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.
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.
One of the journalists was Jason Koebler who later cofounded 404media. That is imho pretty legit outlet which uncovered many pretty damning stories about tech.
404media is good stuff, one of the few news outlets I pay for. I didn't dig too deep on the above comment because I have a deep respect for journalists despite admittedly many of them servicing things I dislike by choice or coercion or for remuneration or fame, etc. Reading about journalists in more authoritarian countries was seriously depressing
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.
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.
The journalist knew what she was doing. Naomi was in China, agreed to do an interview about her self & her work, then the journo tried to drum up clicks by putting her on the spot about politics.
Real consequences for the interviewee, all for some clicks. That's not journalism.
By releasing personal information which a reasonable person would expect to be private? I don't know the specifics of this case (only responding to the overly vague question) but information like address, private contact info, details about their families. Anything you would not immediately expect to become public knowledge simply by writing about topic(s).
Funny enough in her own words, they don't much care..
> You’re wrong. NYT does pay attention to subscriber cancellations. It’s one of the metrics for “outrage” that they take to distinguish between “real” outrage and superficial outrage. What subscribers say can back up dissenting views inside the paper about what it should do and be.
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
> 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.
Cade Metz wrote the article under his real name, and his home address is public information, but presumably he wouldn't appreciate it being published on the internet. Why is that any different?
The NYT has no authority to dox people. If they or anyone believed that SSC was acting unethically or illegally, that should be processed through proper legal or ethical channels, which exist for a reason. The solution is not that NYT should abuse their power to skip those channels.
It’s legal to publish anonymous patient data, doctors do it frequently e.g. in “case studies”. As long as it can’t be traced back to the patient I don’t see why they should care (I wouldn’t). And since it increases public knowledge (e.g. how to treat future patients) I think it’s not only ethical, but should be encouraged.
Doxxing also increases public knowledge, but knowing who’s behind some online pseudonym is much less useful than patient anecdotes (what would you do with the former? Satisfy your interest (or what else do you mean by “public interest”)?). Moreover, unlike anonymous patient data, it has a serious downside: risking someone’s job, relationships, or even life.
In principle, anonymized case studies do not require consent and historically, they were often published without. Without personally identifiable information, this is and always has been 100% legal. But in modern practice, many journals acknowledge that making a case fully anonymous in the age of the internet might not even be possible without taking away everything noteworthy, so they require some form of consent nowadays.
That's not so easy, especially for clinical case studies. If any data points are irrelevant, they should not be stated at all, because they actually might not be irrelevant after all and by arbitrarily changing them, you could confound results. On the other hand, it has been shown that three or more indirect data points can already be enough to unmask you in an anonymized report. And most reports usually contain many more than that. So it's not surprising that journals would cover their backs by requiring consent, even if the law does not explicitly demand it.
I don’t know how typical it is, but HIPAA explicitly doesn’t cover patient data after anonymization, and anecdotally I’ve had an anonymous case study published about me without my consent (although I was notified after).
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.
> 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 was curious about this point when discussion came up on HN just recently. I don't see how you could "assign" each non-QR address a new quantum resistant address unless they "claim" it themselves somehow. What can possibly happen to an uneducated mom-and-pop bitcoin holder who never takes up their claim? Someone else who cracks their private key would be in an identical position to them w.r.t authenticating themselves and doing such a claim first - thus it becomes a race
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?
I always assumed these wallets were never meant to be withdrawn. In the case of satoshi’s - it’s public proof that the Bitcoin network is still secure.
> Bitcoins across old unused wallets worth $30B to $80B depend of how you count it.
It's worth considerably less if you make any attempt to count it accurately. The market capitalization reflects the fact that old unused wallets are unused. If they stopped being unused, market capitalization would drop.
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.
> this is unashamedly published on a so-called credible journalism outlet
There may be credible journalists at some major print newspapers, but I don’t think there are many people who actually believe that any major US-based journalism outlet defaults to credible any more.
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.
It’s like saying chirurgeon job is like any other job, and the most people operated in a minimum amount of time is all that matter to optimize. But even in the most cynical Machiavelli™ hospital, reputation and actual operational results have to be taken into account if the institution want to continue to be frequented.
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.
More likely they were playing with the system when they were the system in the early days, and just didn't keep those keys (IMO). Remember, even into the GPU era people were still giving bitcoin away; those wallets weren't worth anything.
An estimated 22,000 addresses, 1.1 million Bitcoin. Present value $78 billion. That would make him the 23rd richest person in the world. Bill Gates by comparison is 'only' worth $102 billion these days.
If you priced Gates backwards in gold, his $102 billion is about $13 billion two decades ago. He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
You can't price dollars in gold to measure value. Gold doesn't measure value better than the dollar at any point in time, let alone over time. Just use the price index for one currency, or the relative price indexes across currencies.
Wait. Are you claiming that there's some sort of link between "Gates's relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein started in 2011" and the Gates Foundation which launched in 2000 by merging with the Gates Sr. Foundation from all the way back in 1994?
Yes, "charitable work". I'm sure a foundation like that could make a good front for child trafficking. Not that Bill would ever do such a thing obviously, his common interests with that old rascal Jeff must have strictly included other things.
> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
The dollar is trading pretty much at 30-year historic highs relative to all other currencies. You have to go back to ~2000 to find a stronger era, and then the 1980s before that.
I don't know how you know that, but even that argument is a straw man, unless you're asserting that all of the other currencies declined in value equally against whatever theoretical good(s) you're holding out as the objective standard for value.
Gold is a weird one. It’s has a hell of a run over the last decade. I’m not sure it looked so rosy in 2015. I kinda feel like betting on gold is betting on the end of civilization. I don’t really want to be right.
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.
Naah, the moment the first million of those is sold -- the price crashes.
In other words, imagine some investor had those billions, and could buy the key. Should they? A thing is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.
NYT just doesn't care about the consequences of what they publish. A few years ago they put out a piece about how a big group of people were constantly raping another big group of people, that had significant geopolitical implications, it turned out to be entirely made up and they never apologised.
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?
I fail to understand "why". There is this awesome band, Angine de Poitrine, that makes being anonymous a big part of the fun. Some people are trying hard to dox them, and I heard that someone already did it. What if they decide to quit, now that the fun is over if they are not anonymous anymore? Congrats, you fucked up the party and nothing was gained.
Let's keep in mind that doxxing is not a universal concept nor are its mechanisms universally perceived as negative/frowned upon outside of specific online areas.
I don't know of any law against it except for specific populations like law enforcement and even those usually have exceptions for journalism.
Yeah, as a Scandinavian it is often hard to understand how people can feel that their existence is a secret. We've had public and fairly rich (family relations, profession) census data for hundreds of years. Tax records, school grades, property ownership. All of it public information available to and for everyone.
The right to privacy here never meant "noone may know that I exist".
Widely only in limited — mostly english speaking — online communities. Otherwise most people hate it if it is likely to harm someone considered as an innocent individual but less if that figure is already kind of public — people love to know where and all the details on how famous people live — or to people they view more negatively. For instance nobody complains when the real owner, origin and location of say, a shady company, is made known to the general public.
> Then the person who harmed him will be prosecuted ... NY Times isn’t calling for violence.
And the negligent driver also didn't mean to cause injury, yet we have laws on negligent driving.
If the NY Times would have known that harm could come to someone by having information published, they should consult and/or take measures to prevent that harm (or at least, take measures to minimize it).
Consider the following hypothetical: you have a safe in your home with a substantial sum of money in it, and you consider its presence, the location and contents private knowledge. However, someone uses publicly available information to infer the rough location and contents of your safe and makes it public. You are robbed shortly after. What percentage of responsibility lies with that person?
Harm from exposure can take a lot of shapes and sizes that go beyond the physical and the potential prosecution that someone may be held accountable I find weak.
You really dont get it? Because real billionares have the money and you dont.
Journalists just told everyone you are billionare, but you're just average SWE on $120k / year and absolutely no money for hiring small army of guards. Neither your own government agencies keep your back protected like they do for usual high profile people.
Now go find a proof for mafia that you are not in fact have a billion bucks on USD stick.
This has happened in this Satoshi hunt multiple times already. I mean finding that some random crypto related SWE is Satoshi when they are not.
Satoshi is a paper billionaire - he can't use a small fraction of his "wealth" to hire proper security. Simultaneously his "assets" are much more attractive to criminals. Imagine holding a regular billionaire hostage and demanding they give you a billion dollars. They'd probably have to sell 1B worth of stock, then convert it to cash (or crypto), etc. all of that requiring multiple interactions with different people and institutions.
Heisting multiple billions worth of crypto would have the same issues, just to a smaller degree. If that much illicit money is on the line, `mJurisdiction` which normally looks the other way might be tempted to investigate and confiscate it for their own benefit.
They also can't easily sell that amount quickly without repercussions (and without another institution like an exchange).
> There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good or anything like that.
Here is an argument for the greater public good.
Transparency. Bitcoin acts as an alternative global monetary system. It’s not centralized but whales can control the game. Acquisition of bitcoins are asymmetrical, meaning first adopters gained an enormous wealth and became whales virtually for free. So we can say it’s a rigged game. It becomes important to know who are all those people that can control a global monetary system. If Satoshi is an individual it may not matter. But what if it’s an organization, like CIA or o group of bankers. What if it was Epstein or Elon Musk, unlikely but viable candidates but the implications are huge.
Also we assume Bitcoin is for good and maker of a good thing can be anonymous. What if it is a harmful thing, like a Ponzi scheme to grab people’s money. Then Satoshi becomes a criminal rather than a hero, and public must know the name.
Journalists largely have no morals or ethics these days. Literal scum of the earth, anything to make a name for themselves or to push their ideological agendas.
Why should journalism engage in the implied pro-active censorship here?
With that reasoning you could censor everything, including the Epstein files. You only need to find some "critical reason", usually being safety concern or "but but but the children". So I disagree with that rationale.
How far would you want censorship to go?
Having said that, I am not particularly interested in the "who is mystery man" debate situation.
> There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good
That's an opinion. While I personally don't care, others may, so your statement here is also just an opinion. Trump also said the Epstein files are not relevant - I and many others think differently. I wonder how deep the Epstein kompromat situation is, it would be an ideal blackmail situation. Any democracy can be factually undermined that way.
I would assume that they don't care about the unmasking, because the whole thing is a just a misleading show, intended to misdirect you from the reality. I don't know the reality, but perhaps if the USG was behind the creation of BTC, that would explain it.
No, because those people are already public figures. They own companies that are publicly known (i don't mean publicly traded), and thus by proxy, are public face of those companies.
Or they appear(ed) in public to make something of being in public (such as lobbying, or civic activities, or philanthropy etc). This makes any article about them not a doxx - they already revealed themselves publicly. You cannot segregate public affairs of the person with private affairs.
Those people are on alert and already protected. Satoshi is probably a regular guy without any other security other than being anonymous. We are also assuming that they are doxing the real guy, and not some bystander that now have to deal with all the consequences without having the resources to protect himself. Lets suppose they are wrong, they dox the wrong person, "opsies, let us add a footnote to the text saying we were wrong, and let us forget this happened" (RE: reddit played detective a couple times and botched normal people lives).
And if you do have a big pile of money but are flying under the radar so far you sadly should have some investments in security. I thought people around here didn’t really believe in security through obscurity.
Lets keep with the analogy, as wrong as it is. If you discover a serious bug, you usually disclose it privately, allowing the maintainers to patch the problem before disclosing. When the embargo is over, the bug is already harmless. Why we do that? Isn't that security through obscurity? Why we consider unethical to just disclose serious zero day bugs that might even get someone killed, or thousand of script kiddies that would never discover the bug on their own can profit from it easily?
Security through obscurity actually works in real life. There are lots of people that hide all their lives in a humble way, only to get discovered as millionaires after they die. Because you don't have hundred, thousands of bots looking for "vulnerabilities" on everyone's life at almost zero cost and big potential profit.
Sadly it does. Most of those people have to spend a lot of money on security. But usually it's not the Forbes list that specifically outs them as being wealthy. You can't really build a billion dollar company under the radar.
This is just a strange situation where someone has made billions without their identity being known, without being a criminal.
After events of last 4 years in Russia you can probably be killed there for $100 or for a wrong look. Lots of trigger happy ex-convict veterans with PTSD are around.
For now they are busy killing their wives and relatives, but eventually they will run out of money for alcohol and will have to find a "job".
>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.
Ah yes, the cautionary tale where the leadership is willing to accept their own faults, seeks out the most competent to solve their issue, despite initial reservations are willing to go with the suggestions provided and a public that, upon being provided evidence accepts it. Kinda hopeful, if one thinks about it, the Eugenics nonsense notwithstanding…
This section stood out to me because it started out explaining PGP to a layman like this, but then the author gets overly excited that a cryptographer would be interested in... basic cryptography
> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. So does Bitcoin. [...]
> How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.
Bob uses electricity provided from a coal power plant, therefore he must be able to design a Fission plant. Yeah, these are some massive leaps, the question of why, beyond morbid curiosity, one must dox Satoshi not withstanding. Satoshi or the wallets they controlled were never associated with anything beyond the creation of BTC after all, making the value of knowing who they are or were not really great in my view. If these coins suddenly started funding someone or something, there could be an argument, but this coupled with such a layperson approach makes me doubtful about the ethics or approach.
> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.
Amazing! I bet they both for loops too! I heard Bitcoin relies heavily on for loops.
Infuriatingly, to people who don't know much about programming, these pieces of 'evidence' might sound quite compelling, because it will all sound equally obscure to them.
I'm only a quarter of the way through this piece, but I'm finding it very hard to take seriously.
It's strange. I'm sure that he talked to experts who would immediately say, yes many programming languages exist. But two cryptographers who wrote money systems both using C++ is not informative. Today maybe we could expect one to use Rust.
I think it's mind boggling that in 2026 encryption and signing of emails is still not a common thing, only because it's Google's business model to snoop on their users' email. For that reason we can't use email to send sensitive data and need apps for every little thing that could have been an email.
And nowadays, PGP technology is mostly used by the government and military. I wouldn't be surprised if this was also the case when Bitcoins was originally developed
PGP was different then. In the 90s the internet was unencrypted and the only people using PGP were those that had a reasonable need for it. However, there were a couple of big problems that the armchair historian would not be aware of.
First off, communicating with PGP was hard. Imagine you are based in London and you want to publish something controversial without getting taken to court. You could email someone in New York and ask them to post your 'hot potato of juiciness'. But, how to you exchange keys without the beloved five eyes seeing what you are up to?
This was in an era when very little was encrypted, so anything encrypted would theoretically get flagged for the three letter agencies to take a look at. Again, this would depend on the person you are trying to reach, if they were working at the equivalent of 'the Iranian embassy' then yeah, good luck with that, you are going to get caught.
The next problem was that PGP was doable for the three letter agencies using what amounts to WW2 Enigma tactics. In period it was possible for them to man-in-the-middle attack an email, to ask the PGP using sender to 'use the right key and resend'. The sender does as told, even with the same, as provided, public key. However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
PGP was originally treated as a 'munition' with export controls. People weren't using PGP for their Uber Eats and Amazon orders, as per the article, it was only anti-government people that needed PGP, that being Western 'five eyes' governments.
Hence, even though it is a tedious NYT article, the author is right about PGP, in period. And, don't ask how I know about how PGP was hacked, there was a certain fog of war that went on at the time.
It was never trivial for TLAs to man-in-the-middle anyone, because PGP users were very much aware of the problem and nothing about key exchange was automated, for good or ill. Key exchange parties, reading out key fingerprints in their own custom extended phonetic alphabet etc.
A man in the middle attack would maybe work in rare cases, at great cost, and then you'd get one or two messages and immediately make people aware that they'd been attacked. It's not worth it. I'm confident the TLAs never bothered to do it against anyone with public keys on a key server, the minimum effort you could make to guard against MITM attacks.
> However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
Yeah the weird thing about living in a democracy is you have to convince people who don't agree with you to do things. Maybe try better politics rather than attacks or else you'll go another 30 years of no nuclear power then die without realizing your dream of nearly free clean unlimited power.
It’s 10x easier to destroy things and block stuff than it is to build anything.
As witnessed by the US inability to build anything for a generation or two. It’s all NIMBY (or worse) all the time.
Anti-anything is fighting a nearly unwinnable asymmetric political fight these days. Eventually times will get hard enough where this flips, but we are nowhere close to that yet.
In Austria we put it to a vote. Right after building the first fission plant. We never switched it on after a narrow defeat. At least in our narrow case, the restrictions were exclusively democratic.
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?
Didnt follow everything here, but wouldn't that make for a perfect cover story? If you're Satoshi, and people are getting close to verifying (or at least nominating you as "most likely candidate"), what better way to throw people off than to engage in a public conversation in which you (creatively) get all kinds of technical details wrong and make yourself look too ignorant or dumb to ever have been Satoshi?
The funny thing is that the author uses your exact logic when he finds evidence that goes against his hypothesis. He made posts that asked questions about things that Satoshi definitely would've known? Misdirection! Somebody else does it? Strong evidence against them!
The interesting thing to me is, it seems likely that whichever individual or small group actually is Satoshi must have planted at least a few misdirection false flags like that at some point. But how in the world would you ever tell which ones are that sort of misdirection and which are real?
>One can always suppose the identified individual is a double, triple, quadruple agent.
yes in general it's not good reasoning but given that in this case we know that we're talking about someone who tried to stay anonymous and comes out of the cypherpunk culture we can pretty much assume that if they've been interviewed they've denied it.
It's not like that accusation is random, it's that this is what the real Nakamoto, whoever it is, would have said
I think it's a pretty good case. I always wondered why would the inventor would use pseudonym in the first place. Surely, not even the most visionary person could anticipate how hugely popular the thing would become. This is why I was intrigued by Newsweek investigation [1]. However, seeing this article, I am leaning towards the person being someone who had been active in crypto culture for a long while, before creating Bitcoin. The story about Napster, and the paranoia around government going after the inventor ties in nicely towards the motivation to remain anonymous.
The word, phrasing use is a good evidence. I do wonder though why didn't the author try to analyze the source code similarly? Did it prove something to the contrary?
Also, Satoshi jumping in to defend block-size out of the blue sounds too reckless for someone so careful about anonymity. Possible explanation might be that he let his guard down seeing an attempt to "butcher" his creation.
In any case, I am convinced that it was most likely a single person and if not Adam, I think there are no more than 3-4 people who are possible candidates.
> Pretty compelling story. Not necessarily for its revelations, but for the fact that John Carreyrou and the NYT decided to publish it at all.
When is the line crossed from journalism into doxxing? Whoever created Bitcoin has a legitimate safety reason to stay anonymous. Anyone suspected of holding that much wealth becomes a target - as does their family.
There is no such line. The actual line is whether someone is newsworthy; the safeguard you have against journalism abusing random people (which it has done, often, over the last 150 years) is that journalists ordinarily don't write intrusive stories about random people.
(There are some other safeguards, but they're highly situational.)
The conflict between journalism and "doxxing" is a Redditism that people are frantically trying to import into real life. Maybe Reddit norms will upend the longstanding norms (and purpose) of journalism! But nobody should kid themselves that the norms have always been compatible.
But are they themselves newsworthy or is it what they created and that they hold a lot of coins?
There are many people, both FOSS devs and working for major corporations, that have contributed or singularly been responsible for very impactful technologies, but in general, if that person wants to keep their persona discreet and there is no evidence they have done anything of public interest, the reporting remains purely on what they have done. Akin to why Wikipedia generally has rules for notability (I’d argue Satoshi falls under ONEVENT if we are strict here).
To me, the way you describe it, the line appears to be less in whether there may be a public interest and more whether there is public attention. In other words, is the line in the sand whether people should know this or whether they want to (and thus buy copies)?
Genuinely asking, is there a rule set on this the NYT should adhere to? What is the APs position for dem asking a pseudononymous character only notable for a specific thing?
I agree, in that Journalism has always been an unethical business masquerading as moral imperative.
But I think this "Redditism applied to real life" is actually society grappling with the ethics of public safety and social accountability in the 21st century. Is it okay to dox a 16 year old Twitch streamer? Or a wealthy Satoshi? Or a crypto-Nazi? Laws only define so much, and we (society) have to fill in the gaps, which is messy. I think we're figuring out where the line is in real time.
Isn't it a matter of legitimate interest for me to know whether you're obscenely rich or not? After all, if you are, you can probably do things like buying elections and sending hitmen after my family.
Either way, why can't they just deal with it the way other obscenely rich people deal with it?
I hate this idea that doxxing is some kind if crime. “Who is the creator of bitcoin?” is a matter of great public and historical interest. Finding out who he is, is the purest form of journalism.
What does that say about pure journalism? Publish information despite doing harm? How do you present the information, and what impact does that presentation have?
Historically, newspapers often published the full name and physical address of every person they covered, from judges to drunks to rape victims to people suspected of a crime. I'm sure people back in the day called that pure journalism, but I don't think we'd call it "good" today. Our standards today might also not be as good as we assume.
Historically, people got a big book every year with the name and address of most people in it. You could get unlisted numbers but now everyone has a cellphone which just isn’t broadly published but because now many use it for everything it’s probably not that hard to find.
Also, has others have noted it’s trivial to put other a list of wealthy people. In fact, it’s probably better to skip the Forbes 400 list who probably have some level of private security. Just go through the board member lists of Fortune 500 companies.
Speculating about it using arguments like "he also uses C++ and has used words popular in those circles" isn't though or at least shouldn't be.
"Hey this guy probably had an access to a few billion USD worth of btc, maybe still has, his name is X, he lives in Y. He wishes to be anonymous but he knows C++ and we got him!".
> I hate this idea that doxxing is some kind if crime.
The thing is, up until the advent of the internet it basically didn't matter - although in some cases, e.g. the German left-wing terror group "RAF", rich people did end up getting v&, in some cases killed. But that was a rarity.
But now with the possibilities of modern technology? Being able to be active on the Internet without hiding behind a pseudonym is a rare privilege. Wrong political opinion? Some nutjob from the opposite side can and will send anything from "pizza pranks" to outright SWAT to your home (or your parents, or ex-wife, or anyone they can identify as being associated with you). And if you got money? Stalkers, thieves, robbers, scammers, you will get targeted.
Except Satoshi has been "anonymous" and those Bitcoin have never moved, even when the sum total of that wallet might have been $10,000 or so.
And if Satoshi's holdings now exceed $1B, well, for better or worse, multiple courts have ruled that billionaires are inherently public figures, because of their "outsized effect on public discourse".
It would be hilarious if he intentionally or accidentally lost the key, and has been trying to cash out through those Bitcoin adjacent business ventures ever since.
A major problem with the article is the author's inability to weigh the evidence: actual evidence, like presence/absence pattern, is buried whereas p-hacking stylometry (let me try another expert, this one didn't give me what I wanted! let me feed him the Satoshi/Adam Back tells that I'm already in love with!) is majority of the article. It also includes absolute garbage like the vistomail spoof email during the block size wars. And, oh by the way, both Satoshi and Adam Back knew C++. Theranos evidence was binary (machines either work or they don't) but it is not so here and the author is simply out of his depth here.
It is sad - but entirely unsurprising - that NYT decided to paint a big target on someone's back just for clicks. Judith Miller-tier all over again. Miller too had real evidence and junk evidence, couldn't distinguish between the two, and editors wanted a flashy headline. Carreyrou has exactly the same problem here: NYT editors need multimedia events (like junk stylometry filtering - watch the number shrink from 34,000 to 562 to 114 to 56 to 8 to 1!!!) because that's what its audience-product relationship demands. I think it not unfair to say that modern Times' editorial culture has no mechanism for distinguishing rigorous inference from merely compelling narrative. Open the front page on a random day: how often do you see the Times staking credibility on a causal claim "A causes B" vs simply "X happened. Then Y came." vibes/parataxis.
I've had the fortune/misfortune to be directly or peripherally involved in nearly a dozen situations that made it to press and there isn't a single case where the story represented in the article wasn't blatantly misinterpreted from the facts. In nearly every case what was mentioned in the article was the complete opposite of what actually happened. Biggest/Most-egregious offenders were Vice and Vox Media but included are the NYT, WaPo and Time.
