The name is one that has emerged previously as the mysterious creator of Bitcoin
On April 8, the New York Times published an investigation by journalist John Carreyrou, known for exposing the Theranos fraud, naming Adam Back, a 55-year-old British cryptographer, as the most probable person behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym. Back is the CEO of Blockstream and the inventor of Hashcash, a proof-of-work system cited directly in the original Bitcoin white paper, but that’s where the correlation ends.
Back denied the claim the same day, telling the Times, “Clearly I’m not Satoshi,” and posting on X that the investigation reflected “confirmation bias” and “a combination of coincidence and similar phrases from people with similar experience and interests.”
Carreyrou and a colleague spent over a year building a database from three mailing list archives used by cryptographers in the 1990s and 2000s. They ran three separate writing analyses comparing those posts against Satoshi’s known writings.
All three pointed to Back. The specific quirks shared between Back’s writing and Satoshi’s included two spaces between sentences, alternating British and American spellings, hyphenating “proof-of-work,” writing “bugfix” as one word, inconsistent use of “e-mail” versus “email,” and confusion between “it’s” and “its.”
After applying these filters sequentially across roughly 600 active forum participants, Back was the only name remaining. The Times also noted a timing pattern: Back was a consistent presence in cypherpunk circles until Bitcoin launched in late 2008, went quiet, then resurfaced posting about Bitcoin for the first time six weeks after Satoshi disappeared from the internet in 2011.
Wallets attributed to Satoshi hold approximately 1.1 million bitcoin, currently worth around $70 billion, which would place the holder at roughly 26th on the Forbes global wealth list. No cryptographic proof — meaning a signature from Satoshi’s original keys — has been produced, which researchers acknowledge is the only evidence that would definitively settle the question. Carreyrou himself stated the case does not constitute definitive proof.
This is not the first time Back has been named. Prior Satoshi candidates include Dorian Nakamoto (effectively debunked), Craig Wright (later ruled not Satoshi by a UK High Court judge), and Canadian developer Peter Todd, named in an HBO documentary in October 2024, who also denied it and has since provided evidence undermining the claim.
