A British computer scientist has insisted he is not the elusive developer of bitcoin, after a report claimed to unmask him as its creator.
A story in the New York Times details a years-long effort to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious author of the bitcoin white paper which laid the theoretical foundations for modern digital currencies.
It names Adam Back, a London-born computer scientist and entrepreneur. In a thread on
“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 (as) a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity,” he wrote.
Nakamoto’s true identity has been the subject of speculation for years. Previous attempts to unmask him have pointed to Nick Szabo, a “reclusive” Hungarian-American computer scientist; Hal Finney, a software developer; and an “unknown Australian genius” who ended up being a fraud.
This time, the trail pointed the journalist to Back, who was a member of an online anarchist cryptography community called the cypherpunks in the early 1990s.
John Carreyrou unearthed similarities between Back and Nakamoto by combing through decades of old internet postings and analyzing commonalities in their public writings – offhand comments such as “I’m better with code than I am with words” – and shared niche interests.
He compared timelines – Back suddenly went dormant for some years on cryptography-related forums, when Satoshi emerged as a presence – and used artificial intelligence to compare Back and Satoshi’s use of language.
Then he confronted Back with the evidence at a bitcoin conference in El Salvador, where he described Back as reddening and shifting uncomfortably when presented with the evidence – and making a conversational slip, appearing to speak as if he was Satoshi himself.
“He’d removed any lingering doubt in my mind that I had the right man,” Carreyrou wrote.
Back said it was all happenstance. The artefacts that had led to Carreyrou’s conclusion were “a combination of coincidence and similar phrases from people with similar experience and interests”, he wrote.
Not everyone bought it. Domer, a well-known Polymarket gambler, replied to Back’s post saying: “After reading that article, I’m going with a 99% chance that you’re Satoshi. Such obvious tells (the disappearing act is a classic mafia/werewolf rookie error).”
Others were less convinced. Steven Murdoch, a professor of computer science at University College London, said: “There’s some indication that it’s him, but there’s no smoking gun.”
“It’s not implausible but my bet would still be Hal Finney,” Murdoch said, especially because Finney received the first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi. “Common practice is always to test a system by sending something to yourself.”
Dr Jacky Mallett, an assistant professor of computer science at Reykjavík University, said Satoshi was “almost certainly more than one person”, noting updates to the bitcoin code that suggest multiple contributors. “I think there was a small group of people behind this, and that they understood financial structures more than they are credited for,” she said.
Back is the owner of a bitcoin treasury firm that is merging with a publicly traded company created by Cantor Fitzgerald, formerly led by the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.
Were Back to be Nakamoto – and the owner of 1.1m coins worth tens of billions of pounds – he would have to disclose that to the Securities and Exchange Commission, as that fortune could materially affect the bitcoin market.
“We are all Satoshi,” Back wrote on X.