One can only narrow the things they care about to those they can verify (or personally affect them) and go after primary sources themselves and form their own conclusions. I'm no longer convinced that modern journalism is good for anything more than starting bonfires.
can you give some examples? I'm very interested in this. (after all we had about a decade of crying "fake news" - and as far as I understand the verdict was that big traditional outlets get the basic facts right - who what where when - but are absolutely clueless about or intentionally spin the "why".)
Your aside suggests you might already have considered what I'm about propose, but why not Finney and Back both as Satoshi?
The reporting already establishes all three parties (Satoshi being the third) were familiar/friendly with one another. The reporting says that Finney was the recipient of the first ever Bitcoin transaction, which seems like a completely natural thing to do if the two of you are working together.
Finney's name also rises to the top in a few of the author's analysis, while also noting:
> "But his analysis had been hampered by the fact that most of Mr. Back’s papers were coauthored with other cryptographers, which made it difficult to know who really wrote them."
Again, why not both of them as Satoshi?
Hal Finney's passing also helps explain how such a monumental secret of Satoshi's identity has remained a secret for so long. The only other person who's in on the secret is Back himself.
Edit: To add further conjecture, it wouldn't surprise me if Satoshi's wallet is locked away in a trust or tied up with Finney's estate. I can imagine a scenario where the keys to the wallet are legally unobtainable until such time that both Finney and Back have passed, at which point the wallet is liquidated and its proceeds donated (Finney previously raised money for ALS research).
Reasoning: They have the chops to create the world's first system where consensus, scarcity, and ownership exist without a central authority... But, they also lack the ability to write a Perl script to "Send Later". Checks out.
Why would they believe that someone in the future would be tracking their mailing list post history and correlating email timestamps with real-life activity? There's no motivation to take steps to hide one's tracks (by setting up a remote email send while one is were away) unless one thinks that is going to happen.
Anyone sophisticated enough to hide their writing style and identity would be more than capable of setting an email to go out while they were at a public event.
Likewise, the argument discounting szabo because he exposed some ignorance of Bitcoin is exactly what someone might do to throw off the scent.
Impeccable? Carreyrou's articles and eventual book are built largely off of the deep investigative work done by Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis and Dr. Eleftherios P. Diamandis and a listserv with thousands of participating doctors...who aren't mentioned in the book once...Similarly-omitted are Softbank/Fortress and their eventual patent-holding shell company Labrador Diagnostics LLC...
> Can someone explain why this relatively recent tweet fight is convincing evidence that Szabo is too ignorant to have been behind Bitcoin?
I’m a primary player in this sad saga. I can tell you that neither Szabo nor Back are Satoshi, as anyone who knows them would attest.
But to your question, all this does is make this “journalist” look dumb. The thing being discussed by Adam and Nick wasn’t wven proposed for bitcoin until 6 years after Satoshi disappeared.
> I can tell you that neither Szabo nor Back are Satoshi, as anyone who knows them would attest.
I'm sure you can tell us, and I'm sure you all will attest it, but is it true though?
You probably wouldn't "out" Satoshi if it was one of you working on anonymous payment systems on the mailing list, and it very obviously is - there were like ten people at most, if we're generous, who were working on what was at the time an extremely nice cryptography topic.
Which is fine I guess, bit the attestation doesn't mean much.
I co-founded a company with Adam Back. If he is Satoshi, I'd be pissed that we had to take money on really bad terms while he was sitting on billions. And I'd find it strange that I had to correct minor misconceptions about how bitcoin worked back in 2013/2014. That's all non-transferable evidence though that you just have to take, or not take at face value.
On the other hand, just go read Adam's twitter. Half the time it is incomprehensible word salad because Adam clearly still does not proof-read his communications. Yet Satoshi's emails and forum posts were always considered and well-crafted.
In any case, I have no stake in this. I don't even own bitcoin anymore. It's just frustrating to see people's lives continuously turned upside down for no reason other than to drive clicks towards the NYT, without even the most basic journalistic integrity.
I'm not one of those who thinks it's Adam Back, I believe it's Szabo - which means of course that I find your anecdotes perfectly convincing :)
And it seems also the thing you mention about taking money on bad terms should be independently verifiable, which the journalist writing this article should probably have checked.
I have trouble believing Satoshi would pursue a venture capital startup founder life in his personal life, assuming he didn't burn his wallets. I would find it a lot more likely that he pursued an academic career at his own tempo, writing a paper here and there, maybe teaching undergraduates even, etc. But that's a lot closer to my dream life, so maybe I'm biased there as well!
In 2014 I found myself having to explain the fundamental basis of bitcoin's economic model and Satoshi's contribution to ecash (that the value of proof-of-work is independent of the work it represents, something the cypherpunks consistently got wrong pre-bitcoin) to a non-comprehending Nick Szabo. It's not him.
Even if Nick Szabo didn't have anything to do with Bitcoin, I find it very unlikely that he wouldn't know about the core differences between his own system and Bitcoin by 2014.
That's a bit like a mathematician trying damn hard to prove something, proving it for most cases, and then be totally unaware of the proof six months later, relying on his own proof and proving it for all cases. That doesn't sound like it happens very often, especially not for heavily online academics.
Are you sure he wasn't just politely nodding along to the entrepreneur explaining his invention to him?
I think you have the roles backwards. He was the one explaining (at first) how bitcoin wouldn't scale -- couldn't scale -- because the generated value doesn't adjust with the difficulty, when in fact that is fundamental to why bitcoin DOES work and prior schemes did not.
Which is fine. Nick was only just starting to learn about bitcoin at this time. I didn't understand this until much after I was first exposed to bitcoin, tbh. Much of how bitcoin/crypto works, although we take it for granted now, was very non-obvious to people working on ecash-like systems at the time. Bitcoin basically violates every inviolable constraint that cypherpunks had put on digital money systems.
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").
It seems very unlikely to me. I've had personal correspondence with Satoshi, and met Adam Back in person, and I can't see it.
Actually I don't see how anyone involved with Blockstream could be identified as Satoshi. They never believed in what Satoshi was doing and built their whole company around the claim that Satoshi had screwed up the core of the system's design, despite that nothing about the design or its assumptions had changed. They spent years raising investor capital (why would you do that if you were rich?) specifically to build a system designed to replace Bitcoin for end users.
The last time I met Adam he was trying to convince me to not continue working on Satoshi's original design, and none of his arguments were technical. Satoshi had a totally different approach.
I have no idea about any of this stuff - but if I were trying to hide my identity I would go out of my way to misalign my real self with my hidden identity.
e.g. Pick a name that puts people on a false trail.
Satoshi can't spend any of his bitcoins without tanking bitcoin's price. So Satoshi needs to find some other way to support himself. Creating bitcoin related companies is one way.
Nobody knows which coins Satoshi owns, it's just a guess for the very early coins and that guess gets progressively less accurate as time goes by. And this was a long time ago. There was no particular reason to think back then that Satoshi spending his coins would tank the price. Everyone back then was spending Bitcoins because that was the only way to build the economy. The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea when Blockstream killed Bitcoin as a genuine means of exchange and it became all about sitting on them as a speculative "investment".
But if he did want to spend he could just start from his last coins backwards.
This [1][2][3] seems to have a methodology for identifying Satoshi's coins, mined from 2009 to May 2010. But yes, for coins mined after May 2010, he likely can spend without scrutiny.
>The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea
Here are 2 people in 2013 expressing that idea: [4][5].
There's ambiguity here. When people talk about crashing the market they mean if he attempted to sell every last coin he owns for dollars all at once. Of course that would be a signal of lost confidence. What I mean is the more likely scenario of spending coins to achieve some specific goal or project.
It would also seem likely that if he at any point was alive and realised he wouldn't be able to touch his original wallets, he'd still get in early enough to be rich from subsequently crested wallets nobody would suspect.
1. Someone so purely interested in the tech and not money they'd give up the wealth
2. Governments, specifically the ones that don't consider a few billion to be a lot
3. Someone who's dead
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.
What struck me in particular was the fact the reporter noticed that Back had theorized how to evade stylometry. Obviously, if one of the people in question had specifically come up with ways to evade methods, you’d want to re-roll those methods to account for that.
That, alongside a number of other tidbits (Back’s activity and inactivity patterns lining up with Satoshi’s appearance and disappearance, his refusal to provide email metadata, his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law) makes the case a lot more meaningful than just “likely p-hacking.”
>his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law
I don't think you can attribute this to financial incentive. The actual Satoshi could forfeit 90% of their BTC and still have more than they could know what to do with.
At those kinds of levels I can see personal security being a higher consideration.
Either way it would give no indication who might be Satoshi because all candidates would have a similar incentive if they were Satoshi, and you are measuring the absence of information.
why does everybody assume that whoever is Satoshi still has access to their wallet? It's absolutely possible whoever is Satoshi has simply lost the key.
We're talking new technology where you're running fast and loose. It's absolutely possible, and I'd say a big reason why someone would not want to admit to being Satoshi.
I'm Satoshi, but I also lost billions because I messed up a Debian upgrade.
Further, no one would believe them, and they'd still endlessly be a target for criminals. No benefit to revealing any information beyond mild dismissals, IMO.
I commented elsewhere in this thread theorising that Satoshi could be the work of both Finney and Back. If that has any basis in reality, then it stands to reason that perhaps the wallet is locked away in a trust or at least legally unobtainable until certain conditions are met (e.g. Adam Back's passing). I can imagine a scenario in the future where a law firm makes a press release confirming they're in possession of Satoshi's wallet and have been instructed to liquidate and donate its proceeds.
> I'm Satoshi, but I also lost billions because I messed up a Debian upgrade.
That would be very funny. I used to own a whole bitcoin when it was worth nothing.Didn't think it would be ever worth anything and formatted my hard drive to change distro.
Or what if Satoshi deliberately destroyed their key?
The motivations behind Bitcoin were clear.
All the wealthy people I know don’t really do it for the money. The money is the gauge or the metric they use to judge how well they are playing the game but what motivates them is the love of the game and their sense of purpose.
If someone was to truly believe that Bitcoin was going to be a gold/USD/Eurodollar/swift etc. replacement then their metric of success isn’t money if they got in early.
It's entirely possible that Satoshi has deliberately destroyed the keys, but lost them? I doubt it. All these early cryptography guys were very conscious about keeping their keys secure, they discussed it endlessly.
Personally, if someone accuses me of lying, but I am actually telling the truth, I immediately start acting like a liar. It's really embarrassing and hard to explain. I can't believe such a seasoned reporter is leaning so hard on "his face went red."
What's also worth noting is that they were not alone in the room, talking privately. Everything being said could presumably be heard by Back's business associates as well. Some of the questions could well be enough to cause embarrassment or unease on that account.
It did make me think - if he seems nervous under this questioning, it could be because he's actually Satoshi. Or it could also be because he's thinking something like, oh god, if this jerkoff convinces a bunch of people I'm actually Satoshi, all of the businesses I've worked so hard to found will collapse, I might be convicted of crimes around lying about it while founding these businesses, I might get targeted by any number of criminal gangs or even nation-states who will do all kinds of torture to me and my loved ones and will never believe that I'm not actually Satoshi and don't really have a secret stash of a bazillion Bitcoins.
Naturally, this journalist doesn't seem to care much about any of that, or that it wouldn't really change anything at this point besides making the life of whoever it actually is hell.
Yea pretty similar idea to a polygraph test which for years was called a "lie detector."
In reality, they measure a bunch of things that may indicate lying, but they are just as likely to indicate that a person is nervous or reacting to the fact they're being tested at all.
They're typically inadmissible in court these days, however, there is still a pretty solid amount of blind trust in their results.
That part of the article gives a similar "lie detecting" hypothesis, just without the machine.
In fact, we are incredibly bad at telling lies from the body language of people we don't know well. Pretty much all the "well known" tells are sheer and utter bullshit that at best tells you if a person is stressed. That may or may not mean they are lying, but unless you know that person well enough to know if they have specific tells that correlates with lying for them, your odds are poor.
Just a shot in the dark but any chance you grew up in an intensely religious household?
I grew up evangelical and I've noticed this tendency in myself, and saw the connection to how the authorities at my school or church basically demanded dishonest performances or apologies under threat of physical punishment. Several friends over the years have said roughly the same, so I have an armchair theory this is pretty prevalent for that sort of childhood.
I actually think the most compelling evidence is the fact that he was one of the first people to get rich from it, which also explains why he never had to touch his vault of coins.
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.
I didn't realize anything. Everyone and their mother has been saying that about Satoshi since day one... Also, Adam would have infinitely more to gain from being Satoshi than from Satoshi remaining unknown. He's been trying to take credit for Bitcoin ever since he realized that Bitcoin was actually worth something (he initially dismissed it). All his actions point to someone who's largely motivated by financial gain whereas Satoshi hasn't touched a single of his 1M+ BTC.
Maybe :) But seriously, Satoshi is most likely a relatively unknown dude. Why would you spend so much effort hiding your identity and then become a very public figure of the Bitcoin community?
I founded a company with Adam. He is not Satoshi. Neither is Szabo. Best not to speculate publicly as no good comes from it - not least of which there are organized crime rings targeting potential suspects for violent kidnapping or home invasion.
As per the quotes, it could've been that he had read them, liked them and kept repeating them. However given other matching circumstances such as grammar this becomes unlikely. Also, this is just a single journalist; to know precisely this should be outsourced to a company doing forensics.
> 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 read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims
The rest of the arguments is as weak:
1) both released open-source software
2) both don't like spam
3) both like using pseudonyms online
4) both love freedom
5) both are anti-copyright
etc.
Basically, the author found that Adam Back used the same words on X as Satoshi did in some emails (including such rare words as "dang," "backup," and "abandonware") and then decided to find every possible "link" they could to build the case, even if most of the links are along the lines of "Both are humans! Coincidence? I think not."
It's weird they spent so much time on the written word similarities, when the biggest reveal here is that Back disappears off the email lists (on a topic he is VERY interested in and has historically corresponded on) when Nakamoto appears, and then comes back when Nakamoto disappears.
That's the weak evidence. Nobody cares that they both like open source and freedom, half the cypherpunks list fits that.
The parts worth engaging with: Back described a system combining Hashcash and b-money with inflation adjustment and public timestamping on the cypherpunks list between 1997-1999. That's basically Bitcoin's architecture, a decade early. He was one of the most prolific digital cash posters for years, went silent when Satoshi appeared, came back when Satoshi left. And this person who independently arrived at the same technical design also independently landed on the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, and the same FDR gold ban trivia.
Any one of these is a coincidence. At some point you have to ask how many you need before the simpler explanation wins.
I remember having conversations with my brother about Hashcash at the time. There were plenty of nerds that followed that mailing list that had similar technical and political ideas, so I think you'd find a high number of coincidences within an audience that I'd guess was a small multiple of the number of people active on the cypherpunks list. There definitely were a lot of people at my brother's college discussing the same ideas.
FWIW my brother did his own bit of Satoshi hunting with coworkers at his hedge fund. They didn't come to a strong answer but my brother believed Nick Szabo was probably part of a group that helped edit the paper. He suspected Hal Finney was involved similarly at a minimum.
I agree with the parts worth engaging with. I hate when people weak-man arguments.
But interesting as this is, there are others who fit at least as well. That bit gold was the closest proposed scheme to Bitcoin is well known, and we know the proposer of bit gold (Szabo) was actively soliciting partners to help implement it as a real system right before Bitcoin appeared.
Also, people leave mailing lists and come back randomly months later all the time. Adam could have simply been unlucky, and busy with other projects at the time of the launch. Lots of people were, and kicked themselves for it (which honestly, it seems Adam did too!).
Adam Back is credited in the Bitcoin whitepaper as the inventor of Hashcash. W. Dai is credited as the inventor of b-money. But Nick Szabo is not credited as the inventor of bit gold, by far the most mature of these ideas floating around at the cipherpunks mailing list at the time. That's a conspicuous absence.
You need someone who read Back's obscure 1997-1999 cypherpunks posts about combining Hashcash and b-money, implemented exactly that system a decade later, independently came up with the same non-technical analogies and trivia, wrote with the same hyphenation errors, and then happened to be active during the exact window Back went silent. The more you flesh out the "someone who read Back" profile, the more it just sounds like Back.
Someone who has read his material would be likely to repeat the same analogies and trivia.
As for the hyphen errors, they are common for people for whom English is their second language. I commit hyphen errors similar to what is described all the time because English hyphenation makes absolutely no sense. In fact, reading the list of examples, the mistakes listed makes more sense to me than the correct way of writing those.
I also switch back and forth on a lot of the phrases the article mentions.
I also switch back and forth between US and UK spelling, because I learned UK spelling at school, but was far more exposed to US spelling in practice.
Yeah, I'm Norwegian, and maybe the Scandinavian languages makes us extra likely to make those mistakes, but overall English hyphen rules to a large extent boils down to feels. Words "graduate" to hyphens over time as and when they start to become seen as a unit, and then sometimes eventually fuse into words. E-mail to email is one of those. And that pipeline is also not uniform geographically so different English speakers will disagree about what should have hyphens where and when...
At some point "Satoshi was a devoted reader of obscure 1997 Adam Back mailing list posts who shares his hyphenation errors, his Napster vs Gnutella analogy, his celebrity email filtering idea, his FDR gold ban interest, his 'burning the money' metaphor, his 'Achilles heel' description of DigiCash, his 'better with code than words' self-assessment, his energy-vs-banking defense, his British spellings mixed with American ones, his double-spacing habit, his it's/its confusion, his sentence-final 'also' tic, his 'proof-of-work' hyphenation, his WebMoney references, and who went active the exact week Back went silent" is just a longer way of saying it's Adam Back.
I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's what I came up with after challenging myself to read the article in toto again and note 1 by 1.
It's clear it's beyond a couple tics everyone has, and when you combine that with the starting set being ~500 instead of "all 8 billion people on earth", well, it's worth mentioning.
Your entire first paragraph boils down to me as someone who admired Adam Back and who may or may not have English as a second language, coupled with the one additional coincidence of when he was around.
In terms of language, I don't agree it's beyond a couple of tics everyone has at all. I also don't agree with the assumption that the starting set is ~500.
It's of course possible that it is Adam Back, but I don't find the purported evidence remotely compelling as a way of showing that it is.
This article is a great example of "strong + weak = weak".
I only made it to the interesting stuff because of Carreyou's name, otherwise I would have stopped.
The email timing and lack of email metadata were also strong, in my opinion. But all of this nonsense like "Wow, these guys both talk about PGP??" distracts from it.
It's been extremely widely known that whoever created Bitcoin had a strong interest in Hashcash, and perhaps created that or worked on it, for years and years. If that's the only smoking gun, why didn't we identify Satoshi long ago?
You're right, "interested in Hashcash" describes dozens of people, and has been a known Satoshi filter for years.
The new claim is more specific: between 1997-1999, Back proposed combining Hashcash with b-money, adding inflation adjustment via increasing computational difficulty, and using hash trees for public timestamping.
That's most of Bitcoin's architecture in one package, a decade early.
The number of people who proposed that particular combination of ideas is much smaller than the number who were merely interested in Hashcash.
Only if those similarities are indicating more than 'generic internet hacker' for both of them. You only need 23 bits to identify a person but those are 23 uncorrelated bits, and all the 'similarities' presented here are extremely strongly correlated with themselves.
The interests and writing style differentiate Mr. (Dr.?) Back from the general public, sure. But from what I’m reading, they don’t do a great job of distinguishing between 90s hackers.
“Get this, his PhD thesis dealt with a computer language called C++, just like Bitcoin papers used” seems both confused and impossibly lazy to me.
> “Scrap patents and copyright,” Mr. Back wrote in September 1997.
> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license
Really?
Like saying “get this, his college-aged musical interests included the Urban American musical style known as ‘Hip Hop’; therefore Tupac didn’t really die and this is him.” Heavy on insinuation, light on seriousness. Strong “…you’re not from around here, are you?” vibes.
What does this kind of journalism hope to accomplish, anyway? Beyond bothering middle-aged nerds for gossip? And providing a frame for the author’s cute little sleuth jape?
“Good reason to look closer” assumes there’s good reason to pick through ancient rubble in the first place.
All 12,000 words. Kept expecting it to take a turn toward something beyond pre-judgment and insinuation. Instead it unfolded as a cautionary tale, of the power of a premature conclusion to close an investigator’s mind to reasonable alternative possibilities. About escalating commitment to an early hunch, even as it leads you down an investigative dead end.
For example it sure seems like his mountain of circumstantial evidence fits better with the theory that “Satoshi” could be a pen name for a small group of people—maybe even the small group whose history he traces and whose styles he has trouble teasing apart—rather than one “suspect” (as he calls it). But we don’t even really weigh that possibility seriously.
So, like—why are we coming at this one guy by name and spooky hacker photo in the New York Times, with the suggestion that he has $110 billion under his mattress? All these speculations and arguments have been done over and over—what does this reporting add that’s worth 12,000 words?
The colorful journey down a dead end, fine—but leave it at “My Quest,” don’t do the weasel subhed “the trail of clues […] led to Adam Back” to insinuate that it proved what it set out to prove. Or even added anything significant to the well-trodden record.
Similarities in style and word were common enough in small circles such as the cyphyrpunks that spawned those discussions.
Then there's not altogether unlikely chance that Satoshi is a nodding homage to Nicolas Bourbaki, each contributor holding part of a multiparty voting key.
I don't blame you for this initial reaction, which would have been mine too had I not known who the author was. I don't mean that I automatically trust anything published by the reporter who busted Theranos (and won two Pulitzers for other major investigations). But I do mean that if John Carreyrou and his editors decided to publish something this long, that means they (and they're lawyers) are willing to die on this hill, no matter how meandering the first paragraphs of his 1st-person narrative.
Since the story doesn't end with: "And then Adam Back bowed his head and said, 'You have found me, Satoshi'", I'm guessing they preferred to go for the softer "how we did this story" first-person narrative. There is no explicit smoking gun, like an official document or eyewitness who asserts Satoshi's identity. But the circumstantial and technical evidence is quite thorough, to the point where the most likeliest conclusions are:
1. Adam Back is Satoshi
2. Satoshi is someone who is either a close friend or frenemy of Back, and deliberately chose to leave a obfuscated trail that correlates with Back's persona and personal timeline.
If Mr Carreyrou is such a good writer then he should be embarrassed to publish trash:
> In keeping with this belief, Mr. Back made his Hashcash spam-throttling software open source.
> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license, which allowed anyone to use, modify and distribute it without restrictions.
The numerous observations such as this only seem impressive to people who don't know anything at all about the subject. Occam's Razor suggests that the reason that such irrelevant observations were included is because Carreyrou doesn't know anything at all about the subject.
> When we compared those errors with the writings of our hundreds of suspects, Mr. Back was a clear outlier. He shared 67 of Satoshi’s exact hyphenation errors. The person with the second-most matches had 38.
wrt (2) that is if satoshi had the foresight btc would ever blow up in the way it did. obviously, he had some intuition, remaining anonymous, but deliberately creating a fake trail does not seem super plausible to me
I got about two sentences further, it turns out another smoking gun is Mr. Back using c++ in his graduate studies, just like the original bitcoin implementation.
Yeah, based on the list of interests, I guess I've been Satoshi all this time and didn't know it. A shame my memory must have been wiped as I'd quite like all of those bitcoins.
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 Hardy-Littlewood comparison cuts the other way. Two collaborators in the same subfield sharing terminology is the baseline, not evidence of anything. What makes the Back case interesting is convergence on things that have nothing to do with cryptography: the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, the same obscure FDR gold ban interest, the same weird hyphenation errors. Pick any two cypherpunks at random and you won't find that kind of overlap on non-technical quirks.
Then add the negative space. Back was one of the most prolific voices on these lists for a decade, especially on digital cash. Satoshi shows up, Back goes quiet. Satoshi leaves, Back comes back. Hardy and Littlewood never had that problem.
