been shrouded in mystery.
Its creator adopted the mysterious pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, but no individual had so far been decisively identified as Satoshi, now undoubtedly one of the world’s richest people.
But after an extensive investigation involving artificial intelligence and forensic linguistics experts, the New York Times has claimed to uncover the anonymous architect of Bitcoin, who has hidden his identity for 17 years.
That man is Adam Back, a 55-year-old British computer scientist who the newspaper says pioneered the decentralised digital currency, used for encrypted, peer-to-peer transactions without needing a central bank.
If true, the University of Exeter–educated cryptographer has generated a vast fortune: as per Bitcoin lore, Satoshi mined 1.1 million coins in the digital currency’s nascency, a cache that is worth $70 billion today.
On Wednesday, he took to X to deny the allegations, telling his followers decisively, ‘I’m not Satoshi’ before adding in a follow-up tweet: ‘I also don’t know who Satoshi is, and I think it is good for Bitcoin that this is the case, as it helps Bitcoin be viewed a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity.’
Nevertheless, the New York Times’ conclusion was drawn from over a year of trawling through thousands of decades-old internet postings, revealing a trail of opaque clues that weaved together points towards Back.
Over the years, the encryption expert used extraordinary methods to conceal his identity, allegedly even sending emails in his own name to the mysterious Satoshi, playing both roles at once in a Mr. Ripley-esque charade to cover his tracks.
But try as he might to conceal his identity, a series of extensive linguistic analyses have uncovered persuasive similarities between Back and Satoshi’s writing styles, leading to the conclusion that they are, and always have been, the same man.
When confronted originally by the New York Times, Back resolutely denied that he was in fact Satoshi, telling the outlet in a sharp and defensive tone: ‘Ultimately, it doesn’t prove anything. And I will reassure you, it’s really not me.’
But his body language revealed something else, from his blushing cheeks to him shifting uncomfortably in his seat when bombarded with a cascade of questions.
This is not the first time Back has been linked to the shadowy Satoshi. The makers of a 2024 HBO documentary, ‘Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery’, cornered him sat on a park bench in Riga, Latvia, his shirt untucked under a brown coat.
When the leading figure in the Bitcoin movement was asked if he was actually the cryptocurrency’s inventor, his body language was again illuminating: he tensed up, vehemently denied he was Satoshi, and insisted the interview be kept off the record.
But if he claims he’s not the father of the digital currency, then who is Adam Back?
The 55-year-old is the CEO of Blockstream, a blockchain technology company he founded in 2014 ‘to create the financial infrastructure of the future’, which builds products and services for the storage and transfer of cryptocurrency.
He also invented Hashcash in 1997, the proof-of-work algorithm cited by Satoshi in the Bitcoin whitepaper, as the future basis for its mining function.
The grey-haired, spectacle wearing computer scientist – who taught himself how to code on a Timex Sinclair personal computer at age 11 – has built a mini empire of Bitcoin-related businesses and become one of the community’s most prominent thinkers.
Back was an early member of the Cypherpunks, a movement of anarchists formed in the early 1990s who wanted to use cryptography – the art of securing communications through code – to liberate private individuals from government scrutiny and censorship.
But a rigorous analysis of his correspondences and posts in the Cypherpunks mailing list from the 1990s shows that he inadvertently left a number of previously undetected signs behind, linking him to the mystifying Satoshi.
As the investigation continued, other linguistic and grammatical similarities between the two computer geniuses abounded.
The outlet focused on two cryptographic concepts that Satoshi spelled a particular way – ‘proof of work’ and ‘partial pre-image’ – both phrases to describe how Bitcoin’s Hashcash-like mining function actually worked.
When Satoshi used these unique phrases, he’d always hyphenate them, just like Back did.
While such similarities in grammar may seem inconsequential, there were so few individuals regularly using such language at the same, so any similarities are immediately telling.
A third linguistic marker the newspaper zeroed in on was the phrase ‘burning the money’, which Satoshi used while discussing an escrow feature.
He employed the saying to mean destroying bitcoins. Before Satoshi, only one individual had discussed ‘burning’ an electronic coin on the community’s mailing lists: Back, in April 1999.
Eventually, the newspaper used computational text analysis to sift through an enormous database, comprised of the Cypherpunks, Cryptography and Hashcash mailing lists all merged together into a single archive.
The aim was to ascertain which user from the community overwhelmingly shared the same dialect as Satoshi.
They narrowed down the search to 620 candidates who had together written 134,308 posts.
Back came out at the top of the list most aligned with the Satoshi corpus of language they had identified, with 521 synonym-less words shared with the anonymous inventor.
They ran a series of other searches, screening for posters who shared Satoshi’s grammatical hyphenation errors, as well as those who sometimes put two spaces between sentences like Satoshi did.
After all the tests, Back came back as the best match, leading the outlet to believe that he was the inventor all along.
Reacting to the accusations this morning, Back insisted to his 800 thousand X followers that the investigation had drawn the incorrect conclusion, writing: ‘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.’
He then linked to an earlier post of his from March 2023, within which he mysteriously wrote: ‘We are all Satoshi.’
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