The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of Bitcoin’s creator, remains a long-standing mystery. But according to new research has been released in the New York Times, Satoshi could be Adam Back, a British cryptographer who conducted influential early research on digital evidence. Buck denies being Satoshi.
People have been trying to track down the father of Bitcoin for decades, without much success. Based on Back’s denial, it’s unclear whether Times technology reporter John Carreyrou, known for his reporting that brought down Theranos, went much further than anyone else.
The back fits the profile of the kind of person you might suspect would create the first cryptocurrency. He created Hashcash, the proof-of-work system Satoshi used to mine Bitcoin, and is now its co-founder and CEO Blockstreama company that builds infrastructure for blockchain-based payment systems. Back even agreed with Carreyrou that he’s a reasonable suspect, and it’s possible that Satoshi is—like him—a fifty-something British cypherpunk. (In which case, yes, using a Japanese nickname is weird.)
But Carreiro has no indisputable evidence to close the case.
To stake his claim, he collected records of emails sent to three crypto mailing lists between 1992 and 2008, the period when the pseudonym Satoshi was active on these forums. Carreyrou fed the file to an artificial intelligence to spot commonalities between how Satoshi wrote and other active posters. For example, Satoshi did not hyphenate compound nouns and sometimes mixed up “its” and “it’s”.
The back was the best match but wrote to X that the evidence is a “combination of coincidence and similar phrases from people with similar experience and interests”.
The Satoshi case isn’t closed, but we have to admit that Carreyrou’s use of artificial intelligence was pretty clever.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, California
|
13-15 October 2026