>the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, the same obscure FDR gold ban interest, the same weird hyphenation errors
Dunno it assumes their cypherpunk group must always discuss strictly cryptography and never discuss anything else. It could be just some off-topic ideas floating around in their community.
For me, the only solid, damning evidence would be statistical methods of text analysis like they do to prove authenticity of a literary work.
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
I had always assumed that all of them shared the pseudonym of Satoshi, along with Nick Szabo.
Back wrote the white paper with input from Hal and Nick Szabo. Sassaman did the coding work on the client. Sassaman had the keys to the Satoshi wallet, hence it never moving since his passing.
Since Satoshi is a collective, it means that each of them individually can claim, without lying, that they're not Satoshi.
You could game theory this out forever. Maybe he put his name in there because people like you would only use first order logic and conclude that it wasn't him because it would be crazy to "hide in plain site".
I always had Adam Back as my main candidate because HashCash somehow had the same energy and thought to it. But I have no concrete reason to believe it was him.
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.
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?
What I'm saying is that the overall amount of effort being spent on this isn't very proportional to sheer curiosity. Curious people may go out of their way to do something difficult, but years-long research campaigns with a single person in the crosshair feel like a step too far. Not even the perpetrators of famous unsolved crimes receive this much scrutiny. I don't doubt there's many people in the mix who are just curious about this, like you are, but I feel like people who spend months of their lives on this could be trying to get at something bigger. Maybe hurting him or trying to profit off of the knowledge somehow, or even just becoming famous for being the person who found Satoshi Nakamoto.
So am I. I presume I can read if after he passes away, if I am still around. Otherwise I am content to respect people's wishes for anonymity and privacy, as there are plenty of other interesting things to learn about.
It's a silly topic to spend (waste) time on, but I can't help it, I just find it sort of fascinating.
It's a mystery where you have to try and put together different pieces of evidence, match things up, try and look for hidden connections - a certain type of human mind (mine, I guess) just finds that process rewarding.
I've gone down most of these rabbit holes and my 2c is it's one of these two people, not any of the most common candidates: Len Sassaman or Paul Le Roux.
Sassaman is dead and Le Roux is in federal prison in the US, which explains why the coins haven't moved
There are some legitimate reasons. First one: a government-backed operation that can have even deeper conspiracies. The second most important one is Bitcoin's long-term stability. If people figure out who created it, they can also predict what kind of major crashes can happen, especially Satoshi's wallet with million+ bitcoins used one day.
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.
The fact that both knew that C++ is a programming language at all, must suffice as evidence, at least for the purposes of this Article. Weirdly a real divergence from the Theranos reporting, which on top of that, also was absolutely in the public interest as it affected both the health of patients and was on actual fraud. Here it it exposure for exposure sake and not well reasoned to boot.
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.
I haven't read the article yet but I remember this as well. IIRC Adam went the route of more towards a centralized group controlling Bitcoin's future during the BTC/BCH debates/fork. It seemed against what Satoshi would have pushed for. Plus Adam's group seemed like a catalyst for Gavin stepping back as a result of the political in-fighting and mud-slinging. It would be a huge surprise if Satoshi were Adam.
Adding on now that I've read the article and this situation is covered:
> The following year, in 2015, the Bitcoin community fractured over a proposal to increase Bitcoin’s block size. A faction led by two Bitcoin developers, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, wanted to make the blocks much bigger to accommodate more transactions. But this was controversial...
> Mr. Back fiercely opposed increasing the block size. In a series of posts on the Bitcoin-dev list, he warned against Mr. Andresen and Mr. Hearn’s proposal in increasingly strident tones.
> Then, out of the blue, Satoshi appeared on the list with an email that neatly dovetailed with Mr. Back’s position. It was the first time Satoshi had been heard from in more than four years, other than a five-word post the previous year denying a Newsweek article’s claim to have unmasked him.
> Many in the Bitcoin community questioned the new email’s authenticity since another of Satoshi’s email accounts had been hacked. But Mr. Back argued that the email sounded real. In a series of tweets, he called Satoshi’s observations “spot on” and “consistent with Satoshi views IMO” and took to quoting from the email.
I now realize that the Satoshi email was after Hal Finney's death so that changes my opinion.
From OP:
> Satoshi supported big blocks in his writings and empowered the pro-big block Gavin when he disappeared
The small block faction, of which Adam was absolutely one of the ring leaders, were willing to do literally anything to win. They were and still are collectivist totalitarians. Above it was described as a debate, but it wasn't, it was more like a war. Amongst other things, the small block faction:
• Launched botnet attacks on any node or company that expressed support for big blocks. They took Coinbase offline, they took any mining pool offline for merely allowing users to vote for big blocks. They took out entire datacenters because it hosted a single node expressing support for bigger blocks in its version handshake. One of these attacks was big enough to take out the internet for an entire rural ISP.
• Constantly lied about everyone who was working on bigger blocks. I've actually met people who said they didn't trust me because I worked for British intelligence. I've never worked for British intelligence!
• They constantly manipulated people, promising them they'd work on a compromise solution whilst actually refusing to do so and organizing conferences with rules like "nobody is allowed to discuss solutions to the problem" or "nobody is allowed to make written notes".
... and more. I don't recall Adam expressing any opposition to these acts or trying to stop them. Frequently he was directly engaged in them (not sure who was behind the DDoS attacks, but none of the Blockstreamers publicly asked them to stop).
Satoshi's account had been hacked at that time, and one of the main arguments for raising the block size was simply that it wasn't controversial at all - it was in fact the planned roadmap for Bitcoin from day one, that everyone had signed up to and that Satoshi had discussed. Given their willingness to lie to everyone else and use outright illegal tactics to win, would a small blocker have forged an email from Satoshi? Absolutely they would, which is why nobody cared about it and it made no difference. Especially as that email inexplicably refuted a position Satoshi had repeatedly defended for years, without explanation.
>> Satoshi supported big blocks in his writings and empowered the pro-big block Gavin when he disappeared
>
> This isn't correct. In fact, the linked email in the article says the opposite
Characterizing the arguments are big vs small blocks, seems wrong.
There appeared to be broad agreement that the block size needed to be increased, however there were 4 competing proposed solutions(BIP 100, 101, 102, 103), and consensus on which approach to take could not be reached.
Gavin decided to push ahead with BIP 101, and both Satoshi and Adam agreed that it was reckless to proceed without better consensus.
I have no real interest in this chat, but a quick google makes me agree that Hal Finney was very likely Satoshi. Fits my
expectations perfectly and would also explain why it’s a “mystery”, ie some people know but agreed not to reveal it as per Hal or family wishes given their targeting by criminals in the past. Extremely plausible.
It can’t be Finney because there was an entire send reply send reply sequence that was while Finney was in a marathon race between Satoshi and others which could not have been scripted.
The case for Jack Dorsey is much stronger than the Back claim.
Doesn’t this fierce debate exist because people cannot agree what Satoshi would have written had he known Bitcoin would take off in such a massive way, versus what Satoshi believed back when bitcoin was just a paper? If it actually is the case that Adam Back is Satoshi, we shouldn’t find it surprising that Back’s views on bitcoin changed as bitcoin’s viability and real world impact changed
> 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.
From the article:
Then, out of the blue, Satoshi appeared on the list with an email that neatly dovetailed with Mr. Back’s position. It was the first time Satoshi had been heard from in more than four years, other than a five-word post the previous year denying a Newsweek article’s claim to have unmasked him.
Many in the Bitcoin community questioned the new email’s authenticity since another of Satoshi’s email accounts had been hacked. But Mr. Back argued that the email sounded real. In a series of tweets, he called Satoshi’s observations “spot on” and “consistent with Satoshi views IMO” and took to quoting from the email.
Mr. Back was likely correct: To this day, there is no evidence to indicate the email was a forgery, and no other emails from that account have surfaced.
The Satoshi email sounded a lot like Mr. Back had in his posts during the preceding weeks, although no one took notice. Like Mr. Back, Satoshi argued that the Bitcoin network’s increasing centralization jeopardized its security. He called the big block proposal very “dangerous” — the same term Mr. Back had used repeatedly. He also used other words and phrases Mr. Back had used: “widespread consensus,” “consensus rules,” “technical,” “trivial” and “robust.”
At the end of the email, Satoshi denounced Mr. Andresen and Mr. Hearn as two reckless developers trying to hijack Bitcoin with populist tactics and added: “This present situation has been very disappointing to watch unfold.”
It also happened to be densely cited with hyperlinks:
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.
1. I do something similar quite frequently in informal contexts, and have to catch myself before posting such text to more formal settings. If Satoshi was as aware of stylometry as the article claims, it stands to reason that he would edit those out of his writing. The article is clear that Satoshi’s writing is generally more concise than Beck’s, which may have been highly intentional; parenthetical sentences are generally the opposite of concise (they’re often used to go on a tangent or ramble, etc.).
2. Similar to 1 - a quirk that is easily caught by editing, if your goal is to sound more refined and precise. Academics know it’s i.e/e.g but the dots may get omitted when writing quickly.
3. Interesting observation. That’s a fairly stark difference! Are there other posters who do not use “nor”? If Satoshi doesn’t use “nor”, does he use a grammatically incorrect alternative, or are his sentences just structured to avoid it?
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.
The thing is, most of the people heavily involved in early Bitcoin are fairly characterized as cryptoanarchists, a group strongly devoted to the principle of privacy and liberty effected through technological means.
The refusal to provide personal communications metadata by such a person is evidence of nothing but their steadfast commitment to the philosophy that presented them with the opportunity to be part of those email conversations in the first place.
Then again, if I weren't Satoshi, but people suspected that I was, I'd be willing to do just about anything to prove that it's not me. No one in their right mind would want that kind of target on their back.
Satoshi is either dead, or he lost his keys and probably wishes he were.
Handing over email metadata, or whatever your interrogator wants from you, will only cause them to shift the goalposts, or find something they want to find in the metadata even if it exonerates you.
There is no reason to cooperate with journalists with a slant.
Supposing it is Adam Back, and supposing he lost his keys, he's still worth at least nine figures and is one of the most influential figures in the field he’s devoted his life to. Why would he wish he was dead?
"Nine figures isn't cool. You know what's cool? Eleven figures."
That aside, I don't agree with the premise. Back might be Satoshi, but there's nowhere near enough evidence in Carreyrou's article to reach that conclusion. He should have run it by some other veteran figures in the crypto community, so they could point out how quotidian some of the language and tropes being cited really are.
it’s simply that Back has nothing to gain to claim to be Satoshi. It would make bitcoin a lot more volatile. He even said just now
> 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.
Or he wants you to believe he is Satoshi, without being a complete moron, like Craig Wright. Back stands to benefit from this, because he still has money on Bitcoin ventures (Blockstream). If people believe that he is Satoshi, he would still find investors backing him.
Time? He´s busy starting a company, taking the time to drag out decade old emails and digging out the meta data for a journalist who is borderline stalking (assuming he even has them somewhere). I wouldn´t give that the time of day either.
If privacy were such a big concern, then why did he release the messages (without metadata) in the first place? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to keep the messages completely private?
What would it show? If he logged in to Santoshi's email account and sent an email to his personal account, the metadata would be in order, and we would learn little from it.
You have it backwards. The fact that he doesn't release the metadata is interesting. If he had released the metadata, it would be wholly uninteresting.
I don't think the emails exist. What was published in court records, lacking metadata, could easily be forged. The metadata is harder to forge. Not impossible, but harder, especially long after the fact.
The author didn't make a serious effort to obtain the email metadata. The email w/ metadata has previously been part of litigation, -- if it indicated that Adam was Satoshi it would have come up.
Adam has no reason to further fuck up Satoshi's privacy by sharing private information. But I can get how people who see no issue invading Adam's and Satoshi's privacy would have no concept as to why someone wouldn't publish it.
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.
The most important bit to me is that doing something like this would be entirely in-line with his personality.
Also, I think he truly believed there was a good chance he’d eventually be brought back. The most likely case in my mind is that he died with the private keys in his head, and that we’ll never get confirmation.
So I just searched the article for Finney to see why it claimed it wasn't him. It claims Satoshi was active after Finney had died?
What's that about? I used to be of the opinion that it was probably hal, but haven't paid too much attention. What's the counter evidence here? And why do we disregard that?
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.
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.
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
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 comment rings true to me as someone who contemporaneously read Satoshi's posts (not from the very beginning but on bitcointalk.org). People are underestimating how difficult (and probably pointless) it is to create and maintain a whole personality in aid of subterfuge. There are so many other easier and less risky ways to achieve the same goal than to adopt a consistent persona that's far from your own; you could, for example, release the code with one anonymous paper and then disappear completely, and then create three or four random new personas as needed to push it along publicly. That's more plausible (and less work) than sustaining a "Satoshi" with a very different personal style from yourself and then also, as it happens, speculatively fashioning fake email conversations with yourself, years in advance, in order to throw people off the scent in the future.
Among people who try to guess Satoshi's identity, there is also a surprising bias toward fame or at least well-known people. There is literally zero reason to think that Bitcoin came from a person anyone had heard of or has heard of since. It's a big world. Many (most?) interesting and novel open-source contributions, hash algorithms, cipher algorithms, key-exchange protocols, and so on come from previously unknown figures. Pick any random open-source project and try to guess who created it as if you didn't know; most people wouldn't do a good job, and thinking "oh, it has something in common with Twitter so it must have been Jack Dorsey" would have a terrible success rate. And, as it happens, well-known people tend to like fame and don't try to stay anonymous.
I could name hundreds of smart, experienced, and relatively unknown tech-company employees, professors, and open-source contributors who would have all the necessary broad skills to have written Bitcoin. It's not that rare. The contribution itself is rare but that's like lightning; the insight of invention strikes unpredictably. Assembling high-level systems that use cryptography isn't something that requires that you post to mailing lists or message boards of cryptography enthusiasts. And even if that weren't true, there are hundreds of useful, moderately used cryptosystems that most people haven't heard of and that would never make the radar of a NYT author who (evidently) thinks it's a coincidence that two different cryptosystems might use asymmetric ciphers.
The NYT article boils down to "I had a hunch from this person's body language and, out of a community of a few hundred identified figures, I found a methodology to confirm that it was him." It's a hair better than that and honest with regard to some of its own limitations, but in the end it's no more convincing than that. The upshot is that there's some circumstantial evidence in favor of a particular person, although there's significant circumstantial evidence in the other direction too. It's astonishing to me that the NYT published this piece.
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.
Hal was likely part of the Satoshi team — even receiving the first ever bitcoin transaction (on the main blockchain).
Hopefully his children got to open extremely rewarding bankboxes, after his death (whether or not containing bitcoin — but likely so). If it were myself, I'd also keep quiet about such a miracle.
For my own meager holdings, I'll keep waiting (over a decade strong HODL, now).
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.
Yeah this one seems absolutely insane, how many Satoshi Nakamotos are there in the world? It's very plausible to see the name on a mailbox (or meet the person) and think "that'd be a cool handle." And it's so wildly improbable that someone else would make up exactly the name of a neighbor of one of a small clique of obscure internet cypherpunks. It's not like the name was "John Smith" or anything.
But I don't know how to square that with the "Finney was running a marathon while satoshi sent emails" claim.
Given Back and Finney's close-ish relationship, that same fact could have permeated to Back, and would be a further reason for him to use the name. That said, it's all pure speculation so :shrug:?.
Is it a coincidence? Or is it really bad opsec from someone who was otherwise pretty good at it? Or was it really good opsec and someone wanted to plant little clues that it was finney?
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.
After reading the article, my first thought was it is both Finney and Back posting under Satoshi. Others may have been involved too but not necessarily posting.
Here's my armchair two cents: Whoever it is, has to be British. The language is unmistakeably British or Commonwealth. It's likely him. I'd wager if there was a polymarket bet. But I also feel for him. Does this make him a target for both half-wit criminials and rogue nation states?
This is notable as it argues against a lot of the candidates who are American, but I would say this is relatively easy to fake if you were privacy minded.
It would be somewhat harder the other way (American pretending to be British) as American English is much more prominent, but I think I could convincingly pretend to be American in text if necessary if I was only participating in generally technical discussions (and nobody asked me about cultural stuff like NFL etc.)
This article is kinda bogwater. Repeating the same points, writing as if it were LinkedIn, pretending to be technically competent while obviously not. Over and over and over, reiterating the same points but ultimately getting nowhere.
Changing requirements ad-hoc throughout the article, picking and choosing ideal matches rather than objective ones, etc. basically trying to make the data fit the problem by force.
Author, over time, gets more desperate to be "the one that found Satoshi" and loses the plot entirely.
I mean, what the hell is this bullshit?
"""
Adam Back: I did a lot of talking though for somebody, I mean … I mean, I’m not saying I’m good with words but I sure did a lot of yakking on these lists actually.
To my ears, it sounded like he was saying that for someone who preferred code over words, he sure had written a lot of words. Implicit in that was an acknowledgment that he had been the one who wrote the quote. In other words, for a few seconds, Mr. Back had let the mask fall and turned into Satoshi.
"""
Not directly related but still interesting. The fellow who came up with the ide for the Architectural Uprisings we have seen around the world, is still anonymous.
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
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.
Blockstream is mentioned multiple times, as is Back's wealth;
> It was the beginning of an era in which Mr. Back quickly amassed influence and became a ring leader in the still small Bitcoin community. To staff Blockstream, he poached the top Bitcoin Core developers from their day jobs at companies like Google and Mozilla, giving him tremendous sway over the digital currency. He also became very wealthy: Over the next dozen years, Blockstream and its affiliates would raise $1 billion in funding and Blockstream would reach a valuation of $3.2 billion.
Why would anyone use bitcoin if the world's factory ie China wants gold as payments?
Even pro Bitcoin people like Balaji and Lyn Alden haven't answered this structural question. There exists market for what counts as money. If that market (led by China) says we don't accept Bitcoin, then these are just some random numbers.
China probably doesn’t accept Dominican pesos, either, and yet you’d be hard pressed to say that somebody with 100 billion Dominican pesos just has some random numbers. If you can exchange something for another form of value, then it has value. I think the trouble here is that there’s just nobody out there who would actually give you $100 billion worth of value for this particular asset. At least not as a lump sum.
I tend to think this, too. Or rather a small group of cryptographers working for a nation-state. It's the only way to make sense of the fact that Satoshi is enormously wealthy. I don't think any individual could sit on this kind of wealth and not cash out visibly.
I tend to agree, but for the sake of argument: it’s possible that he’s such a true believer that he’d see cashing out as a betrayal. Alternatively, he might understand that cashing out would significantly aid the (clearly large number of) people engaged in unmasking him. Further, he may simply realize that liquidating holdings of his size would drastically alter the market in ways that could end with the whole thing coming apart.
Keep in mind that he could not have cashed out his tokens in the early days without destroying the whole project and by the time btc was valuable and liquid enough for him to sell, he would have already been wealthy from blockstream (if this is really him) and wouldn’t need the money. What would he do with it? buy gold, real estate, tbills? What asset would he ever put the money into that he would think is better than bitcoin?
> 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.
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.
> No one in the cipherpunks mailing list thought any of this was odd, probably because it was obvious to them who Satoshi was.
If dozens of people affiliated on a mailing list knew that Sbazo was Satoshi is a decade ago, would’t his identity be treated as an open secret by now?
Exactly my thoughts down to the indictment of the thought process of a top investigative journalist. The amount of tunnel vision here, that dismisses Szabo based on a tweet of wanting to understand developments in core 10 years later? In all this writing, there's not a hint of investigation into every damning link to Szabo, including the IP leak which was simply dismissed as "dead end".
Carreyrou is flying across the world to finally get a weak slip in speech he thinks finally implicates Back, meanwhile Szabo already slipped up in speech years ago for anyone to find.
We know he - Szabo, whether Satoshi or not - asked for help in realizing something a lot like Bitcoin, a short time before Bitcoin appeared. I don't rule out that he could have had some help with the coding.
But I've also not seen anything suggesting he wasn't good enough of a coder to make it himself. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science.
Why would he do that surreptitiously, instead of just being clear that they were working on it? Why wouldn't they cash in the million or so bitcoins that were pre-mined? How did they get the whole team to communicate in a unified style? How did they get everyone to stay quiet after Bitcoin took off?
This was a fun article, but also an oddball collection of strong and weak claims.
Some of the "isn't it interesting ..." type coincidences would, as people on this forum would know, be commonplace among the subculture or even just technologists, and often lack the comparison to the overall Cypherpunk corpus - for example: no, studying public-key cryptography in grad school certainly isn't a high-signal differentiating tell for Satoshi-ness.
For some he does provide that though, and they're certainly compelling.
What I like best about the Back attribution is that it totally makes sense in context of my operating model of humans and passes the Occam's Razor test: Still actively involved, interested in the governance, interested in acclaim/prestige, built up wealth masking his other wealth, etc. Ego and "Tell me you're Satoshi without telling me you're Satoshi" written all over it.
When did Satoshi make an appearance in 2015? I couldn't find the spot in the article where the author cites it. Everywhere I've read it states his last interactions were 2010, and his wallet hasn't been touched since then either.
Based on everything I've read, I think Satoshi is Len Sassaman
Bad science, -- article contains a litany of points that are true for many other people (myself)-- and a number of the bits of I have personal experience with are just flatly untrue or misleading, e.g. citing Back's name at the top of a paper I coauthored as evidence of his importance to it, -- the names were alphabetic. Not that it was an important point, but I think failing to notice the names being alphabetic and including it speaks to the bar being held to the other 'evidence' there.
That said-- I guess credit goes for naming someone who is essentially credible in the sense that they had the relevant interests and aptitudes, a lot of the journalists writing on this stuff have picked ludicrous names out of a hat. But so did a lot of other people. And unfortunately, the real person was clearly trying to obscure their identity and so they easily could have been adding chaff similarity to other people. (which may explain why there are good matches with multiple of the highest visibility ecash authors). For the few journalists that don't finger absolutely absurd people they keep going over and over again to some of the most visible people from the cypherpunks community, but in reality it may well have been a lurker that never posted or only posted pseudonymously.
Probably the research on this stuff tends to not be very good because people who would do good work realize that it's a pointless effort and care that incorrectly implicating them causes harm by putting their safety at risk... and so they don't publish.
In any case I would be extremely surprised if it were so-- I've known Adam for a long time, and he's been consistently straightforward and guileless. When he came into Bitcoin he had a number of significant misunderstandings that Satoshi couldn't have had, (unless Bitcoin was developed multiple people, of course). To have consistently played dumb like that would be entirely inconsistent with the person I know, and perhaps outside of his capability.
Fundamentally the article ignores the base rate and the correlations... as in yes this or that thing is true about adam and satoshi, but it's also true of a large number of odd people who have the other prerequisites. Normal people don't talk about pre-images but cryptographers do. When you use correlated characteristics you overweight the underlying common factor. You also basically hand Satoshi a win on hiding if he was in fact copying visible characteristics from other people.
In any case, at least I haven't yet heard rumors that this was a paid piece by someone with an agenda ... sad that I can't say that about all NYT writing.
Aside, the comments about Adam's body language and emphatic denial: I can tell you what that is straight up: He's afraid of being harmed because of these accusations and he's afraid of being criticized for not denying it if he doesn't do so directly and clearly enough doubly so because some actual Satoshi fakers have accused him of being one himself, and tried to dismiss the respect Adam has earned as an unearned product of being suspected of being Satoshi. This is absolutely a witch-test where you're dammed one way or the other: In the HBO documentary, Peter Todd gave a cutesy demurring response which was the polar opposite of Adam's and in that case the program used that as evidence of the same. That kind of subjective judgement is just a coat-rack to hang your preconceived notions on.
This is not really covering anything new - BarelySocial did the same thing in 2020 - and is circumstantial at best, but from all the candidates, Adam Back is by far the most likely.
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.
One factor is that it's known that he controls the wallet with many billions of dollars in it. That would make him a target for kidnapping/extortion/etc. He could have easily kept mining under a different address though and become very wealthy aside from the main wallet.
If I were Satoshi I'd keep my head down. I wouldn't want my life f-d up by outing myself.
Think about the kind of world view you need to have to decide to dedicate the necessary time to develop a system for transacting outside of approved channels. Dude's probably worried about polonium finding its way into his tea or whatever.
You probably won't get killed, but of course you might by someone looking to make a point, in any case your life is gonna get turned upside down, various interests are going to want you to do things for them, people will want to hire you to say things or confer them legitimacy, people will want you to opine on things, etc.
If you're in a nice enough place to dedicate the time to a project like Bitcoin is that something you really need? If you have sufficient frame of mind to develop Bitcoin that's probably not something you want in the first place.
Wealthy people are notorious for having a ravenous desire for more wealth... It's often the mindset that made them wealthy in the first place - unless they inherited it, and even then.
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.
what if satoshi is not one person but a phenomenon, a group of minds... the interesting thing about the technology is that it is a public ledger and everything that goes along with that when you tie it to the metadata trails across the networks people use it on... ohh the implications
I don't believe anyone claiming that Satoshi is still alive. There is zero chance any human who put so much effort into creating something would remain silent while it became a $2 trillion phenomenon that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Satoshi is certainly dead.
I once became so famous that a community of several hundred people knew and recognized my name for a few years. At the time, it was very ego-flattering, and I was delighted to have done something that had such a big and positive impact. However, as an experience it really did not agree with me, and even this very minor level of fame has left me resolved to never, ever, ever become that famous again if I can help it.
I don't think I am unique in that. In fact, I perceive that it is very normal for public figures, not merely to fade from public attention, but to actively seek out seclusion.
While I'm not Satoshi, I would put the odds of someone in such a position of maintaining radio silence far from "zero chance". I would put it more around 70 or 80 percent. And at any rate, it is certainly what I would do.
This is a ridiculous argument "zero chance" that completely discounts the possibility (or in all likelyhood, probability) that the creator may be compelled to stay silent, in jail, etc.
Adam Back is the well-off CEO of a company in the blockchain space. From that position, he gets to continue to use his expertise in the field with plenty of connections while having more than enough money without needing to risk revealing himself as Satoshi or risk de-stabilizing Bitcoin's value by using Satoshi's known wallets. It seems like the best possible outcome for someone in Satoshi's position.
I'll at least agree that I don't think any other living candidates for Satoshi make any sense. I can't believe someone who started a brand new influential field of study could fully exit from it while fully avoiding the proceeds from it, as would be necessary to believe in any other living candidate.
If I were to invent something like bitcoin, I would use your exact logic to decide to burn the keys. I couldn't trust myself, so I would remove the possibility of agonizing over it. Obviously, I still might feel regret, but I'd choose the potential regret over the potential agony.
Hell, even if I didn't burn the keys initially, I might do it as I observed it starting to take off. I'd be more attached to the idea and its success than to the idea of being filthy rich (and at risk of jail, extortion, and murder). It would feel like a giant middle finger to the parts of the system I disliked.
My theory is that Satoshi is a persona created by Adam Back and Hal Finney.
They probably devised something where both needed to agree and sign something for Satoshi to act. This also allowed them to say "I’m not Satoshi Nakamoto".
They also probably ensured that anything that belongs to Satoshi required both of them. The death of Hal Finney ensure that Satoshi died definitely.
But they may have "killed" him before by burning the keys because, when Bitcoin started to become a success, they probably anticipated the need to "kill" satoshi (few remember but Bitcoin passing 1$ was considered as a crazy bubble at the time! Some become millionnaires and exited when BTC did the 30$ bubble. Satoshi’s stack was already closely observed, bright mind of that time would have anticipated the need to kill it). Or it was just that "satoshi" was not needed or they accidentaly deleted some keys.
I'd like to think that if I'd come up with something like this, I'd have quickly gone "oh shit" and realised it'd be hard to access the earliest coins without raising unwanted attention, and started mining with multiple different keys, and actively moved those coins around. If Satoshi is still around, I'd expect he has more than enough money without the need to risk the upheaval touching those earliest keys would cause.
This may be the most convincing theory I've heard.
I don't believe any live human being has the wherewithal to not use any of the $100B+ in the Satoshi wallets, which has led me to believe it was Hal Finney. Back and Finney both being in on it would explain some of the email timing as well
> would remain silent while it became a $2 trillion phenomenon
I can see how it might be preferable. Satoshi has an incredible amount of wealth in a form that’s very easy to transfer anonymously. Anyone that admits to being him will be a huge target.
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.
I thought bitcoin was cool for about 6 months back in 2014, and read everything I could about it. For the life of me I simply can't understand how people are still so interested in it or who created it.
I have always thought Satoshi must be dead (as a couple of past suspects are).
How could someone not want one hundred BILLION dollars? There is no person alive who could resist that. I'm sorry, there's just not.
To be fair, if Back was Satoshi, he would need to hide it so his company can go public, or whatever. Because that way he might make -- who knows! -- hundreds of millions of dollars?
Even if moving the coins crashed the Bitcoin price by 90%, Satoshi would still be a billionaire. Generational wealth.
Back has earned generational wealth already, and the wealthy borrow (at rates lower than capital appreciations) against capital to fund all their living. If I were Back, that's exactly what I'd be doing to preserve anonymity.
"Now, there are only two of the accused who were British and only one of those has two spaces in every one of his papers. Figure it out people. It'll take you 15 minutes."
british guy.
the paper has two spaces after periods, and only one of these two british guys has two spaces after each period.
> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography.
>So does Bitcoin...
> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.
This is such poor quality writing, I'm kind of shocked to see it in nyt. It reads like a family guy cutaway lampooning a whodunnit.
I honestly can't believe this warranted a full piece. I was wondering if this a symptom of the author going down some llm psychosis rabbit hole?
_youre absolutely right, you've repeatedly shown signs that back is satoshi. The pattern is clear: back isn't just some cypherpunk, he's Satoshi._
Every time I see one of these articles about "unmasking" Nakamoto, I always wonder the same thing: why? I don't really see a compelling reason to unmask this person. Surely there are other more important things a journalist can spend their time looking into. It's the same with Banksy: why?
I agree about Banksy. But in this case Satoshi controls a huge about of bitcoin. If, whoever they are, they did something with it, it would absolutely move markets.
I like it. In particular the descriptions of how he reacted when confronted. The public key anecdote is a red herring - there is far more convincing evidence in the article.
Wouldn't Satoshi own some bitcoin in first blocks? Like about 60 billion worth of bitcoins, the largest wallet in existence? For me this is necessary and sufficient proof of their persona.
Anyone who has access to Satoshi's account is worth $100B. If Satoshi were still alive some of the BTC would have been moved at least a little but they haven't.
There was no guarantee that Bitcoin would take off. It may be tough to imagine looking back in retrospect but, in another world, Bitcoin could have turned out to have been another digital currency with limited value. Many people lost their keys in the early days when Bitcoin was worthless. It's not unreasonable to think the same wouldn't have happened to Satoshi. He may have also thrown them away on purpose.
Terrible article. The real Satoshi is Nick Szabo and no one else is even close. Hal Finney, Wei Dai, etc. New York Times’ quality has really gone downhill.
Seems most probable it was Hal Finney. Hal passed away in 2014 which explains the no movement of the Satoshi coins which are currently valued at a staggering ~$75 billion
It would not surprise me. Adam Back seems to have good connections to the deep state people, too. His company is merging via a SPAC with a Cantor Fitzgerald (Lutnick owned) company.
Cantor Fitzgerald also handles the collateral for Tether, which relocated from the Caribbean (where it was associated with a CIA bank) to El Salvador.
Bitcoin is very handy for avoiding awkward Iran Contra schemes for covert ops. You no longer need Lutnick's friend Epstein to handle the laundering.
My working hypothesis has always been that Satoshi was a CIA or NSA working group partly to fund black ops. Also, it could be that Bitcoin was a psyop to get people used to digital currency followed by the bait and switch to CBDC. Seem to be working.
So, it is interesting to know who is behind bitcoin but ...
... why is it important?
I mean, let's say it was not a state guy but some agency,
like with the xz utils backdoor (that was most likely not
a solo dev, the coordination, time and planning seemed to
indicate a state actor; also peculiar to see western-style
folks use asian names here). Would that change the situation
with regards to bitcoins?
Ultimately what should matter is whether xyz is secure or not.
I just don't get the epic fascination with "who is mystery man
101".
Satoshi has many contributors. In my view, he/she is not one person but many. Why, because it would take a genius with multiple skills, e.g. engineering, programming, cryptography, mathematics, financial knowledge and a lot of time, a lotta time to come up with something like this.
It is more plausible that Satoshi was a rogue AI, ET, the Illuminati or future time traveler instead of one single person :)
I'm going to call BS on this. Not that this guy couldn't be Satoshi, but the article has some serious nonsense in it. Ha said he learned to program on a "Timex Sinclair". It wasn't called that in the UK. Did he know the alternative name and auto-translate in speaking to a US journalist? Seems unlikely. Then he used C++! Amazing. So did everyone at that time. He took an interest in PK cryptography. So has every single serious software engineer since the 1990s. It's the same thing as Bitcoin! Seriously. I stopped reading when the next piece of evidence was that he used the word "libertarian".
If this guy was still just a guy on a mailing list and otherwise living a private life, this article would be inappropriate to publish IMO.
However, he's a significant public figure in the Bitcoin world (apparently). Still a gray area I guess but I don't think he's off limits from this kind of scrutiny.
If you read the article there’s an interesting bit where Mr. Back has an active incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi: US securities law, which requires disclosing things which’d be material to investors. Like, for example, a stash of bitcoin which if sold could crash the price of the thing.
And also, from my understanding, Back allegedly had some not-insignificant ties or meetings with Epstein?
Point being, journalism like this is morally complex, and not as simple as “doxxing innocent people.” Of course, we are biased, as hackers on a web forum, we naturally relate with Satoshi, who was also a techie on a web forum.
I don't. It's a tool used by modern "journalism" to distract and detract from a story. If you have something reliable to report, then by all means, report it. If all you have is a "compelling narrative" then put it on the shelf and do NOT waste my time with it.
If you can't manage that then publish fiction books.
I don't think this reveals Satoshi's identity, nor that any prior piece of reporting may have done so. But I do think there's a high probability that Satoshi lurks or has lurked on HN, and perhaps reads these posts with an initial sense of apprehension followed by a chuckle at the inevitable misidentification.
We don't know if that's misidentification either. The author provides good evidence that the writing style matches, which doesn't provide a strong proof, however it's a good clue of who might it be.
Obviously Satoshi and Banksy are the same person. They are both from the same era and British.
There are so many people I know from that Era who believed the same things that Mr. Back believed in. Half my work colleagues at the time where interested in distributed computers,
Postage pay, and algorithmic payments.
The author has collected more than enough entropy to single out Mr. Back, especially when the anonymity set of who could be Satoshi is so small.
It's either Back or someone who tried to frame him, long before Bitcoin was even remotely successful. Generally, framing someone like this is a poor strategy because it places you in the person's radius as opposed to being absolutely anyone.
He’s not one person but a front for a US law enforcement task force dedicated to tracking down cyber criminals and anyone who would need anonymity online. It started, alongside TOR, as a way for drug dealers, weapons dealers, and pedophiles to do business. Neither cryptocurrency nor TOR are actually anonymous. They’re part of a pretty impressive honeypot ecosystem.
What I’m interested in is the pivot when crypto tried to go legit. Some spook or suit decided that it would be used for other reasons also. Now it has some semblance of legitimacy.
Before anyone asks: social media is another part of the same ecosystem. Nurtured and protected by the government and law enforcement, despite any number of practices that would bankrupt most companies and sent people to jail.
It also locks us all down to just the computers that are in our possession and the big tech silos, because now nobody can offer any computer resources free to the public without crypto miners immediately getting dropped on them. Even GitHub Actions got used this way, for example. Now every-goddamn-thing is sign up, log in, Know Your Customer, show us your ID, move your head like the arrows on screen, enter the digits from your authenticator app, check your email for the unique code.
The FBI created the purportedly encrypted "AN0M" messaging app [1] as part of a sting operation running between 2018-2021 used to catch drug-traffickers.
Creating a fake app that people believe is secure or anonymous is an easier way to run a police sting operation than first making a significant breakthrough in Distributed Systems around the Byzantine Generals Problem.
For your conspiracy theory to be true, at some point a honeypot/sting operation must actually end and arrests be made and the evidence be used in court.
Would make a good tv show where a small group in a secretive TLA org started this but then made so much money they decided to keep it to themselves and get rich.
"Sorry director, the experimental project was a failure. We deleted it all now to clean up and free resources. Oh and yeah unrelated, I need to hand in my notice. Want to spend more time with my ...er... family. Thanks."
I haven't read the full article yet but I'm guessing they didn't give credit, as the New York Times tends to do. Not definitive but it's a very convincing case.
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.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416
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
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.
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.
One of the journalists was Jason Koebler who later cofounded 404media. That is imho pretty legit outlet which uncovered many pretty damning stories about tech.
404media is good stuff, one of the few news outlets I pay for. I didn't dig too deep on the above comment because I have a deep respect for journalists despite admittedly many of them servicing things I dislike by choice or coercion or for remuneration or fame, etc. Reading about journalists in more authoritarian countries was seriously depressing
Yep Googlers... Metans... don't throw stones.
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.
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.
The journalist knew what she was doing. Naomi was in China, agreed to do an interview about her self & her work, then the journo tried to drum up clicks by putting her on the spot about politics.
Real consequences for the interviewee, all for some clicks. That's not journalism.
How do you "dox" a journalist? Are they writing under anonymous bylines now?
By releasing personal information which a reasonable person would expect to be private? I don't know the specifics of this case (only responding to the overly vague question) but information like address, private contact info, details about their families. Anything you would not immediately expect to become public knowledge simply by writing about topic(s).
In the US at least owning a residence is public record. It can be obfuscated with shell companies and things like that but most people don’t do.
> “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
It's not racist if you attack old white men now, it's quite popular.
The responses will claim something about the past justifying it.
> Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories.
People can opt to not read and pay such people.
Funny enough in her own words, they don't much care..
> You’re wrong. NYT does pay attention to subscriber cancellations. It’s one of the metrics for “outrage” that they take to distinguish between “real” outrage and superficial outrage. What subscribers say can back up dissenting views inside the paper about what it should do and be.
It's the use of the word "quest" here that really bothers me. It seems ignoble.
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.
Journalism is activism these days. Hurting your enemy is the goal, not merely reporting the facts.
And getting clicks at any cost is a secondary goal...
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
He was not blogging under his real name. Scott Alexander is not his real name.
It is his real name, and he also used his real surname in early blog posts.
It is not his real name. Once he upended his life, he revealed his real name here[1]. It is not Scott Alexander.
[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/still-alive
Scott Alexander are his first and middle names, and Siskind his last name, or that's what I've understood.
It's his first and middle name. At least that's what he said in the post about shutting down the blog.
> 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.
Cade Metz wrote the article under his real name, and his home address is public information, but presumably he wouldn't appreciate it being published on the internet. Why is that any different?
The NYT has no authority to dox people. If they or anyone believed that SSC was acting unethically or illegally, that should be processed through proper legal or ethical channels, which exist for a reason. The solution is not that NYT should abuse their power to skip those channels.
It’s legal to publish anonymous patient data, doctors do it frequently e.g. in “case studies”. As long as it can’t be traced back to the patient I don’t see why they should care (I wouldn’t). And since it increases public knowledge (e.g. how to treat future patients) I think it’s not only ethical, but should be encouraged.
Doxxing also increases public knowledge, but knowing who’s behind some online pseudonym is much less useful than patient anecdotes (what would you do with the former? Satisfy your interest (or what else do you mean by “public interest”)?). Moreover, unlike anonymous patient data, it has a serious downside: risking someone’s job, relationships, or even life.
Case studies are done with consent, typically. That’s pretty different.
In principle, anonymized case studies do not require consent and historically, they were often published without. Without personally identifiable information, this is and always has been 100% legal. But in modern practice, many journals acknowledge that making a case fully anonymous in the age of the internet might not even be possible without taking away everything noteworthy, so they require some form of consent nowadays.
Alternatively they can do what Scott Alexander did and change irrelevant details.
That's not so easy, especially for clinical case studies. If any data points are irrelevant, they should not be stated at all, because they actually might not be irrelevant after all and by arbitrarily changing them, you could confound results. On the other hand, it has been shown that three or more indirect data points can already be enough to unmask you in an anonymized report. And most reports usually contain many more than that. So it's not surprising that journals would cover their backs by requiring consent, even if the law does not explicitly demand it.
I don’t know how typical it is, but HIPAA explicitly doesn’t cover patient data after anonymization, and anecdotally I’ve had an anonymous case study published about me without my consent (although I was notified after).
You can't doxx someone who already publicly identified themselves.
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.
It’s all about balance.
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.
> 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.
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.
Long gone until quantum computers crack all the legacy wallets
At which point the bitcoin in legacy wallets is clearly worthless
It would be insane for the Bitcoin protocol to make Bitcoin in non QR wallets worthless.
The parent claim is that once quantum cracking becomes real, there would be no more bitcoin in non-QR wallet (because the quants would steal it all).
I was curious about this point when discussion came up on HN just recently. I don't see how you could "assign" each non-QR address a new quantum resistant address unless they "claim" it themselves somehow. What can possibly happen to an uneducated mom-and-pop bitcoin holder who never takes up their claim? Someone else who cracks their private key would be in an identical position to them w.r.t authenticating themselves and doing such a claim first - thus it becomes a race
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?
It's not even hundreds of millions. It's tens of billions of dollars if we suppose someone actually have access to these wallets.
Bitcoins across old unused wallets worth $30B to $80B depend of how you count it.
I always assumed these wallets were never meant to be withdrawn. In the case of satoshi’s - it’s public proof that the Bitcoin network is still secure.
> Bitcoins across old unused wallets worth $30B to $80B depend of how you count it.
It's worth considerably less if you make any attempt to count it accurately. The market capitalization reflects the fact that old unused wallets are unused. If they stopped being unused, market capitalization would drop.
In some sense they are even completely worthless - just tokens in a wealth redistribution scheme not connected to notable real value production.
If the system does crash, nothing of value would be lost. And we would be rid of ransomware.
> hundreds of millions
More in the range of 100 billion
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.
> this is unashamedly published on a so-called credible journalism outlet
There may be credible journalists at some major print newspapers, but I don’t think there are many people who actually believe that any major US-based journalism outlet defaults to credible any more.
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.
It’s like saying chirurgeon job is like any other job, and the most people operated in a minimum amount of time is all that matter to optimize. But even in the most cynical Machiavelli™ hospital, reputation and actual operational results have to be taken into account if the institution want to continue to be frequented.
> 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
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.
More likely they were playing with the system when they were the system in the early days, and just didn't keep those keys (IMO). Remember, even into the GPU era people were still giving bitcoin away; those wallets weren't worth anything.
If you were to attempt to transfer money out if those wallets it would have a knock on effect on the price.
An estimated 22,000 addresses, 1.1 million Bitcoin. Present value $78 billion. That would make him the 23rd richest person in the world. Bill Gates by comparison is 'only' worth $102 billion these days.
If you priced Gates backwards in gold, his $102 billion is about $13 billion two decades ago. He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
You can't price dollars in gold to measure value. Gold doesn't measure value better than the dollar at any point in time, let alone over time. Just use the price index for one currency, or the relative price indexes across currencies.
> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
That hasn't been his goal. For the last two decades he's been running a huge charitable foundation...
Is that what they call visiting private islands these days?
It's a pretty well known entity. You can find more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_Foundation
> It's a pretty well known entity. You can find more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_Foundation
Gates's relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein started in 2011, a few years after Epstein was convicted for procuring a child for prostitution
I see.
Wait. Are you claiming that there's some sort of link between "Gates's relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein started in 2011" and the Gates Foundation which launched in 2000 by merging with the Gates Sr. Foundation from all the way back in 1994?
Was that in between his visits on Epstine island?
Sure. Al Capone did a lot of charitable work too.
Someone can do more than one thing.
Yes, "charitable work". I'm sure a foundation like that could make a good front for child trafficking. Not that Bill would ever do such a thing obviously, his common interests with that old rascal Jeff must have strictly included other things.
If any of those addresses sold a single sat the price would crash hard.
Biggest pump and dump in history
> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
The dollar is trading pretty much at 30-year historic highs relative to all other currencies. You have to go back to ~2000 to find a stronger era, and then the 1980s before that.
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/dxy
They're talking about the decline in the purchasing price of a dollar over the past decade, not its value relative to other currencies at the moment
I don't know how you know that, but even that argument is a straw man, unless you're asserting that all of the other currencies declined in value equally against whatever theoretical good(s) you're holding out as the objective standard for value.
1.1m Bitcoin is currently $77B not $7B.
Gold is a weird one. It’s has a hell of a run over the last decade. I’m not sure it looked so rosy in 2015. I kinda feel like betting on gold is betting on the end of civilization. I don’t really want to be right.
Lmao, it's $70B+ brother. Zeros aren't for everyone. :")
Couldn't agree more. If you don't want to be famous in today's day and age, don't do infamous shit.
He is a billionaire who should pay taxes.
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.
You do realize the author is the one that exposed the Theranos fraud ?
> And really, for what?
Readership, clicks and views
Hundreds of billions, not millions.
Naah, the moment the first million of those is sold -- the price crashes.
In other words, imagine some investor had those billions, and could buy the key. Should they? A thing is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.
At least until they actually tried selling them
NYT just doesn't care about the consequences of what they publish. A few years ago they put out a piece about how a big group of people were constantly raping another big group of people, that had significant geopolitical implications, it turned out to be entirely made up and they never apologised.
I can't work out whether this is supposed to be talking about trans panic, the 80s satanic panic, the Epstein files, Rotherham, or something else.
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?
I fail to understand "why". There is this awesome band, Angine de Poitrine, that makes being anonymous a big part of the fun. Some people are trying hard to dox them, and I heard that someone already did it. What if they decide to quit, now that the fun is over if they are not anonymous anymore? Congrats, you fucked up the party and nothing was gained.
Let's keep in mind that doxxing is not a universal concept nor are its mechanisms universally perceived as negative/frowned upon outside of specific online areas.
I don't know of any law against it except for specific populations like law enforcement and even those usually have exceptions for journalism.
Australia has a law against "menacing or harassing" doxxing.
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....
(nice permalink URL guys.)
Yeah, as a Scandinavian it is often hard to understand how people can feel that their existence is a secret. We've had public and fairly rich (family relations, profession) census data for hundreds of years. Tax records, school grades, property ownership. All of it public information available to and for everyone.
The right to privacy here never meant "noone may know that I exist".
I believe it widely understood to be what most people call "a douche move".
Widely only in limited — mostly english speaking — online communities. Otherwise most people hate it if it is likely to harm someone considered as an innocent individual but less if that figure is already kind of public — people love to know where and all the details on how famous people live — or to people they view more negatively. For instance nobody complains when the real owner, origin and location of say, a shady company, is made known to the general public.
So the real truth is "it depends". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Indeed, unless they're already a public person (such as celebrity or public figure of note).
Mini-celebrities are probably far more likely to attract attention than a lot of “rich people.”
I was just wondering the same thing.
Exposing the wealthy is pretty standard journalism
And if this guy isn't Satoshi?
And if he comes to harm as a result of someone believing the NYT?
Then the person who harmed him will be prosecuted. And life will go on.
The NY Times isn’t calling for violence.
> Then the person who harmed him will be prosecuted ... NY Times isn’t calling for violence.
And the negligent driver also didn't mean to cause injury, yet we have laws on negligent driving.
If the NY Times would have known that harm could come to someone by having information published, they should consult and/or take measures to prevent that harm (or at least, take measures to minimize it).
Consider the following hypothetical: you have a safe in your home with a substantial sum of money in it, and you consider its presence, the location and contents private knowledge. However, someone uses publicly available information to infer the rough location and contents of your safe and makes it public. You are robbed shortly after. What percentage of responsibility lies with that person?
So if someone broke into your house, murdered you, and stole all your money, you would die peacefully, knowing that the thief will be prosecuted?
Harm from exposure can take a lot of shapes and sizes that go beyond the physical and the potential prosecution that someone may be held accountable I find weak.
And yet they would be responsible.
It's pretty standard left wing activism. Rags like the NYT pretending there's no difference, doesn't mean there is no difference.
Well given they have hunreds of millions of dollars to protect themselves with, it seems like it would be a good time to start using it.
Satoshi cannot spend his fortune. If he did, it would be visible on the blockchain and bitcoin's price would collapse.
Imagine mafia knocking on your door and putting a gun to your head because some journalist figured out you are secret billionare.
Not cool?
How is it different from all the non-secret billionaires to say nothing of all the people with 100s of millions?
You really dont get it? Because real billionares have the money and you dont.
Journalists just told everyone you are billionare, but you're just average SWE on $120k / year and absolutely no money for hiring small army of guards. Neither your own government agencies keep your back protected like they do for usual high profile people.
Now go find a proof for mafia that you are not in fact have a billion bucks on USD stick.
This has happened in this Satoshi hunt multiple times already. I mean finding that some random crypto related SWE is Satoshi when they are not.
Even if you put a gun to Bill Gates' head, signing over all his wealth to you would still require a lengthy process, not just handing over some keys.
Satoshi is a paper billionaire - he can't use a small fraction of his "wealth" to hire proper security. Simultaneously his "assets" are much more attractive to criminals. Imagine holding a regular billionaire hostage and demanding they give you a billion dollars. They'd probably have to sell 1B worth of stock, then convert it to cash (or crypto), etc. all of that requiring multiple interactions with different people and institutions.
Heisting multiple billions worth of crypto would have the same issues, just to a smaller degree. If that much illicit money is on the line, `mJurisdiction` which normally looks the other way might be tempted to investigate and confiscate it for their own benefit.
They also can't easily sell that amount quickly without repercussions (and without another institution like an exchange).
You're right, but only to a limited degree.
> There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good or anything like that.
Here is an argument for the greater public good.
Transparency. Bitcoin acts as an alternative global monetary system. It’s not centralized but whales can control the game. Acquisition of bitcoins are asymmetrical, meaning first adopters gained an enormous wealth and became whales virtually for free. So we can say it’s a rigged game. It becomes important to know who are all those people that can control a global monetary system. If Satoshi is an individual it may not matter. But what if it’s an organization, like CIA or o group of bankers. What if it was Epstein or Elon Musk, unlikely but viable candidates but the implications are huge.
Also we assume Bitcoin is for good and maker of a good thing can be anonymous. What if it is a harmful thing, like a Ponzi scheme to grab people’s money. Then Satoshi becomes a criminal rather than a hero, and public must know the name.
Journalists largely have no morals or ethics these days. Literal scum of the earth, anything to make a name for themselves or to push their ideological agendas.
Why should journalism engage in the implied pro-active censorship here?
With that reasoning you could censor everything, including the Epstein files. You only need to find some "critical reason", usually being safety concern or "but but but the children". So I disagree with that rationale.
How far would you want censorship to go?
Having said that, I am not particularly interested in the "who is mystery man" debate situation.
> There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good
That's an opinion. While I personally don't care, others may, so your statement here is also just an opinion. Trump also said the Epstein files are not relevant - I and many others think differently. I wonder how deep the Epstein kompromat situation is, it would be an ideal blackmail situation. Any democracy can be factually undermined that way.
> Why should journalism engage in the implied pro-active censorship here?
Because in this particular case it endangers subject's life.
I would assume that they don't care about the unmasking, because the whole thing is a just a misleading show, intended to misdirect you from the reality. I don't know the reality, but perhaps if the USG was behind the creation of BTC, that would explain it.
>Satoshi’s wallets are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and there have been kidnappings/torture/murders for much less than that.
So if Forbes publishes a list of the richest people in the world, it makes them targets?
No, because those people are already public figures. They own companies that are publicly known (i don't mean publicly traded), and thus by proxy, are public face of those companies.
Or they appear(ed) in public to make something of being in public (such as lobbying, or civic activities, or philanthropy etc). This makes any article about them not a doxx - they already revealed themselves publicly. You cannot segregate public affairs of the person with private affairs.
The Forbes 30-under-30 is I believe pay to play. It's also a surprisingly reliable predictor of arrest.
Those people are on alert and already protected. Satoshi is probably a regular guy without any other security other than being anonymous. We are also assuming that they are doxing the real guy, and not some bystander that now have to deal with all the consequences without having the resources to protect himself. Lets suppose they are wrong, they dox the wrong person, "opsies, let us add a footnote to the text saying we were wrong, and let us forget this happened" (RE: reddit played detective a couple times and botched normal people lives).
And if you do have a big pile of money but are flying under the radar so far you sadly should have some investments in security. I thought people around here didn’t really believe in security through obscurity.
Lets keep with the analogy, as wrong as it is. If you discover a serious bug, you usually disclose it privately, allowing the maintainers to patch the problem before disclosing. When the embargo is over, the bug is already harmless. Why we do that? Isn't that security through obscurity? Why we consider unethical to just disclose serious zero day bugs that might even get someone killed, or thousand of script kiddies that would never discover the bug on their own can profit from it easily?
Security through obscurity actually works in real life. There are lots of people that hide all their lives in a humble way, only to get discovered as millionaires after they die. Because you don't have hundred, thousands of bots looking for "vulnerabilities" on everyone's life at almost zero cost and big potential profit.
Sadly it does. Most of those people have to spend a lot of money on security. But usually it's not the Forbes list that specifically outs them as being wealthy. You can't really build a billion dollar company under the radar.
This is just a strange situation where someone has made billions without their identity being known, without being a criminal.
When you are not actually rich, it matters.
This. Imagine being targeted by actual government agencies of russia, north korea and iran who wouldn't mind to take some of your bitcoins.
If Forbes misidentifies the wrong person as a billionaire, then yes, it is a problem.
a killer from Moscow used to cost $5000
After events of last 4 years in Russia you can probably be killed there for $100 or for a wrong look. Lots of trigger happy ex-convict veterans with PTSD are around.
For now they are busy killing their wives and relatives, but eventually they will run out of money for alcohol and will have to find a "job".
sad state indeed. people deserve better than that
This is what you get when majority of country is ignoring politics, dont participate in electiom process, dont fight for their rights, etc.
do you need the forbes list of billionaires to know who is bezos, gates or musk?
There's 3428 on that list, I don't think it's feasible for any random person to know about more than 5% of them.
The NYTimes is basically a mouthpiece for US government interests. The US government has an interest in outing cryptocurrency actors of all kinds.
I found this amusing.
>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.
>Water, a drink consumed by nobel price winners and European kings...
Oxygen, an element serial killers need in order to kill again.
Dihydrogen monoxide - a constituent of many known toxic substances, diseases and disease-causing agents[0]
[0]: https://www.dhmo.org/
100% of people who've ever had DHMO have died.
This is scientifically verified and yet nobody does anything about it.
I know this is a joke, but you did it wrong. There are obviously people (like me) who have had DHMO and are not dead.
100% of the people who have died have been exposed to DHMO.
You aren't fooling anyone, you know.
http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Holy_Grail/Scene2.htm
Truly, we can eliminate the null hypothesis because only ~93% of humans who have ever lived have died. [0] [1]
[0] https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-... [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Over 90% of people who've ever had DHMO have died.
I like the formulatiom that 100% of the cancer tumors have DHMO and no one has done anything about it.
> and yet nobody does anything about it
So dismissive of all the transhumanist efforts to eradicate death!
Their failure to address the presence of DMHO suggests they are not serious.
thousands of people die every year from DHMO toxicity, literal overdoses of DHMO, yet you can still find it in baby food and breast milk.
I was alway taught that Adolf Hitler was a prevalent user of dihydrogen monoxide and refused to give it to his captives.
Water? Like, from the toilet?
Ah yes, the cautionary tale where the leadership is willing to accept their own faults, seeks out the most competent to solve their issue, despite initial reservations are willing to go with the suggestions provided and a public that, upon being provided evidence accepts it. Kinda hopeful, if one thinks about it, the Eugenics nonsense notwithstanding…
Does it have electrolytes?
It's what plants crave.
(I needed to be able to post that to HN tonight.)
Very on brand for our darkest timeline, if you excuse the mixed media metaphor.
This section stood out to me because it started out explaining PGP to a layman like this, but then the author gets overly excited that a cryptographer would be interested in... basic cryptography
> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. So does Bitcoin. [...]
> How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.
Bob uses electricity provided from a coal power plant, therefore he must be able to design a Fission plant. Yeah, these are some massive leaps, the question of why, beyond morbid curiosity, one must dox Satoshi not withstanding. Satoshi or the wallets they controlled were never associated with anything beyond the creation of BTC after all, making the value of knowing who they are or were not really great in my view. If these coins suddenly started funding someone or something, there could be an argument, but this coupled with such a layperson approach makes me doubtful about the ethics or approach.
We also have this gem:
> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.
Amazing! I bet they both for loops too! I heard Bitcoin relies heavily on for loops.
Infuriatingly, to people who don't know much about programming, these pieces of 'evidence' might sound quite compelling, because it will all sound equally obscure to them.
I'm only a quarter of the way through this piece, but I'm finding it very hard to take seriously.
It's strange. I'm sure that he talked to experts who would immediately say, yes many programming languages exist. But two cryptographers who wrote money systems both using C++ is not informative. Today maybe we could expect one to use Rust.
Well .. you probably thought the same when John was unmasking Theranos
The leaps here would get one laughed out of an early 2k conspiracy forum.
I see your point, but PGP was literally invented by an anti-nuclear activist and intentionally disseminated to human rights groups.
"Created" or "originally used" would be on point, 60 years after the fact it is just slop.
60? Not even 40.
I think it's mind boggling that in 2026 encryption and signing of emails is still not a common thing, only because it's Google's business model to snoop on their users' email. For that reason we can't use email to send sensitive data and need apps for every little thing that could have been an email.
> I would ping him over the Signal app
Signal, the free encryption app used by journalists
Signal, which shares its name with the propaganda publication of the Third Reich ...
Signal, an App predominantly used by governmental officials to leak war plans or bypass historical recording obligations.
that's such a loaded statement.
This is the power of language.
The bias is built into it.
And nowadays, PGP technology is mostly used by the government and military. I wouldn't be surprised if this was also the case when Bitcoins was originally developed
Never seen it. What parts? Do you mean PKI?
[Citation needed]
Seriously why would gov use pgp? They would be the last group i would expect to use something like PGP.
Source: I worked two years on GnuPG, which is certified VS-NfD: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geheimhaltungsgrad
PGP was different then. In the 90s the internet was unencrypted and the only people using PGP were those that had a reasonable need for it. However, there were a couple of big problems that the armchair historian would not be aware of.
First off, communicating with PGP was hard. Imagine you are based in London and you want to publish something controversial without getting taken to court. You could email someone in New York and ask them to post your 'hot potato of juiciness'. But, how to you exchange keys without the beloved five eyes seeing what you are up to?
This was in an era when very little was encrypted, so anything encrypted would theoretically get flagged for the three letter agencies to take a look at. Again, this would depend on the person you are trying to reach, if they were working at the equivalent of 'the Iranian embassy' then yeah, good luck with that, you are going to get caught.
The next problem was that PGP was doable for the three letter agencies using what amounts to WW2 Enigma tactics. In period it was possible for them to man-in-the-middle attack an email, to ask the PGP using sender to 'use the right key and resend'. The sender does as told, even with the same, as provided, public key. However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
PGP was originally treated as a 'munition' with export controls. People weren't using PGP for their Uber Eats and Amazon orders, as per the article, it was only anti-government people that needed PGP, that being Western 'five eyes' governments.
Hence, even though it is a tedious NYT article, the author is right about PGP, in period. And, don't ask how I know about how PGP was hacked, there was a certain fog of war that went on at the time.
It was never trivial for TLAs to man-in-the-middle anyone, because PGP users were very much aware of the problem and nothing about key exchange was automated, for good or ill. Key exchange parties, reading out key fingerprints in their own custom extended phonetic alphabet etc.
A man in the middle attack would maybe work in rare cases, at great cost, and then you'd get one or two messages and immediately make people aware that they'd been attacked. It's not worth it. I'm confident the TLAs never bothered to do it against anyone with public keys on a key server, the minimum effort you could make to guard against MITM attacks.
> However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
Could you expand on this please?
They cannot because PGP has no such vulnerability.
You must be joking!
It is hard to imagine that "modern" encryption would be susceptible to known plaintext attacks, please provide some citations.
"antinuclear activists and human rights groups to shield their files and emails from government surveillance"
You mean the people responsible for not allowing us to embrace Nuclear 30 years before we should have?
Yeah the weird thing about living in a democracy is you have to convince people who don't agree with you to do things. Maybe try better politics rather than attacks or else you'll go another 30 years of no nuclear power then die without realizing your dream of nearly free clean unlimited power.
It’s 10x easier to destroy things and block stuff than it is to build anything.
As witnessed by the US inability to build anything for a generation or two. It’s all NIMBY (or worse) all the time.
Anti-anything is fighting a nearly unwinnable asymmetric political fight these days. Eventually times will get hard enough where this flips, but we are nowhere close to that yet.
> people who don't agree with you to do things.
the problem is that those people who don't agree with me are also not taking the externalized cost of non-action.
Nuclear restrictions were instituted by beurocratic means, not democratic means.
In Austria we put it to a vote. Right after building the first fission plant. We never switched it on after a narrow defeat. At least in our narrow case, the restrictions were exclusively democratic.
It depends on the country. In many, there were actual rounds of dedicated votes.
No - Zimmerman was an anti nuclear weapons activist with the Nuclear Freeze campaign when he invented PGP.
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?
[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
> a heated debate ... exposed his ignorance
Didnt follow everything here, but wouldn't that make for a perfect cover story? If you're Satoshi, and people are getting close to verifying (or at least nominating you as "most likely candidate"), what better way to throw people off than to engage in a public conversation in which you (creatively) get all kinds of technical details wrong and make yourself look too ignorant or dumb to ever have been Satoshi?
The funny thing is that the author uses your exact logic when he finds evidence that goes against his hypothesis. He made posts that asked questions about things that Satoshi definitely would've known? Misdirection! Somebody else does it? Strong evidence against them!
The interesting thing to me is, it seems likely that whichever individual or small group actually is Satoshi must have planted at least a few misdirection false flags like that at some point. But how in the world would you ever tell which ones are that sort of misdirection and which are real?
This is why I stopped reading these Bitcoin creator stories. It's usually more about the journalist and their 'process' than the story.
There’s no bottom to this line of reasoning, however.
One can always suppose the identified individual is a double, triple, quadruple agent.
What level do you play at?
One level higher than you.
>One can always suppose the identified individual is a double, triple, quadruple agent.
yes in general it's not good reasoning but given that in this case we know that we're talking about someone who tried to stay anonymous and comes out of the cypherpunk culture we can pretty much assume that if they've been interviewed they've denied it.
It's not like that accusation is random, it's that this is what the real Nakamoto, whoever it is, would have said
I think it's a pretty good case. I always wondered why would the inventor would use pseudonym in the first place. Surely, not even the most visionary person could anticipate how hugely popular the thing would become. This is why I was intrigued by Newsweek investigation [1]. However, seeing this article, I am leaning towards the person being someone who had been active in crypto culture for a long while, before creating Bitcoin. The story about Napster, and the paranoia around government going after the inventor ties in nicely towards the motivation to remain anonymous.
The word, phrasing use is a good evidence. I do wonder though why didn't the author try to analyze the source code similarly? Did it prove something to the contrary?
Also, Satoshi jumping in to defend block-size out of the blue sounds too reckless for someone so careful about anonymity. Possible explanation might be that he let his guard down seeing an attempt to "butcher" his creation.
In any case, I am convinced that it was most likely a single person and if not Adam, I think there are no more than 3-4 people who are possible candidates.
[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-bitcoin-2479...
There is no such line. The actual line is whether someone is newsworthy; the safeguard you have against journalism abusing random people (which it has done, often, over the last 150 years) is that journalists ordinarily don't write intrusive stories about random people.
(There are some other safeguards, but they're highly situational.)
The conflict between journalism and "doxxing" is a Redditism that people are frantically trying to import into real life. Maybe Reddit norms will upend the longstanding norms (and purpose) of journalism! But nobody should kid themselves that the norms have always been compatible.
But are they themselves newsworthy or is it what they created and that they hold a lot of coins?
There are many people, both FOSS devs and working for major corporations, that have contributed or singularly been responsible for very impactful technologies, but in general, if that person wants to keep their persona discreet and there is no evidence they have done anything of public interest, the reporting remains purely on what they have done. Akin to why Wikipedia generally has rules for notability (I’d argue Satoshi falls under ONEVENT if we are strict here).
To me, the way you describe it, the line appears to be less in whether there may be a public interest and more whether there is public attention. In other words, is the line in the sand whether people should know this or whether they want to (and thus buy copies)?
Genuinely asking, is there a rule set on this the NYT should adhere to? What is the APs position for dem asking a pseudononymous character only notable for a specific thing?
I agree, in that Journalism has always been an unethical business masquerading as moral imperative.
But I think this "Redditism applied to real life" is actually society grappling with the ethics of public safety and social accountability in the 21st century. Is it okay to dox a 16 year old Twitch streamer? Or a wealthy Satoshi? Or a crypto-Nazi? Laws only define so much, and we (society) have to fill in the gaps, which is messy. I think we're figuring out where the line is in real time.
Isn't it a matter of legitimate interest for me to know whether you're obscenely rich or not? After all, if you are, you can probably do things like buying elections and sending hitmen after my family.
Either way, why can't they just deal with it the way other obscenely rich people deal with it?
I hate this idea that doxxing is some kind if crime. “Who is the creator of bitcoin?” is a matter of great public and historical interest. Finding out who he is, is the purest form of journalism.
What does that say about pure journalism? Publish information despite doing harm? How do you present the information, and what impact does that presentation have?
Historically, newspapers often published the full name and physical address of every person they covered, from judges to drunks to rape victims to people suspected of a crime. I'm sure people back in the day called that pure journalism, but I don't think we'd call it "good" today. Our standards today might also not be as good as we assume.
Historically, people got a big book every year with the name and address of most people in it. You could get unlisted numbers but now everyone has a cellphone which just isn’t broadly published but because now many use it for everything it’s probably not that hard to find.
Also, has others have noted it’s trivial to put other a list of wealthy people. In fact, it’s probably better to skip the Forbes 400 list who probably have some level of private security. Just go through the board member lists of Fortune 500 companies.
Username doesn't check out.
Good point, personally I had never considered that doxing could be considered not illegal/crime.
It's a horrible point, it assumes that the person being doxxed is the claim of the doxer.
There is no wait they can be 100% sure, so they will ruin someone's life over what?
At what point does the use of clues to uncover the identity of a criminal cross the line from solid detective work to doxing? /s
Speculating about it using arguments like "he also uses C++ and has used words popular in those circles" isn't though or at least shouldn't be.
"Hey this guy probably had an access to a few billion USD worth of btc, maybe still has, his name is X, he lives in Y. He wishes to be anonymous but he knows C++ and we got him!".
> I hate this idea that doxxing is some kind if crime.
The thing is, up until the advent of the internet it basically didn't matter - although in some cases, e.g. the German left-wing terror group "RAF", rich people did end up getting v&, in some cases killed. But that was a rarity.
But now with the possibilities of modern technology? Being able to be active on the Internet without hiding behind a pseudonym is a rare privilege. Wrong political opinion? Some nutjob from the opposite side can and will send anything from "pizza pranks" to outright SWAT to your home (or your parents, or ex-wife, or anyone they can identify as being associated with you). And if you got money? Stalkers, thieves, robbers, scammers, you will get targeted.
Except Satoshi has been "anonymous" and those Bitcoin have never moved, even when the sum total of that wallet might have been $10,000 or so.
And if Satoshi's holdings now exceed $1B, well, for better or worse, multiple courts have ruled that billionaires are inherently public figures, because of their "outsized effect on public discourse".
It would be hilarious if he intentionally or accidentally lost the key, and has been trying to cash out through those Bitcoin adjacent business ventures ever since.
Even if he is Satoshi he might not be a billionaire or rich at all.
A major problem with the article is the author's inability to weigh the evidence: actual evidence, like presence/absence pattern, is buried whereas p-hacking stylometry (let me try another expert, this one didn't give me what I wanted! let me feed him the Satoshi/Adam Back tells that I'm already in love with!) is majority of the article. It also includes absolute garbage like the vistomail spoof email during the block size wars. And, oh by the way, both Satoshi and Adam Back knew C++. Theranos evidence was binary (machines either work or they don't) but it is not so here and the author is simply out of his depth here.
It is sad - but entirely unsurprising - that NYT decided to paint a big target on someone's back just for clicks. Judith Miller-tier all over again. Miller too had real evidence and junk evidence, couldn't distinguish between the two, and editors wanted a flashy headline. Carreyrou has exactly the same problem here: NYT editors need multimedia events (like junk stylometry filtering - watch the number shrink from 34,000 to 562 to 114 to 56 to 8 to 1!!!) because that's what its audience-product relationship demands. I think it not unfair to say that modern Times' editorial culture has no mechanism for distinguishing rigorous inference from merely compelling narrative. Open the front page on a random day: how often do you see the Times staking credibility on a causal claim "A causes B" vs simply "X happened. Then Y came." vibes/parataxis.
I've had the fortune/misfortune to be directly or peripherally involved in nearly a dozen situations that made it to press and there isn't a single case where the story represented in the article wasn't blatantly misinterpreted from the facts. In nearly every case what was mentioned in the article was the complete opposite of what actually happened. Biggest/Most-egregious offenders were Vice and Vox Media but included are the NYT, WaPo and Time.
One can only narrow the things they care about to those they can verify (or personally affect them) and go after primary sources themselves and form their own conclusions. I'm no longer convinced that modern journalism is good for anything more than starting bonfires.
can you give some examples? I'm very interested in this. (after all we had about a decade of crying "fake news" - and as far as I understand the verdict was that big traditional outlets get the basic facts right - who what where when - but are absolutely clueless about or intentionally spin the "why".)
Does Carreyrou give reasons for eliminating Hal Finney from being (part or all of) Satoshi?
The reporting already establishes all three parties (Satoshi being the third) were familiar/friendly with one another. The reporting says that Finney was the recipient of the first ever Bitcoin transaction, which seems like a completely natural thing to do if the two of you are working together.
Finney's name also rises to the top in a few of the author's analysis, while also noting:
Again, why not both of them as Satoshi?Hal Finney's passing also helps explain how such a monumental secret of Satoshi's identity has remained a secret for so long. The only other person who's in on the secret is Back himself.
Edit: To add further conjecture, it wouldn't surprise me if Satoshi's wallet is locked away in a trust or tied up with Finney's estate. I can imagine a scenario where the keys to the wallet are legally unobtainable until such time that both Finney and Back have passed, at which point the wallet is liquidated and its proceeds donated (Finney previously raised money for ALS research).
If Finney and Back were working together, why does Finney post a lot as himself through Satoshi's existence while Back does not?
That implies it's just Back who was the Satoshi poster. And if so, you don't have any evidence Finney is a technical co-founder.
Yes, he mentions he was photographed running a foot race during a date and time Satoshi sent emails (of course that's a bit weak).
Thank you!
Reasoning: They have the chops to create the world's first system where consensus, scarcity, and ownership exist without a central authority... But, they also lack the ability to write a Perl script to "Send Later". Checks out.
Why would they believe that someone in the future would be tracking their mailing list post history and correlating email timestamps with real-life activity? There's no motivation to take steps to hide one's tracks (by setting up a remote email send while one is were away) unless one thinks that is going to happen.
Satoshi took many steps to conceal his identity and very much values anonymity. Why is this step one too far?
As the article says, Back was very interested in methods of covering one's tracks.
Anyone sophisticated enough to hide their writing style and identity would be more than capable of setting an email to go out while they were at a public event.
Likewise, the argument discounting szabo because he exposed some ignorance of Bitcoin is exactly what someone might do to throw off the scent.
If you believe that Satoshi's email wasn't hacked then his last emails came after Finney had passed away.
I remember at the time the consensus was that the email host itself had been hacked
It was running on outdated software with known vulnerabilities
Impeccable? Carreyrou's articles and eventual book are built largely off of the deep investigative work done by Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis and Dr. Eleftherios P. Diamandis and a listserv with thousands of participating doctors...who aren't mentioned in the book once...Similarly-omitted are Softbank/Fortress and their eventual patent-holding shell company Labrador Diagnostics LLC...
> Can someone explain why this relatively recent tweet fight is convincing evidence that Szabo is too ignorant to have been behind Bitcoin?
I’m a primary player in this sad saga. I can tell you that neither Szabo nor Back are Satoshi, as anyone who knows them would attest.
But to your question, all this does is make this “journalist” look dumb. The thing being discussed by Adam and Nick wasn’t wven proposed for bitcoin until 6 years after Satoshi disappeared.
> I can tell you that neither Szabo nor Back are Satoshi, as anyone who knows them would attest.
I'm sure you can tell us, and I'm sure you all will attest it, but is it true though?
You probably wouldn't "out" Satoshi if it was one of you working on anonymous payment systems on the mailing list, and it very obviously is - there were like ten people at most, if we're generous, who were working on what was at the time an extremely nice cryptography topic.
Which is fine I guess, bit the attestation doesn't mean much.
I co-founded a company with Adam Back. If he is Satoshi, I'd be pissed that we had to take money on really bad terms while he was sitting on billions. And I'd find it strange that I had to correct minor misconceptions about how bitcoin worked back in 2013/2014. That's all non-transferable evidence though that you just have to take, or not take at face value.
On the other hand, just go read Adam's twitter. Half the time it is incomprehensible word salad because Adam clearly still does not proof-read his communications. Yet Satoshi's emails and forum posts were always considered and well-crafted.
In any case, I have no stake in this. I don't even own bitcoin anymore. It's just frustrating to see people's lives continuously turned upside down for no reason other than to drive clicks towards the NYT, without even the most basic journalistic integrity.
I'm not one of those who thinks it's Adam Back, I believe it's Szabo - which means of course that I find your anecdotes perfectly convincing :)
And it seems also the thing you mention about taking money on bad terms should be independently verifiable, which the journalist writing this article should probably have checked.
I have trouble believing Satoshi would pursue a venture capital startup founder life in his personal life, assuming he didn't burn his wallets. I would find it a lot more likely that he pursued an academic career at his own tempo, writing a paper here and there, maybe teaching undergraduates even, etc. But that's a lot closer to my dream life, so maybe I'm biased there as well!
In 2014 I found myself having to explain the fundamental basis of bitcoin's economic model and Satoshi's contribution to ecash (that the value of proof-of-work is independent of the work it represents, something the cypherpunks consistently got wrong pre-bitcoin) to a non-comprehending Nick Szabo. It's not him.
Even if Nick Szabo didn't have anything to do with Bitcoin, I find it very unlikely that he wouldn't know about the core differences between his own system and Bitcoin by 2014.
That's a bit like a mathematician trying damn hard to prove something, proving it for most cases, and then be totally unaware of the proof six months later, relying on his own proof and proving it for all cases. That doesn't sound like it happens very often, especially not for heavily online academics.
Are you sure he wasn't just politely nodding along to the entrepreneur explaining his invention to him?
I think you have the roles backwards. He was the one explaining (at first) how bitcoin wouldn't scale -- couldn't scale -- because the generated value doesn't adjust with the difficulty, when in fact that is fundamental to why bitcoin DOES work and prior schemes did not.
Which is fine. Nick was only just starting to learn about bitcoin at this time. I didn't understand this until much after I was first exposed to bitcoin, tbh. Much of how bitcoin/crypto works, although we take it for granted now, was very non-obvious to people working on ecash-like systems at the time. Bitcoin basically violates every inviolable constraint that cypherpunks had put on digital money systems.
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").
It seems very unlikely to me. I've had personal correspondence with Satoshi, and met Adam Back in person, and I can't see it.
Actually I don't see how anyone involved with Blockstream could be identified as Satoshi. They never believed in what Satoshi was doing and built their whole company around the claim that Satoshi had screwed up the core of the system's design, despite that nothing about the design or its assumptions had changed. They spent years raising investor capital (why would you do that if you were rich?) specifically to build a system designed to replace Bitcoin for end users.
The last time I met Adam he was trying to convince me to not continue working on Satoshi's original design, and none of his arguments were technical. Satoshi had a totally different approach.
I have no idea about any of this stuff - but if I were trying to hide my identity I would go out of my way to misalign my real self with my hidden identity.
e.g. Pick a name that puts people on a false trail.
>why would you do that if you were rich?
Satoshi can't spend any of his bitcoins without tanking bitcoin's price. So Satoshi needs to find some other way to support himself. Creating bitcoin related companies is one way.
Nobody knows which coins Satoshi owns, it's just a guess for the very early coins and that guess gets progressively less accurate as time goes by. And this was a long time ago. There was no particular reason to think back then that Satoshi spending his coins would tank the price. Everyone back then was spending Bitcoins because that was the only way to build the economy. The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea when Blockstream killed Bitcoin as a genuine means of exchange and it became all about sitting on them as a speculative "investment".
But if he did want to spend he could just start from his last coins backwards.
This [1][2][3] seems to have a methodology for identifying Satoshi's coins, mined from 2009 to May 2010. But yes, for coins mined after May 2010, he likely can spend without scrutiny.
>The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea
Here are 2 people in 2013 expressing that idea: [4][5].
[1] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-...
[2] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/more-on-block-mining-history-...
[3] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/24/satoshi-s-fortune-a-more-accu...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5569077
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5569346
There's ambiguity here. When people talk about crashing the market they mean if he attempted to sell every last coin he owns for dollars all at once. Of course that would be a signal of lost confidence. What I mean is the more likely scenario of spending coins to achieve some specific goal or project.
He could tank the price to $1000 and still be a billionaire. There's a much more plausible reason for why Satoshi's coins haven't moved.
It would also seem likely that if he at any point was alive and realised he wouldn't be able to touch his original wallets, he'd still get in early enough to be rich from subsequently crested wallets nobody would suspect.
Who would realistically not want to cash out?
1. Someone so purely interested in the tech and not money they'd give up the wealth 2. Governments, specifically the ones that don't consider a few billion to be a lot 3. Someone who's dead
What's the much more plausible reason?
That the person is dead would be a pretty convincing one.
Or they just lost access.
Yep. Dead, lost access or in prison. I'm leaning towards dead.
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.
What struck me in particular was the fact the reporter noticed that Back had theorized how to evade stylometry. Obviously, if one of the people in question had specifically come up with ways to evade methods, you’d want to re-roll those methods to account for that.
That, alongside a number of other tidbits (Back’s activity and inactivity patterns lining up with Satoshi’s appearance and disappearance, his refusal to provide email metadata, his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law) makes the case a lot more meaningful than just “likely p-hacking.”
>his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law
I don't think you can attribute this to financial incentive. The actual Satoshi could forfeit 90% of their BTC and still have more than they could know what to do with.
At those kinds of levels I can see personal security being a higher consideration.
Either way it would give no indication who might be Satoshi because all candidates would have a similar incentive if they were Satoshi, and you are measuring the absence of information.
why does everybody assume that whoever is Satoshi still has access to their wallet? It's absolutely possible whoever is Satoshi has simply lost the key.
We're talking new technology where you're running fast and loose. It's absolutely possible, and I'd say a big reason why someone would not want to admit to being Satoshi.
I'm Satoshi, but I also lost billions because I messed up a Debian upgrade.
Further, no one would believe them, and they'd still endlessly be a target for criminals. No benefit to revealing any information beyond mild dismissals, IMO.
I commented elsewhere in this thread theorising that Satoshi could be the work of both Finney and Back. If that has any basis in reality, then it stands to reason that perhaps the wallet is locked away in a trust or at least legally unobtainable until certain conditions are met (e.g. Adam Back's passing). I can imagine a scenario in the future where a law firm makes a press release confirming they're in possession of Satoshi's wallet and have been instructed to liquidate and donate its proceeds.
> I'm Satoshi, but I also lost billions because I messed up a Debian upgrade.
That would be very funny. I used to own a whole bitcoin when it was worth nothing.Didn't think it would be ever worth anything and formatted my hard drive to change distro.
Or what if Satoshi deliberately destroyed their key?
The motivations behind Bitcoin were clear.
All the wealthy people I know don’t really do it for the money. The money is the gauge or the metric they use to judge how well they are playing the game but what motivates them is the love of the game and their sense of purpose.
If someone was to truly believe that Bitcoin was going to be a gold/USD/Eurodollar/swift etc. replacement then their metric of success isn’t money if they got in early.
It's entirely possible that Satoshi has deliberately destroyed the keys, but lost them? I doubt it. All these early cryptography guys were very conscious about keeping their keys secure, they discussed it endlessly.
For that wealth to mean anything he has to withdraw from it, and wouldn't that produce a paper trail?
Apologies if its mentioned in TFA, I only got halfway through it... the author's self-indulgence was getting to be a bit much
> The actual Satoshi could forfeit 90% of their BTC and still have more than they could know what to do with.
Ha, that may be technically true but when did you ever find a billionaire who would be OK with it?
Bill Gates is doing just that; to name one of many throughout recent history.
> What struck me in particular was the fact the reporter noticed that Back had theorized how to evade stylometry.
there are automated tools for this now that students use routinely so that their papers don't get flagged as AI whether they wrote it or not
there would be lots of people that looked this up as it has been discussed a lot on those same mailing lists before being so commonplace
Also Back’s response on X was very telling
The body language thing really bothers me.
Personally, if someone accuses me of lying, but I am actually telling the truth, I immediately start acting like a liar. It's really embarrassing and hard to explain. I can't believe such a seasoned reporter is leaning so hard on "his face went red."
What's also worth noting is that they were not alone in the room, talking privately. Everything being said could presumably be heard by Back's business associates as well. Some of the questions could well be enough to cause embarrassment or unease on that account.
It did make me think - if he seems nervous under this questioning, it could be because he's actually Satoshi. Or it could also be because he's thinking something like, oh god, if this jerkoff convinces a bunch of people I'm actually Satoshi, all of the businesses I've worked so hard to found will collapse, I might be convicted of crimes around lying about it while founding these businesses, I might get targeted by any number of criminal gangs or even nation-states who will do all kinds of torture to me and my loved ones and will never believe that I'm not actually Satoshi and don't really have a secret stash of a bazillion Bitcoins.
Naturally, this journalist doesn't seem to care much about any of that, or that it wouldn't really change anything at this point besides making the life of whoever it actually is hell.
Yea pretty similar idea to a polygraph test which for years was called a "lie detector."
In reality, they measure a bunch of things that may indicate lying, but they are just as likely to indicate that a person is nervous or reacting to the fact they're being tested at all.
They're typically inadmissible in court these days, however, there is still a pretty solid amount of blind trust in their results.
That part of the article gives a similar "lie detecting" hypothesis, just without the machine.
In fact, we are incredibly bad at telling lies from the body language of people we don't know well. Pretty much all the "well known" tells are sheer and utter bullshit that at best tells you if a person is stressed. That may or may not mean they are lying, but unless you know that person well enough to know if they have specific tells that correlates with lying for them, your odds are poor.
Just a shot in the dark but any chance you grew up in an intensely religious household?
I grew up evangelical and I've noticed this tendency in myself, and saw the connection to how the authorities at my school or church basically demanded dishonest performances or apologies under threat of physical punishment. Several friends over the years have said roughly the same, so I have an armchair theory this is pretty prevalent for that sort of childhood.
Same set of interests? Clearly Raph is Satoshi.
(Sorry, this was a joke, not a snipe.)
I actually think the most compelling evidence is the fact that he was one of the first people to get rich from it, which also explains why he never had to touch his vault of coins.
> 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.
It seems like this “journalist” speaks English. Guess who also spoke English? That’s exactly right, Satoshi did.
I heard through the grapevine that both Satoshi and Back were human beings. Coincidence? I think not. /s
Did you know Back had an interest in Japan? A rare and unusual trait within the cypherpunk community! /s
To me this was just the cherry on top though, there's a huge list of such correlations that seem wildly unsurprising.
All you need to know about this "quest": https://xcancel.com/austinhill/status/2041986130871251141
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.
Look at his comment here, then you will realize why it’s definitely Back. And why he certainly would never claim to be satoshi
https://xcancel.com/adam3us/status/2041816020776611935?s=46
I didn't realize anything. Everyone and their mother has been saying that about Satoshi since day one... Also, Adam would have infinitely more to gain from being Satoshi than from Satoshi remaining unknown. He's been trying to take credit for Bitcoin ever since he realized that Bitcoin was actually worth something (he initially dismissed it). All his actions point to someone who's largely motivated by financial gain whereas Satoshi hasn't touched a single of his 1M+ BTC.
If you're interested in serious research about Satoshi's identity, try this paper instead: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.10257
And your HN account was created right between the release of the white paper and Bitcoin 0.1. Coincidence? Are you Satoshi?!?
That’s about the level of investigative journalism performed by NYT here. Thanks for being sensible.
Maybe :) But seriously, Satoshi is most likely a relatively unknown dude. Why would you spend so much effort hiding your identity and then become a very public figure of the Bitcoin community?
I founded a company with Adam. He is not Satoshi. Neither is Szabo. Best not to speculate publicly as no good comes from it - not least of which there are organized crime rings targeting potential suspects for violent kidnapping or home invasion.
Not to be a jerk, but it'd be helpful for a reader to know how and why you came to that conclusion.
Not to be a jerk, but none of this is anybody's business.
As per the quotes, it could've been that he had read them, liked them and kept repeating them. However given other matching circumstances such as grammar this becomes unlikely. Also, this is just a single journalist; to know precisely this should be outsourced to a company doing forensics.
> The most plausible explanation is that Satoshi is either dead or incapacitated.
He could have lost the key and doesn't want to be a target or ridiculed. Happened to a lot of people.
> 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 read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims
The rest of the arguments is as weak:
1) both released open-source software
2) both don't like spam
3) both like using pseudonyms online
4) both love freedom
5) both are anti-copyright
etc.
Basically, the author found that Adam Back used the same words on X as Satoshi did in some emails (including such rare words as "dang," "backup," and "abandonware") and then decided to find every possible "link" they could to build the case, even if most of the links are along the lines of "Both are humans! Coincidence? I think not."
It's weird they spent so much time on the written word similarities, when the biggest reveal here is that Back disappears off the email lists (on a topic he is VERY interested in and has historically corresponded on) when Nakamoto appears, and then comes back when Nakamoto disappears.
This is one of the few real clues in this article, I would say.
Befitting a writer, though.
Yep, As fans of Larson's The Far Side, probably every American and Americo-phile computer geek and cypherpunk used 'dang'
Same goes for the rest of your list.
I use "dang" as a nod to Gary Larson.
TIL I am Satoshi.
That's the weak evidence. Nobody cares that they both like open source and freedom, half the cypherpunks list fits that.
The parts worth engaging with: Back described a system combining Hashcash and b-money with inflation adjustment and public timestamping on the cypherpunks list between 1997-1999. That's basically Bitcoin's architecture, a decade early. He was one of the most prolific digital cash posters for years, went silent when Satoshi appeared, came back when Satoshi left. And this person who independently arrived at the same technical design also independently landed on the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, and the same FDR gold ban trivia.
Any one of these is a coincidence. At some point you have to ask how many you need before the simpler explanation wins.
I remember having conversations with my brother about Hashcash at the time. There were plenty of nerds that followed that mailing list that had similar technical and political ideas, so I think you'd find a high number of coincidences within an audience that I'd guess was a small multiple of the number of people active on the cypherpunks list. There definitely were a lot of people at my brother's college discussing the same ideas.
FWIW my brother did his own bit of Satoshi hunting with coworkers at his hedge fund. They didn't come to a strong answer but my brother believed Nick Szabo was probably part of a group that helped edit the paper. He suspected Hal Finney was involved similarly at a minimum.
I agree with the parts worth engaging with. I hate when people weak-man arguments.
But interesting as this is, there are others who fit at least as well. That bit gold was the closest proposed scheme to Bitcoin is well known, and we know the proposer of bit gold (Szabo) was actively soliciting partners to help implement it as a real system right before Bitcoin appeared.
Also, people leave mailing lists and come back randomly months later all the time. Adam could have simply been unlucky, and busy with other projects at the time of the launch. Lots of people were, and kicked themselves for it (which honestly, it seems Adam did too!).
Adam Back is credited in the Bitcoin whitepaper as the inventor of Hashcash. W. Dai is credited as the inventor of b-money. But Nick Szabo is not credited as the inventor of bit gold, by far the most mature of these ideas floating around at the cipherpunks mailing list at the time. That's a conspicuous absence.
All of those similarities can be explained by Satoshi having read what Back wrote.
You need someone who read Back's obscure 1997-1999 cypherpunks posts about combining Hashcash and b-money, implemented exactly that system a decade later, independently came up with the same non-technical analogies and trivia, wrote with the same hyphenation errors, and then happened to be active during the exact window Back went silent. The more you flesh out the "someone who read Back" profile, the more it just sounds like Back.
Someone who has read his material would be likely to repeat the same analogies and trivia.
As for the hyphen errors, they are common for people for whom English is their second language. I commit hyphen errors similar to what is described all the time because English hyphenation makes absolutely no sense. In fact, reading the list of examples, the mistakes listed makes more sense to me than the correct way of writing those.
I also switch back and forth on a lot of the phrases the article mentions.
I also switch back and forth between US and UK spelling, because I learned UK spelling at school, but was far more exposed to US spelling in practice.
This seems to me to be exceedingly weak.
As a Swede I also do all of these things. And it doesn't feel like anything special, I imagine hundreds of thousands of people do the same.
Yeah, I'm Norwegian, and maybe the Scandinavian languages makes us extra likely to make those mistakes, but overall English hyphen rules to a large extent boils down to feels. Words "graduate" to hyphens over time as and when they start to become seen as a unit, and then sometimes eventually fuse into words. E-mail to email is one of those. And that pipeline is also not uniform geographically so different English speakers will disagree about what should have hyphens where and when...
At some point "Satoshi was a devoted reader of obscure 1997 Adam Back mailing list posts who shares his hyphenation errors, his Napster vs Gnutella analogy, his celebrity email filtering idea, his FDR gold ban interest, his 'burning the money' metaphor, his 'Achilles heel' description of DigiCash, his 'better with code than words' self-assessment, his energy-vs-banking defense, his British spellings mixed with American ones, his double-spacing habit, his it's/its confusion, his sentence-final 'also' tic, his 'proof-of-work' hyphenation, his WebMoney references, and who went active the exact week Back went silent" is just a longer way of saying it's Adam Back.
I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's what I came up with after challenging myself to read the article in toto again and note 1 by 1.
It's clear it's beyond a couple tics everyone has, and when you combine that with the starting set being ~500 instead of "all 8 billion people on earth", well, it's worth mentioning.
Your entire first paragraph boils down to me as someone who admired Adam Back and who may or may not have English as a second language, coupled with the one additional coincidence of when he was around.
In terms of language, I don't agree it's beyond a couple of tics everyone has at all. I also don't agree with the assumption that the starting set is ~500.
It's of course possible that it is Adam Back, but I don't find the purported evidence remotely compelling as a way of showing that it is.
Where does your 500 come from? Why can't Satoshi be someone who simply had no deanonymized online presence?
This article is a great example of "strong + weak = weak".
I only made it to the interesting stuff because of Carreyou's name, otherwise I would have stopped.
The email timing and lack of email metadata were also strong, in my opinion. But all of this nonsense like "Wow, these guys both talk about PGP??" distracts from it.
It's been extremely widely known that whoever created Bitcoin had a strong interest in Hashcash, and perhaps created that or worked on it, for years and years. If that's the only smoking gun, why didn't we identify Satoshi long ago?
You're right, "interested in Hashcash" describes dozens of people, and has been a known Satoshi filter for years.
The new claim is more specific: between 1997-1999, Back proposed combining Hashcash with b-money, adding inflation adjustment via increasing computational difficulty, and using hash trees for public timestamping.
That's most of Bitcoin's architecture in one package, a decade early.
The number of people who proposed that particular combination of ideas is much smaller than the number who were merely interested in Hashcash.
In every parallel universe where a different person invents bitcoin, every single one is familiar with becks ideas from a decade earlier.
I think this misses the point. The point is that interests and writing style matches, which means there's a higher chance they are the same person.
The more similarities you find, the closer the match. It's in no way proof, of course. But it does provide good reason to look closer
Only if those similarities are indicating more than 'generic internet hacker' for both of them. You only need 23 bits to identify a person but those are 23 uncorrelated bits, and all the 'similarities' presented here are extremely strongly correlated with themselves.
Where are you getting 23 from? That's only 8-ish million values max.
Suspect it's a typo. 33, not 23, gives ~8.6*10^9.
D'oh, yeah.
Probably used logn not log2.
The interests and writing style differentiate Mr. (Dr.?) Back from the general public, sure. But from what I’m reading, they don’t do a great job of distinguishing between 90s hackers.
“Get this, his PhD thesis dealt with a computer language called C++, just like Bitcoin papers used” seems both confused and impossibly lazy to me.
> “Scrap patents and copyright,” Mr. Back wrote in September 1997.
> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license
Really?
Like saying “get this, his college-aged musical interests included the Urban American musical style known as ‘Hip Hop’; therefore Tupac didn’t really die and this is him.” Heavy on insinuation, light on seriousness. Strong “…you’re not from around here, are you?” vibes.
What does this kind of journalism hope to accomplish, anyway? Beyond bothering middle-aged nerds for gossip? And providing a frame for the author’s cute little sleuth jape?
“Good reason to look closer” assumes there’s good reason to pick through ancient rubble in the first place.
Did you read most of the article or what?
All 12,000 words. Kept expecting it to take a turn toward something beyond pre-judgment and insinuation. Instead it unfolded as a cautionary tale, of the power of a premature conclusion to close an investigator’s mind to reasonable alternative possibilities. About escalating commitment to an early hunch, even as it leads you down an investigative dead end.
For example it sure seems like his mountain of circumstantial evidence fits better with the theory that “Satoshi” could be a pen name for a small group of people—maybe even the small group whose history he traces and whose styles he has trouble teasing apart—rather than one “suspect” (as he calls it). But we don’t even really weigh that possibility seriously.
So, like—why are we coming at this one guy by name and spooky hacker photo in the New York Times, with the suggestion that he has $110 billion under his mattress? All these speculations and arguments have been done over and over—what does this reporting add that’s worth 12,000 words?
The colorful journey down a dead end, fine—but leave it at “My Quest,” don’t do the weasel subhed “the trail of clues […] led to Adam Back” to insinuate that it proved what it set out to prove. Or even added anything significant to the well-trodden record.
Similarities in style and word were common enough in small circles such as the cyphyrpunks that spawned those discussions.
Then there's not altogether unlikely chance that Satoshi is a nodding homage to Nicolas Bourbaki, each contributor holding part of a multiparty voting key.
I don't blame you for this initial reaction, which would have been mine too had I not known who the author was. I don't mean that I automatically trust anything published by the reporter who busted Theranos (and won two Pulitzers for other major investigations). But I do mean that if John Carreyrou and his editors decided to publish something this long, that means they (and they're lawyers) are willing to die on this hill, no matter how meandering the first paragraphs of his 1st-person narrative.
Since the story doesn't end with: "And then Adam Back bowed his head and said, 'You have found me, Satoshi'", I'm guessing they preferred to go for the softer "how we did this story" first-person narrative. There is no explicit smoking gun, like an official document or eyewitness who asserts Satoshi's identity. But the circumstantial and technical evidence is quite thorough, to the point where the most likeliest conclusions are:
1. Adam Back is Satoshi
2. Satoshi is someone who is either a close friend or frenemy of Back, and deliberately chose to leave a obfuscated trail that correlates with Back's persona and personal timeline.
If Mr Carreyrou is such a good writer then he should be embarrassed to publish trash:
> In keeping with this belief, Mr. Back made his Hashcash spam-throttling software open source.
> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license, which allowed anyone to use, modify and distribute it without restrictions.
The numerous observations such as this only seem impressive to people who don't know anything at all about the subject. Occam's Razor suggests that the reason that such irrelevant observations were included is because Carreyrou doesn't know anything at all about the subject.
> When we compared those errors with the writings of our hundreds of suspects, 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 article does not improve.
wrt (2) that is if satoshi had the foresight btc would ever blow up in the way it did. obviously, he had some intuition, remaining anonymous, but deliberately creating a fake trail does not seem super plausible to me
I got about two sentences further, it turns out another smoking gun is Mr. Back using c++ in his graduate studies, just like the original bitcoin implementation.
Yeah, based on the list of interests, I guess I've been Satoshi all this time and didn't know it. A shame my memory must have been wiped as I'd quite like all of those bitcoins.
All of us "olds" had this as a hobby. Or used it regularly.
Just a bunch of weird stuff in this article.
I quit here too. This article is an embarrassment that should never have passed the editorial process.
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 Hardy-Littlewood comparison cuts the other way. Two collaborators in the same subfield sharing terminology is the baseline, not evidence of anything. What makes the Back case interesting is convergence on things that have nothing to do with cryptography: the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, the same obscure FDR gold ban interest, the same weird hyphenation errors. Pick any two cypherpunks at random and you won't find that kind of overlap on non-technical quirks.
Then add the negative space. Back was one of the most prolific voices on these lists for a decade, especially on digital cash. Satoshi shows up, Back goes quiet. Satoshi leaves, Back comes back. Hardy and Littlewood never had that problem.
>the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, the same obscure FDR gold ban interest, the same weird hyphenation errors
Dunno it assumes their cypherpunk group must always discuss strictly cryptography and never discuss anything else. It could be just some off-topic ideas floating around in their community.
For me, the only solid, damning evidence would be statistical methods of text analysis like they do to prove authenticity of a literary work.
> Pick any two cypherpunks at random and you won't find that kind of overlap on non-technical quirks.
That could be a valid methodology if you pre-registered the list of quirks before doing the investigation.
But in this case the journalist clearly didn't do that, but tweaked the set of quirks until they produced the desired outcome.
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
I had always assumed that all of them shared the pseudonym of Satoshi, along with Nick Szabo.
Back wrote the white paper with input from Hal and Nick Szabo. Sassaman did the coding work on the client. Sassaman had the keys to the Satoshi wallet, hence it never moving since his passing.
Since Satoshi is a collective, it means that each of them individually can claim, without lying, that they're not Satoshi.
That's my uninformed guess.
You could game theory this out forever. Maybe he put his name in there because people like you would only use first order logic and conclude that it wasn't him because it would be crazy to "hide in plain site".
I always had Adam Back as my main candidate because HashCash somehow had the same energy and thought to it. But I have no concrete reason to believe it was him.
So clearly I cannot choose the wine in front of me!
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.
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.
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?
> Can I just ask why people are so fixated on revealing Satoshi's identity?
Probably the same reason people remain interested in the identity of Jack the Ripper, despite over 130 years having passed.
See also, DB Cooper and who stole the FIFA World Cup.
Nothing wrong with a good mystery.
I'm curious about his life, in the same way I might read a biography or the Early Life section on a Wikipedia page.
Some people like mysteries.
What I'm saying is that the overall amount of effort being spent on this isn't very proportional to sheer curiosity. Curious people may go out of their way to do something difficult, but years-long research campaigns with a single person in the crosshair feel like a step too far. Not even the perpetrators of famous unsolved crimes receive this much scrutiny. I don't doubt there's many people in the mix who are just curious about this, like you are, but I feel like people who spend months of their lives on this could be trying to get at something bigger. Maybe hurting him or trying to profit off of the knowledge somehow, or even just becoming famous for being the person who found Satoshi Nakamoto.
> Not even the perpetrators of famous unsolved crimes receive this much scrutiny.
The zodiac killer still has an active subreddit! https://old.reddit.com/r/ZodiacKiller/
> Maybe hurting him or trying to profit off of the knowledge somehow, or even just becoming famous for being the person who found Satoshi Nakamoto.
Yeah, there's likely some pride/ego involved, and sadly trying to hurt the person most responsible for cryptocurrency.
So am I. I presume I can read if after he passes away, if I am still around. Otherwise I am content to respect people's wishes for anonymity and privacy, as there are plenty of other interesting things to learn about.
I agree. I'm interested, but think Satoshi should keep his anonymity.
I was articulating why someone might want to know, as tavavex asked.
It's a silly topic to spend (waste) time on, but I can't help it, I just find it sort of fascinating.
It's a mystery where you have to try and put together different pieces of evidence, match things up, try and look for hidden connections - a certain type of human mind (mine, I guess) just finds that process rewarding.
I've gone down most of these rabbit holes and my 2c is it's one of these two people, not any of the most common candidates: Len Sassaman or Paul Le Roux.
Sassaman is dead and Le Roux is in federal prison in the US, which explains why the coins haven't moved
There are some legitimate reasons. First one: a government-backed operation that can have even deeper conspiracies. The second most important one is Bitcoin's long-term stability. If people figure out who created it, they can also predict what kind of major crashes can happen, especially Satoshi's wallet with million+ bitcoins used one day.
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.
The fact that both knew that C++ is a programming language at all, must suffice as evidence, at least for the purposes of this Article. Weirdly a real divergence from the Theranos reporting, which on top of that, also was absolutely in the public interest as it affected both the health of patients and was on actual fraud. Here it it exposure for exposure sake and not well reasoned to boot.
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.
I haven't read the article yet but I remember this as well. IIRC Adam went the route of more towards a centralized group controlling Bitcoin's future during the BTC/BCH debates/fork. It seemed against what Satoshi would have pushed for. Plus Adam's group seemed like a catalyst for Gavin stepping back as a result of the political in-fighting and mud-slinging. It would be a huge surprise if Satoshi were Adam.
Personally, I think Satoshi was Hal Finney.
Adding on now that I've read the article and this situation is covered:
> The following year, in 2015, the Bitcoin community fractured over a proposal to increase Bitcoin’s block size. A faction led by two Bitcoin developers, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, wanted to make the blocks much bigger to accommodate more transactions. But this was controversial...
> Mr. Back fiercely opposed increasing the block size. In a series of posts on the Bitcoin-dev list, he warned against Mr. Andresen and Mr. Hearn’s proposal in increasingly strident tones.
> Then, out of the blue, Satoshi appeared on the list with an email that neatly dovetailed with Mr. Back’s position. It was the first time Satoshi had been heard from in more than four years, other than a five-word post the previous year denying a Newsweek article’s claim to have unmasked him.
> Many in the Bitcoin community questioned the new email’s authenticity since another of Satoshi’s email accounts had been hacked. But Mr. Back argued that the email sounded real. In a series of tweets, he called Satoshi’s observations “spot on” and “consistent with Satoshi views IMO” and took to quoting from the email.
I now realize that the Satoshi email was after Hal Finney's death so that changes my opinion.
From OP:
> Satoshi supported big blocks in his writings and empowered the pro-big block Gavin when he disappeared
This isn't correct. In fact, the linked email in the article says the opposite https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/6EC9DDF352DC4838AE9B088AB37...
It helps to understand the context at the time.
The small block faction, of which Adam was absolutely one of the ring leaders, were willing to do literally anything to win. They were and still are collectivist totalitarians. Above it was described as a debate, but it wasn't, it was more like a war. Amongst other things, the small block faction:
• Launched botnet attacks on any node or company that expressed support for big blocks. They took Coinbase offline, they took any mining pool offline for merely allowing users to vote for big blocks. They took out entire datacenters because it hosted a single node expressing support for bigger blocks in its version handshake. One of these attacks was big enough to take out the internet for an entire rural ISP.
• Constantly lied about everyone who was working on bigger blocks. I've actually met people who said they didn't trust me because I worked for British intelligence. I've never worked for British intelligence!
• They wrote a tool to fuck with the vote we were trying to run. Back was fully in support of such tactics: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3hb63g/bip_suggest...
• They constantly manipulated people, promising them they'd work on a compromise solution whilst actually refusing to do so and organizing conferences with rules like "nobody is allowed to discuss solutions to the problem" or "nobody is allowed to make written notes".
... and more. I don't recall Adam expressing any opposition to these acts or trying to stop them. Frequently he was directly engaged in them (not sure who was behind the DDoS attacks, but none of the Blockstreamers publicly asked them to stop).
Satoshi's account had been hacked at that time, and one of the main arguments for raising the block size was simply that it wasn't controversial at all - it was in fact the planned roadmap for Bitcoin from day one, that everyone had signed up to and that Satoshi had discussed. Given their willingness to lie to everyone else and use outright illegal tactics to win, would a small blocker have forged an email from Satoshi? Absolutely they would, which is why nobody cared about it and it made no difference. Especially as that email inexplicably refuted a position Satoshi had repeatedly defended for years, without explanation.
>> Satoshi supported big blocks in his writings and empowered the pro-big block Gavin when he disappeared
>
> This isn't correct. In fact, the linked email in the article says the opposite
Characterizing the arguments are big vs small blocks, seems wrong.
There appeared to be broad agreement that the block size needed to be increased, however there were 4 competing proposed solutions(BIP 100, 101, 102, 103), and consensus on which approach to take could not be reached.
Gavin decided to push ahead with BIP 101, and both Satoshi and Adam agreed that it was reckless to proceed without better consensus.
I have no real interest in this chat, but a quick google makes me agree that Hal Finney was very likely Satoshi. Fits my expectations perfectly and would also explain why it’s a “mystery”, ie some people know but agreed not to reveal it as per Hal or family wishes given their targeting by criminals in the past. Extremely plausible.
I think Back reacts the way he does when being asked if he is the creator of BTC is that he knows it was Finney, and the key is gone.
It can’t be Finney because there was an entire send reply send reply sequence that was while Finney was in a marathon race between Satoshi and others which could not have been scripted.
The case for Jack Dorsey is much stronger than the Back claim.
Doesn’t this fierce debate exist because people cannot agree what Satoshi would have written had he known Bitcoin would take off in such a massive way, versus what Satoshi believed back when bitcoin was just a paper? If it actually is the case that Adam Back is Satoshi, we shouldn’t find it surprising that Back’s views on bitcoin changed as bitcoin’s viability and real world impact changed
Exactly. Adam is also very emotional when he writes, and Satoshi was nothing like it.
> 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.
From the article:
It also happened to be densely cited with hyperlinks:https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/6EC9DDF352DC4838AE9B088AB37...
https://x.com/adam3us/status/632928398893907968
https://x.com/adam3us/status/632650884011458560
https://x.com/adam3us/status/632923680104841220
https://x.com/adam3us/status/632919411112849410
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CALqxMTHfU5+1ezP-Jnn5obpd62...
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CALqxMTGBt7MNs5YWf8QzKe+4Fr...
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CALqxMTFC7zBN9GvHAZLQj4SbXj...
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CALqxMTFu6DRVMSLsGDa6AgVX1X...
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CALqxMTG7+MMN50VH9-Y++B1_De...
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CALqxMTGCkTZAs74bXk57L6JWK2...
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CALqxMTH_5rtOs=aSNiVrfsG_sq...
Did you miss the part where Satoshi came to Adam's rescue, to thwart big blocks?
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/6EC9DDF352DC4838AE9B088AB37...
satoshi: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=show...
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.
1. I do something similar quite frequently in informal contexts, and have to catch myself before posting such text to more formal settings. If Satoshi was as aware of stylometry as the article claims, it stands to reason that he would edit those out of his writing. The article is clear that Satoshi’s writing is generally more concise than Beck’s, which may have been highly intentional; parenthetical sentences are generally the opposite of concise (they’re often used to go on a tangent or ramble, etc.).
2. Similar to 1 - a quirk that is easily caught by editing, if your goal is to sound more refined and precise. Academics know it’s i.e/e.g but the dots may get omitted when writing quickly.
3. Interesting observation. That’s a fairly stark difference! Are there other posters who do not use “nor”? If Satoshi doesn’t use “nor”, does he use a grammatically incorrect alternative, or are his sentences just structured to avoid it?
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.
The thing is, most of the people heavily involved in early Bitcoin are fairly characterized as cryptoanarchists, a group strongly devoted to the principle of privacy and liberty effected through technological means.
The refusal to provide personal communications metadata by such a person is evidence of nothing but their steadfast commitment to the philosophy that presented them with the opportunity to be part of those email conversations in the first place.
Then again, if I weren't Satoshi, but people suspected that I was, I'd be willing to do just about anything to prove that it's not me. No one in their right mind would want that kind of target on their back.
Satoshi is either dead, or he lost his keys and probably wishes he were.
Handing over email metadata, or whatever your interrogator wants from you, will only cause them to shift the goalposts, or find something they want to find in the metadata even if it exonerates you.
There is no reason to cooperate with journalists with a slant.
I tend to agree with you, to be honest. Seems fairly clear that Carreyrou was going to conclude that Back is Satoshi, come hell or high water.
Kind of a disappointing piece of work from the guy who took down Theranos. His journalistic talents are sorely needed elsewhere right now.
Supposing it is Adam Back, and supposing he lost his keys, he's still worth at least nine figures and is one of the most influential figures in the field he’s devoted his life to. Why would he wish he was dead?
"Nine figures isn't cool. You know what's cool? Eleven figures."
That aside, I don't agree with the premise. Back might be Satoshi, but there's nowhere near enough evidence in Carreyrou's article to reach that conclusion. He should have run it by some other veteran figures in the crypto community, so they could point out how quotidian some of the language and tropes being cited really are.
it’s simply that Back has nothing to gain to claim to be Satoshi. It would make bitcoin a lot more volatile. He even said just now
> 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.
That’s as close to admitting it as you can get
Point being, he has a lot to lose if people think he IS Satoshi.
I would be coughing up those email headers if I were him. Or forging some, if necessary.
Or he wants you to believe he is Satoshi, without being a complete moron, like Craig Wright. Back stands to benefit from this, because he still has money on Bitcoin ventures (Blockstream). If people believe that he is Satoshi, he would still find investors backing him.
>There's literally no reason whatsoever to hide the metadata unless he is the one.
privacy?
Time? He´s busy starting a company, taking the time to drag out decade old emails and digging out the meta data for a journalist who is borderline stalking (assuming he even has them somewhere). I wouldn´t give that the time of day either.
If privacy were such a big concern, then why did he release the messages (without metadata) in the first place? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to keep the messages completely private?
What would it show? If he logged in to Santoshi's email account and sent an email to his personal account, the metadata would be in order, and we would learn little from it.
You have it backwards. The fact that he doesn't release the metadata is interesting. If he had released the metadata, it would be wholly uninteresting.
I don't think the emails exist. What was published in court records, lacking metadata, could easily be forged. The metadata is harder to forge. Not impossible, but harder, especially long after the fact.
The author didn't make a serious effort to obtain the email metadata. The email w/ metadata has previously been part of litigation, -- if it indicated that Adam was Satoshi it would have come up.
Adam has no reason to further fuck up Satoshi's privacy by sharing private information. But I can get how people who see no issue invading Adam's and Satoshi's privacy would have no concept as to why someone wouldn't publish it.
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.
Chances are the key to those is simply lost forever.
If you've ever seen Back's twitter you would know he's not Satoshi. I'm still firmly in the Finney camp.
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.
I’m also in the Finney camp.
The most important bit to me is that doing something like this would be entirely in-line with his personality.
Also, I think he truly believed there was a good chance he’d eventually be brought back. The most likely case in my mind is that he died with the private keys in his head, and that we’ll never get confirmation.
So I just searched the article for Finney to see why it claimed it wasn't him. It claims Satoshi was active after Finney had died?
What's that about? I used to be of the opinion that it was probably hal, but haven't paid too much attention. What's the counter evidence here? And why do we disregard that?
Satoshi's email accounts were presumably hacked in 2014 and the emails sent from them later were presumed fake because they lacked PGP signatures.
Do you have a link for Satoshi's post after Hal had died?
It's literally in TFA.
Thanks, admittedly, I hadn't read the article at the time.
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.
> mailing lists were large group emails in old typewriter font
lol
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.
Its a good story but it sorta seems like the author decided on Adam Back then was working backwards to prove it by the end
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
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 comment rings true to me as someone who contemporaneously read Satoshi's posts (not from the very beginning but on bitcointalk.org). People are underestimating how difficult (and probably pointless) it is to create and maintain a whole personality in aid of subterfuge. There are so many other easier and less risky ways to achieve the same goal than to adopt a consistent persona that's far from your own; you could, for example, release the code with one anonymous paper and then disappear completely, and then create three or four random new personas as needed to push it along publicly. That's more plausible (and less work) than sustaining a "Satoshi" with a very different personal style from yourself and then also, as it happens, speculatively fashioning fake email conversations with yourself, years in advance, in order to throw people off the scent in the future.
Among people who try to guess Satoshi's identity, there is also a surprising bias toward fame or at least well-known people. There is literally zero reason to think that Bitcoin came from a person anyone had heard of or has heard of since. It's a big world. Many (most?) interesting and novel open-source contributions, hash algorithms, cipher algorithms, key-exchange protocols, and so on come from previously unknown figures. Pick any random open-source project and try to guess who created it as if you didn't know; most people wouldn't do a good job, and thinking "oh, it has something in common with Twitter so it must have been Jack Dorsey" would have a terrible success rate. And, as it happens, well-known people tend to like fame and don't try to stay anonymous.
I could name hundreds of smart, experienced, and relatively unknown tech-company employees, professors, and open-source contributors who would have all the necessary broad skills to have written Bitcoin. It's not that rare. The contribution itself is rare but that's like lightning; the insight of invention strikes unpredictably. Assembling high-level systems that use cryptography isn't something that requires that you post to mailing lists or message boards of cryptography enthusiasts. And even if that weren't true, there are hundreds of useful, moderately used cryptosystems that most people haven't heard of and that would never make the radar of a NYT author who (evidently) thinks it's a coincidence that two different cryptosystems might use asymmetric ciphers.
The NYT article boils down to "I had a hunch from this person's body language and, out of a community of a few hundred identified figures, I found a methodology to confirm that it was him." It's a hair better than that and honest with regard to some of its own limitations, but in the end it's no more convincing than that. The upshot is that there's some circumstantial evidence in favor of a particular person, although there's significant circumstantial evidence in the other direction too. It's astonishing to me that the NYT published this piece.
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.
My money's on Hal.
Hal was likely part of the Satoshi team — even receiving the first ever bitcoin transaction (on the main blockchain).
Hopefully his children got to open extremely rewarding bankboxes, after his death (whether or not containing bitcoin — but likely so). If it were myself, I'd also keep quiet about such a miracle.
For my own meager holdings, I'll keep waiting (over a decade strong HODL, now).
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.
Also whether he primarily used Windows as Satoshi seems to have done - Back feels like more of a GNU/Linux kind of guy, but I could be wrong
I can’t get past the fact that Hal Finney lived around the corner from someone called “ Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto”
I know coincidences happen but that’s one hell of a coincidence
Yeah this one seems absolutely insane, how many Satoshi Nakamotos are there in the world? It's very plausible to see the name on a mailbox (or meet the person) and think "that'd be a cool handle." And it's so wildly improbable that someone else would make up exactly the name of a neighbor of one of a small clique of obscure internet cypherpunks. It's not like the name was "John Smith" or anything.
But I don't know how to square that with the "Finney was running a marathon while satoshi sent emails" claim.
Given Back and Finney's close-ish relationship, that same fact could have permeated to Back, and would be a further reason for him to use the name. That said, it's all pure speculation so :shrug:?.
Is it a coincidence? Or is it really bad opsec from someone who was otherwise pretty good at it? Or was it really good opsec and someone wanted to plant little clues that it was finney?
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.
So... who is Satoshi?
Barely Sociable already explained it 5 years ago:
https://youtu.be/XfcvX0P1b5g
If people want rabbit holes
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The article literally mentions that in the beginning
tl;dw?
> "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"
After reading the article, my first thought was it is both Finney and Back posting under Satoshi. Others may have been involved too but not necessarily posting.
Congrats to the author citing a troll on a Vistomail account anyone could re-register when AnonymousSpeech was around.
Here's my armchair two cents: Whoever it is, has to be British. The language is unmistakeably British or Commonwealth. It's likely him. I'd wager if there was a polymarket bet. But I also feel for him. Does this make him a target for both half-wit criminials and rogue nation states?
This is notable as it argues against a lot of the candidates who are American, but I would say this is relatively easy to fake if you were privacy minded.
It would be somewhat harder the other way (American pretending to be British) as American English is much more prominent, but I think I could convincingly pretend to be American in text if necessary if I was only participating in generally technical discussions (and nobody asked me about cultural stuff like NFL etc.)
This article is kinda bogwater. Repeating the same points, writing as if it were LinkedIn, pretending to be technically competent while obviously not. Over and over and over, reiterating the same points but ultimately getting nowhere.
Changing requirements ad-hoc throughout the article, picking and choosing ideal matches rather than objective ones, etc. basically trying to make the data fit the problem by force.
Author, over time, gets more desperate to be "the one that found Satoshi" and loses the plot entirely.
I mean, what the hell is this bullshit?
""" Adam Back: I did a lot of talking though for somebody, I mean … I mean, I’m not saying I’m good with words but I sure did a lot of yakking on these lists actually.
To my ears, it sounded like he was saying that for someone who preferred code over words, he sure had written a lot of words. Implicit in that was an acknowledgment that he had been the one who wrote the quote. In other words, for a few seconds, Mr. Back had let the mask fall and turned into Satoshi. """
Not directly related but still interesting. The fellow who came up with the ide for the Architectural Uprisings we have seen around the world, is still anonymous.
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
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.
He was already the CEO of a billion dollar company and the article describes him traveling with security.
Yet another example of how the article failed to do basic research.
Blockstream is mentioned multiple times, as is Back's wealth;
> It was the beginning of an era in which Mr. Back quickly amassed influence and became a ring leader in the still small Bitcoin community. To staff Blockstream, he poached the top Bitcoin Core developers from their day jobs at companies like Google and Mozilla, giving him tremendous sway over the digital currency. He also became very wealthy: Over the next dozen years, Blockstream and its affiliates would raise $1 billion in funding and Blockstream would reach a valuation of $3.2 billion.
I haven't seen this question answered anywhere.
Why would anyone use bitcoin if the world's factory ie China wants gold as payments?
Even pro Bitcoin people like Balaji and Lyn Alden haven't answered this structural question. There exists market for what counts as money. If that market (led by China) says we don't accept Bitcoin, then these are just some random numbers.
China probably doesn’t accept Dominican pesos, either, and yet you’d be hard pressed to say that somebody with 100 billion Dominican pesos just has some random numbers. If you can exchange something for another form of value, then it has value. I think the trouble here is that there’s just nobody out there who would actually give you $100 billion worth of value for this particular asset. At least not as a lump sum.
https://archive.is/iRBng
thank you!
Do we think CIA/NSA/FBI know who is Satoshi? Maybe not all of them, but someone in the government has to know, no?
Aba wouldn't have said: "Send X bitcoins to my priority hotline at this IP and I’ll read the message personally."
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.
Particularly I believe that Satoshi Nakamoto is a nation-state who created Bitcoin to bypass sanctions. Simple as that.
I tend to think this, too. Or rather a small group of cryptographers working for a nation-state. It's the only way to make sense of the fact that Satoshi is enormously wealthy. I don't think any individual could sit on this kind of wealth and not cash out visibly.
I tend to agree, but for the sake of argument: it’s possible that he’s such a true believer that he’d see cashing out as a betrayal. Alternatively, he might understand that cashing out would significantly aid the (clearly large number of) people engaged in unmasking him. Further, he may simply realize that liquidating holdings of his size would drastically alter the market in ways that could end with the whole thing coming apart.
Satoshi may also be unable to cash out simply because they are dead.
Keep in mind that he could not have cashed out his tokens in the early days without destroying the whole project and by the time btc was valuable and liquid enough for him to sell, he would have already been wealthy from blockstream (if this is really him) and wouldn’t need the money. What would he do with it? buy gold, real estate, tbills? What asset would he ever put the money into that he would think is better than bitcoin?
I've subscribed to the nation-state theory as well, but intentions unknown.
It was the CIA and anyone who aren't starry eyed tech dorks has known this forever
The skills would be at the NSA for this project
Occam's razor in this case is most likely true
Isn't occam's razor that he's just some guy who doesn't like being famous
this and the recent banksy 'umasking' by major news outlets is sad in our era of huge US governmental crimes and coverups.
Should we believe that intelligence agencies like CIA or FBI doesn't know her/him?
Would be darkly hilarious if Santoshi lost his wallet long ago…
I’ve certainly lost a lot of the small scripts and utilities I wrote long ago. Can’t remember any usernames, much less passwords, from 20 years ago…
Believe it or not, but the answer is revealed in this videogame: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
Spoiler: it's not Adam Back!
> 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.
> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.
Dr Watson at work. Facepalm
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.
> No one in the cipherpunks mailing list thought any of this was odd, probably because it was obvious to them who Satoshi was.
If dozens of people affiliated on a mailing list knew that Sbazo was Satoshi is a decade ago, would’t his identity be treated as an open secret by now?
I think a lot of people in the know assume it's Szabo but are happy to let the waters be muddy to give some privacy.
Exactly my thoughts down to the indictment of the thought process of a top investigative journalist. The amount of tunnel vision here, that dismisses Szabo based on a tweet of wanting to understand developments in core 10 years later? In all this writing, there's not a hint of investigation into every damning link to Szabo, including the IP leak which was simply dismissed as "dead end". Carreyrou is flying across the world to finally get a weak slip in speech he thinks finally implicates Back, meanwhile Szabo already slipped up in speech years ago for anyone to find.
Incredible gell-mann reminder for reporting...
> In contrast to a certain convicted Australian fraudster who got caught trying to backdate his statements,
Who?
This embarrassing wanker
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-28/craig-wright-not-sato...
Szabo is definitely top 3 candidates or on team
Nick Szabo doesn't know how to program enough to deliver the original bitcoin source code.
We know he - Szabo, whether Satoshi or not - asked for help in realizing something a lot like Bitcoin, a short time before Bitcoin appeared. I don't rule out that he could have had some help with the coding.
But I've also not seen anything suggesting he wasn't good enough of a coder to make it himself. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science.
He probably worked with Finney who helped out.
This is the most compelling "who is Satoshi?" post I've found:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=628344.msg48198887#m...
"I contend that James Simons put the team together that made up Satoshi Nakamoto and that Nick Szabo was the main public-facing voice behind the nym."
Why would he do that surreptitiously, instead of just being clear that they were working on it? Why wouldn't they cash in the million or so bitcoins that were pre-mined? How did they get the whole team to communicate in a unified style? How did they get everyone to stay quiet after Bitcoin took off?
This was a fun article, but also an oddball collection of strong and weak claims.
Some of the "isn't it interesting ..." type coincidences would, as people on this forum would know, be commonplace among the subculture or even just technologists, and often lack the comparison to the overall Cypherpunk corpus - for example: no, studying public-key cryptography in grad school certainly isn't a high-signal differentiating tell for Satoshi-ness.
For some he does provide that though, and they're certainly compelling.
What I like best about the Back attribution is that it totally makes sense in context of my operating model of humans and passes the Occam's Razor test: Still actively involved, interested in the governance, interested in acclaim/prestige, built up wealth masking his other wealth, etc. Ego and "Tell me you're Satoshi without telling me you're Satoshi" written all over it.
Interesting: my Occam's Razor test is "$100B sitting around untouched, how can that be?" Well, simplest answer is that satoshi is dead.
When did Satoshi make an appearance in 2015? I couldn't find the spot in the article where the author cites it. Everywhere I've read it states his last interactions were 2010, and his wallet hasn't been touched since then either.
Based on everything I've read, I think Satoshi is Len Sassaman
Here it is:
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/6EC9DDF352DC4838AE9B088AB37...
Satoshi came to Adam's rescue when it seemed like Adam is going to fail to prevent the fork.
Search for this section:
> Then, out of the blue, Satoshi appeared on the list with an email that neatly dovetailed with Mr. Back’s position
Satoshi is the guy with the PhD in distributed computing who took a sabbatical during which bitcoin was published.
Len Sassaman?
Bad science, -- article contains a litany of points that are true for many other people (myself)-- and a number of the bits of I have personal experience with are just flatly untrue or misleading, e.g. citing Back's name at the top of a paper I coauthored as evidence of his importance to it, -- the names were alphabetic. Not that it was an important point, but I think failing to notice the names being alphabetic and including it speaks to the bar being held to the other 'evidence' there.
That said-- I guess credit goes for naming someone who is essentially credible in the sense that they had the relevant interests and aptitudes, a lot of the journalists writing on this stuff have picked ludicrous names out of a hat. But so did a lot of other people. And unfortunately, the real person was clearly trying to obscure their identity and so they easily could have been adding chaff similarity to other people. (which may explain why there are good matches with multiple of the highest visibility ecash authors). For the few journalists that don't finger absolutely absurd people they keep going over and over again to some of the most visible people from the cypherpunks community, but in reality it may well have been a lurker that never posted or only posted pseudonymously.
Probably the research on this stuff tends to not be very good because people who would do good work realize that it's a pointless effort and care that incorrectly implicating them causes harm by putting their safety at risk... and so they don't publish.
In any case I would be extremely surprised if it were so-- I've known Adam for a long time, and he's been consistently straightforward and guileless. When he came into Bitcoin he had a number of significant misunderstandings that Satoshi couldn't have had, (unless Bitcoin was developed multiple people, of course). To have consistently played dumb like that would be entirely inconsistent with the person I know, and perhaps outside of his capability.
Fundamentally the article ignores the base rate and the correlations... as in yes this or that thing is true about adam and satoshi, but it's also true of a large number of odd people who have the other prerequisites. Normal people don't talk about pre-images but cryptographers do. When you use correlated characteristics you overweight the underlying common factor. You also basically hand Satoshi a win on hiding if he was in fact copying visible characteristics from other people.
In any case, at least I haven't yet heard rumors that this was a paid piece by someone with an agenda ... sad that I can't say that about all NYT writing.
Aside, the comments about Adam's body language and emphatic denial: I can tell you what that is straight up: He's afraid of being harmed because of these accusations and he's afraid of being criticized for not denying it if he doesn't do so directly and clearly enough doubly so because some actual Satoshi fakers have accused him of being one himself, and tried to dismiss the respect Adam has earned as an unearned product of being suspected of being Satoshi. This is absolutely a witch-test where you're dammed one way or the other: In the HBO documentary, Peter Todd gave a cutesy demurring response which was the polar opposite of Adam's and in that case the program used that as evidence of the same. That kind of subjective judgement is just a coat-rack to hang your preconceived notions on.
I have now read about 100 articles claiming to have found the Bitcoin creator.
I think the NSA is Satoshi Nakamoto. That makes most sense.
Len Sassaman with contributions from others through time. We already know that.
fascinating. John Carreyrou is the guy who broke the Theranos story!
But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Electric%3A_The_Bitcoin_... is a bit more compelling. Satoshi is Adam Back and Peter Todd.
This is not really covering anything new - BarelySocial did the same thing in 2020 - and is circumstantial at best, but from all the candidates, Adam Back is by far the most likely.
On the other hand, who cares.
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.
One factor is that it's known that he controls the wallet with many billions of dollars in it. That would make him a target for kidnapping/extortion/etc. He could have easily kept mining under a different address though and become very wealthy aside from the main wallet.
> Not needing the wealth or the fame and ego-stroking that comes with being behind such a revolutionary technology is enviable.
I can only assume you haven't met very many engineers!
I've met plenty of engineers with egos
I haven't.
Plenty of them on HN.
If I were Satoshi I'd keep my head down. I wouldn't want my life f-d up by outing myself.
Think about the kind of world view you need to have to decide to dedicate the necessary time to develop a system for transacting outside of approved channels. Dude's probably worried about polonium finding its way into his tea or whatever.
Assuming he is even an individual.
What would killing him achieve? The Bitcoin technology is out of his control.
You probably won't get killed, but of course you might by someone looking to make a point, in any case your life is gonna get turned upside down, various interests are going to want you to do things for them, people will want to hire you to say things or confer them legitimacy, people will want you to opine on things, etc.
If you're in a nice enough place to dedicate the time to a project like Bitcoin is that something you really need? If you have sufficient frame of mind to develop Bitcoin that's probably not something you want in the first place.
Good point
"Hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us his passphrase." Which he has likely forgotten or lost.
What if he is already very wealthy and very famous … and knows there is no upside for Bitcoin if they disclose it.
Wealthy people are notorious for having a ravenous desire for more wealth... It's often the mindset that made them wealthy in the first place - unless they inherited it, and even then.
Like a certain Adam Back
Or Jack Dorsey.
https://x.com/financeguy74/status/1890850549035110558
https://x.com/matthew_sigel/status/1891852538376487327
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.
Why are journalists giving this guy exposure?
He doesn’t write anything like Satoshi.
I always thought it was Argonne that built it. Interestingly it seems that Adam Back did work with them. So maybe?
what if satoshi is not one person but a phenomenon, a group of minds... the interesting thing about the technology is that it is a public ledger and everything that goes along with that when you tie it to the metadata trails across the networks people use it on... ohh the implications
Seems like the IRS would have an enormous vested interest in tracking him down too…
This article makes me think we are too generous to journalists.
Why does it matter? Changes nothing except doxxing someone
Humans are social animals, so any mystery about another person is interesting, and wealth and fame multiply this.
I don't believe anyone claiming that Satoshi is still alive. There is zero chance any human who put so much effort into creating something would remain silent while it became a $2 trillion phenomenon that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Satoshi is certainly dead.
I once became so famous that a community of several hundred people knew and recognized my name for a few years. At the time, it was very ego-flattering, and I was delighted to have done something that had such a big and positive impact. However, as an experience it really did not agree with me, and even this very minor level of fame has left me resolved to never, ever, ever become that famous again if I can help it.
I don't think I am unique in that. In fact, I perceive that it is very normal for public figures, not merely to fade from public attention, but to actively seek out seclusion.
While I'm not Satoshi, I would put the odds of someone in such a position of maintaining radio silence far from "zero chance". I would put it more around 70 or 80 percent. And at any rate, it is certainly what I would do.
> There is zero chance any human who put so much effort into creating something would remain silent while it became a $2 trillion phenomenon
I'd argue this is the best reason to remain silent as much as one can.
This is a ridiculous argument "zero chance" that completely discounts the possibility (or in all likelyhood, probability) that the creator may be compelled to stay silent, in jail, etc.
Adam Back is the well-off CEO of a company in the blockchain space. From that position, he gets to continue to use his expertise in the field with plenty of connections while having more than enough money without needing to risk revealing himself as Satoshi or risk de-stabilizing Bitcoin's value by using Satoshi's known wallets. It seems like the best possible outcome for someone in Satoshi's position.
I'll at least agree that I don't think any other living candidates for Satoshi make any sense. I can't believe someone who started a brand new influential field of study could fully exit from it while fully avoiding the proceeds from it, as would be necessary to believe in any other living candidate.
If I were to invent something like bitcoin, I would use your exact logic to decide to burn the keys. I couldn't trust myself, so I would remove the possibility of agonizing over it. Obviously, I still might feel regret, but I'd choose the potential regret over the potential agony.
Hell, even if I didn't burn the keys initially, I might do it as I observed it starting to take off. I'd be more attached to the idea and its success than to the idea of being filthy rich (and at risk of jail, extortion, and murder). It would feel like a giant middle finger to the parts of the system I disliked.
My theory is that Satoshi is a persona created by Adam Back and Hal Finney.
They probably devised something where both needed to agree and sign something for Satoshi to act. This also allowed them to say "I’m not Satoshi Nakamoto".
They also probably ensured that anything that belongs to Satoshi required both of them. The death of Hal Finney ensure that Satoshi died definitely.
But they may have "killed" him before by burning the keys because, when Bitcoin started to become a success, they probably anticipated the need to "kill" satoshi (few remember but Bitcoin passing 1$ was considered as a crazy bubble at the time! Some become millionnaires and exited when BTC did the 30$ bubble. Satoshi’s stack was already closely observed, bright mind of that time would have anticipated the need to kill it). Or it was just that "satoshi" was not needed or they accidentaly deleted some keys.
I'd like to think that if I'd come up with something like this, I'd have quickly gone "oh shit" and realised it'd be hard to access the earliest coins without raising unwanted attention, and started mining with multiple different keys, and actively moved those coins around. If Satoshi is still around, I'd expect he has more than enough money without the need to risk the upheaval touching those earliest keys would cause.
This may be the most convincing theory I've heard.
I don't believe any live human being has the wherewithal to not use any of the $100B+ in the Satoshi wallets, which has led me to believe it was Hal Finney. Back and Finney both being in on it would explain some of the email timing as well
What if Satoshi is already a billionaire?
> would remain silent while it became a $2 trillion phenomenon
I can see how it might be preferable. Satoshi has an incredible amount of wealth in a form that’s very easy to transfer anonymously. Anyone that admits to being him will be a huge target.
Maybe they're embarrassed to admit they lost the password for their wallet.
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.
I thought bitcoin was cool for about 6 months back in 2014, and read everything I could about it. For the life of me I simply can't understand how people are still so interested in it or who created it.
Hal Finney
I have always thought Satoshi must be dead (as a couple of past suspects are).
How could someone not want one hundred BILLION dollars? There is no person alive who could resist that. I'm sorry, there's just not.
To be fair, if Back was Satoshi, he would need to hide it so his company can go public, or whatever. Because that way he might make -- who knows! -- hundreds of millions of dollars?
Even if moving the coins crashed the Bitcoin price by 90%, Satoshi would still be a billionaire. Generational wealth.
Back has earned generational wealth already, and the wealthy borrow (at rates lower than capital appreciations) against capital to fund all their living. If I were Back, that's exactly what I'd be doing to preserve anonymity.
The billionaires ruining the world right now are certainly satisfied with their respective hauls.
He (or the enterprise) could have ample bitcoin, on other accounts... the main account is just bait for people.
john mcafee already unmasked who it is years ago.
"Now, there are only two of the accused who were British and only one of those has two spaces in every one of his papers. Figure it out people. It'll take you 15 minutes."
british guy.
the paper has two spaces after periods, and only one of these two british guys has two spaces after each period.
seems pretty conclusive.
it's Adam Back
What if Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he is, lost the key to his wallet?
I've read somewhere that there are some very big bitcoin wallets nobody has touched since long ago. So it's safe to assume the keys are gone.
Does it matter if a large proportion of bitcoins are gone from the network?
The guy who took down Theranos spent a year on hyphenation patterns. Respect the commitment.
> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. >So does Bitcoin... > And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.
This is such poor quality writing, I'm kind of shocked to see it in nyt. It reads like a family guy cutaway lampooning a whodunnit.
I honestly can't believe this warranted a full piece. I was wondering if this a symptom of the author going down some llm psychosis rabbit hole?
_youre absolutely right, you've repeatedly shown signs that back is satoshi. The pattern is clear: back isn't just some cypherpunk, he's Satoshi._
Every time I see one of these articles about "unmasking" Nakamoto, I always wonder the same thing: why? I don't really see a compelling reason to unmask this person. Surely there are other more important things a journalist can spend their time looking into. It's the same with Banksy: why?
I agree about Banksy. But in this case Satoshi controls a huge about of bitcoin. If, whoever they are, they did something with it, it would absolutely move markets.
Why would a newspaper openly try to doxx someone who did nothing wrong?
Clearly the guy doesn't want to be public and there is no public interest in figuring him out either.
I like it. In particular the descriptions of how he reacted when confronted. The public key anecdote is a red herring - there is far more convincing evidence in the article.
Wouldn't Satoshi own some bitcoin in first blocks? Like about 60 billion worth of bitcoins, the largest wallet in existence? For me this is necessary and sufficient proof of their persona.
Anyone who has access to Satoshi's account is worth $100B. If Satoshi were still alive some of the BTC would have been moved at least a little but they haven't.
Whoever Satoshi was is now dead.
There was no guarantee that Bitcoin would take off. It may be tough to imagine looking back in retrospect but, in another world, Bitcoin could have turned out to have been another digital currency with limited value. Many people lost their keys in the early days when Bitcoin was worthless. It's not unreasonable to think the same wouldn't have happened to Satoshi. He may have also thrown them away on purpose.
Terrible article. The real Satoshi is Nick Szabo and no one else is even close. Hal Finney, Wei Dai, etc. New York Times’ quality has really gone downhill.
Maybe this is something to set Claude Mythos loose on. This seems like the kind of thing it would be good at.
Yep def the lexical pattern piece.
Seems most probable it was Hal Finney. Hal passed away in 2014 which explains the no movement of the Satoshi coins which are currently valued at a staggering ~$75 billion
It's Epstein, brah.
It would not surprise me. Adam Back seems to have good connections to the deep state people, too. His company is merging via a SPAC with a Cantor Fitzgerald (Lutnick owned) company.
Cantor Fitzgerald also handles the collateral for Tether, which relocated from the Caribbean (where it was associated with a CIA bank) to El Salvador.
Bitcoin is very handy for avoiding awkward Iran Contra schemes for covert ops. You no longer need Lutnick's friend Epstein to handle the laundering.
By now, this is a snipe hunt.
If "Satoshi" were to ever try cashing out some of "his" BitCoin, I suspect that things could get interesting.
Every couple of years they convince some "intrepid" reporters to go make up a story about /the/ creator of bitcoin.
Which I find highly suggestive about the true nature of the creator(s) of bitcoin.
My working hypothesis has always been that Satoshi was a CIA or NSA working group partly to fund black ops. Also, it could be that Bitcoin was a psyop to get people used to digital currency followed by the bait and switch to CBDC. Seem to be working.
So, it is interesting to know who is behind bitcoin but ...
... why is it important?
I mean, let's say it was not a state guy but some agency, like with the xz utils backdoor (that was most likely not a solo dev, the coordination, time and planning seemed to indicate a state actor; also peculiar to see western-style folks use asian names here). Would that change the situation with regards to bitcoins?
Ultimately what should matter is whether xyz is secure or not. I just don't get the epic fascination with "who is mystery man 101".
Satoshi Nakamoto is CIA
Satoshi has many contributors. In my view, he/she is not one person but many. Why, because it would take a genius with multiple skills, e.g. engineering, programming, cryptography, mathematics, financial knowledge and a lot of time, a lotta time to come up with something like this.
It is more plausible that Satoshi was a rogue AI, ET, the Illuminati or future time traveler instead of one single person :)
Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-...
I'm going to call BS on this. Not that this guy couldn't be Satoshi, but the article has some serious nonsense in it. Ha said he learned to program on a "Timex Sinclair". It wasn't called that in the UK. Did he know the alternative name and auto-translate in speaking to a US journalist? Seems unlikely. Then he used C++! Amazing. So did everyone at that time. He took an interest in PK cryptography. So has every single serious software engineer since the 1990s. It's the same thing as Bitcoin! Seriously. I stopped reading when the next piece of evidence was that he used the word "libertarian".
Why do journalists try to doxx innocent people, putting their personal (and here actual) lives at risk? Bansky, Scott Alexander...
Spend this effort investigating corruption.
If this guy was still just a guy on a mailing list and otherwise living a private life, this article would be inappropriate to publish IMO.
However, he's a significant public figure in the Bitcoin world (apparently). Still a gray area I guess but I don't think he's off limits from this kind of scrutiny.
Journalists job is to get clicks on their article.
If you read the article there’s an interesting bit where Mr. Back has an active incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi: US securities law, which requires disclosing things which’d be material to investors. Like, for example, a stash of bitcoin which if sold could crash the price of the thing.
And also, from my understanding, Back allegedly had some not-insignificant ties or meetings with Epstein?
Point being, journalism like this is morally complex, and not as simple as “doxxing innocent people.” Of course, we are biased, as hackers on a web forum, we naturally relate with Satoshi, who was also a techie on a web forum.
another pointless debate. who cares who satoshi is. only TV and magazines.
Who doesn’t like a good mystery?
I like good mysteries too but satoshi mystery articles come out with same thing everytime.
I don't. It's a tool used by modern "journalism" to distract and detract from a story. If you have something reliable to report, then by all means, report it. If all you have is a "compelling narrative" then put it on the shelf and do NOT waste my time with it.
If you can't manage that then publish fiction books.
You already wasted your time bringing yourself into the conversation.
Why? You've expressed no more meaningful of a position than I have. Perhaps you're confused as to the purpose of a "forum?"
I don't think this reveals Satoshi's identity, nor that any prior piece of reporting may have done so. But I do think there's a high probability that Satoshi lurks or has lurked on HN, and perhaps reads these posts with an initial sense of apprehension followed by a chuckle at the inevitable misidentification.
> misidentification
We don't know if that's misidentification either. The author provides good evidence that the writing style matches, which doesn't provide a strong proof, however it's a good clue of who might it be.
Using the articles logic.
Obviously Satoshi and Banksy are the same person. They are both from the same era and British.
There are so many people I know from that Era who believed the same things that Mr. Back believed in. Half my work colleagues at the time where interested in distributed computers, Postage pay, and algorithmic payments.
I am not convinced
The author has collected more than enough entropy to single out Mr. Back, especially when the anonymity set of who could be Satoshi is so small.
It's either Back or someone who tried to frame him, long before Bitcoin was even remotely successful. Generally, framing someone like this is a poor strategy because it places you in the person's radius as opposed to being absolutely anyone.
He’s not one person but a front for a US law enforcement task force dedicated to tracking down cyber criminals and anyone who would need anonymity online. It started, alongside TOR, as a way for drug dealers, weapons dealers, and pedophiles to do business. Neither cryptocurrency nor TOR are actually anonymous. They’re part of a pretty impressive honeypot ecosystem.
What I’m interested in is the pivot when crypto tried to go legit. Some spook or suit decided that it would be used for other reasons also. Now it has some semblance of legitimacy.
Before anyone asks: social media is another part of the same ecosystem. Nurtured and protected by the government and law enforcement, despite any number of practices that would bankrupt most companies and sent people to jail.
It also locks us all down to just the computers that are in our possession and the big tech silos, because now nobody can offer any computer resources free to the public without crypto miners immediately getting dropped on them. Even GitHub Actions got used this way, for example. Now every-goddamn-thing is sign up, log in, Know Your Customer, show us your ID, move your head like the arrows on screen, enter the digits from your authenticator app, check your email for the unique code.
The FBI created the purportedly encrypted "AN0M" messaging app [1] as part of a sting operation running between 2018-2021 used to catch drug-traffickers.
Creating a fake app that people believe is secure or anonymous is an easier way to run a police sting operation than first making a significant breakthrough in Distributed Systems around the Byzantine Generals Problem.
For your conspiracy theory to be true, at some point a honeypot/sting operation must actually end and arrests be made and the evidence be used in court.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield
Would make a good tv show where a small group in a secretive TLA org started this but then made so much money they decided to keep it to themselves and get rich.
"Sorry director, the experimental project was a failure. We deleted it all now to clean up and free resources. Oh and yeah unrelated, I need to hand in my notice. Want to spend more time with my ...er... family. Thanks."
People who've seen what the nation state can do to those who draw it's ire don't do such things.
But other than that it would make a good show.
That's my theory as well, but not just to catch digital criminals, but it's a test bed for the digital wallet / ID
I don't think it's exclusively american tho, it's a consortium between US/EU/ASIA, to establish the foundation of the world government, digital first
Someone already found this years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g
I haven't read the full article yet but I'm guessing they didn't give credit, as the New York Times tends to do. Not definitive but it's a very convincing case.
This video is linked in the article