Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 think what makes this a little murkier is that this Beck guy appears to be already a well known figure in crypto circles. (I don't really follow the space). It feels more like uncovering the secret director of a film to be an established film producer.

For the last point, I agree there's a sort of "who cares" aspect to the piece. There is no artistic intent to interpret. The product speaks for itself making BTC the default crypto coin instead of any of the other millions of coins. The wealth from the founder, from what I can tell, has not been instrumentalized in any significant way.

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.

If I say that I think you are Satoshi, what are the ethical implications of that? Should I not speak or write opinions that you find annoying or inconvenient? How does that scale to everyone?

This is why the first item in the U.S. Bill of Rights is freedom of speech and of the press. Who knows what objections anyone will have to any given statement, and forcing everyone to accommodate everyone leads to a claustrophobic dystopia.

> 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

This one is challenging I think because the article itself is so thin. The evidence seems really shaky.

That said, clearly a lot of people really do seem to care who Satoshi is, so it doesn't seem like its out of the question for a newspaper to print an article claiming to answer that question.

> Do they just not care about the ethical implications?

Did Satoshi not care about the ethical implications of creating bitcoin? Mr Back may not be Satoshi, but he's also made a career driving the adoption of bitcoin and bitcoin itself has enabled many, many terrible crimes. It seems like special pleading to argue that Mr Back is not responsible for any of the consequence of bitcoin in the world, and also that the NY Times is morally responsible if someone harms Mr Back because they think he is Satoshi. Either we have an ethical responsibility to consider the consequences of our actions or we don't.

While in general you are right, there is a reason why developed countries are usually publicizing information about government officials and private entrepreneurs. This creates sense of accountability and allows for proper oversight by the journalists and law. And among those are plenty of rich or very rich people and no one is kidnapping or shooting them in the streets despite knowing exactly where they live or work.

Arguably a person who can at whim with a single click destabilize half the world economy (simply by moving a single sat from the creator wallet to another, among other things) necessitates such oversight too and can't claim to be a private insignificant individual who is abused by transparency.

PS: even though I'm a lowly QA on a relatively small salary, as an entrepreneur my private info like contact, full address, tax returns and other is completely and legally public for anyone in the world to see on my government portal. And it is a good thing.

> hundreds of millions

More in the range of 100 billion

Adam Back is already a high profile target. Unmasking him as Satoshi doesn't really change that for the guy that founded that company that leads bitcoin core development.

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?

Yes, this seems like one of those cases where "the public is curious" and "the public has a right to know" are being blurred together

Hundreds of billions, not millions.

So you are suggesting the super rich get some extra layer of kid glove treatment, simply because they have more money?

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.

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.

By definition, if they’re not concerned about the ethics, they are not journalists and their occupation is not journalism. Nor does your employer’s reputation[1] allow them to claim such titles simple because they sign your pay cheque. You can’t inherit the title like that.

Journalist/journalism is like leader/leadership… too often used inappropriately, too often used to mislead, too often used inappropriately. Words such as reporter, hack, or NYT agent are more appropriate and more accurate.

Put another way, if your pet barks, would you still call it a cat? Of course not! If these people and entities aren’t fulfilling the baseline of the definition why do we continue to call them something they are not?

Journalist is a verb. It’s the decisions made and the actions taken. We’d be doing the collective a favor if we stopped giving credit where credit is NOT due.

[1] editorial: Most of us would agree that the NYT has lost its way. That it’s getting by on the fumes of integrity long gone.

Easy - they don't care. Major institutional publications have lacked journalistic integrity for a very long time now. I can't really think of any exceptions there anymore.

>> 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.

Sure there is. A whole system of unregulated finance has been setup and it's very useful for criminality. How is not in the public interest to know who set it up and for what purpose? If it turned out Satoshi was actually a nation state and this was done for some nefarious purpose you think that's not in the public interest?

Never get between a journalist and their scoop.

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.

Are you implying there is an inherent right for public figures to hide their wealth, “for security reasons”? WTF?

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.

invention of bitcoin is significant enough that world needs to know who really did it. Why is the person hiding is the real question.

> And really, for what?

Readership, clicks and views

I was just wondering the same thing.

He is a billionaire who should pay taxes.

> 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.

The NYTimes is basically a mouthpiece for US government interests. The US government has an interest in outing cryptocurrency actors of all kinds.

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.

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.

>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?

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.”

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."

If you were around those circles, a lot of the "signals" in the article just look like the shared baseline culture rather than anything uniquely identifying

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.

Same set of interests? Clearly Raph is Satoshi.

>Water, a drink consumed by nobel price winners and European kings...

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.

I found that entire section amusing. Some choice quotes:

> 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.

> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.

public key encryption and c++! It must be him.

I see your point, but PGP was literally invented by an anti-nuclear activist and intentionally disseminated to human rights groups.

> I would ping him over the Signal app

Signal, the free encryption app used by journalists

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.

It's technically true, but it's also a very selective framing

that's such a loaded statement.

The New York Times has some great journalists and does important work, but they certainly have an editorial bias/agenda on most topics, even though it's often subtle. People claiming they are neutral on most topics are just not seeing it, because it aligns with their slant. Just saying it's interesting to see when folks notice it or not on hackernews.

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.

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

"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?

> 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?

  > 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.

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...

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.

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...

> "this mountain of circumstantial evidence and statistical analysis"

On the stats side I'm seeing 1) stylometry expert finding nothing conclusive 2) The database made by scraping(?) the email archives being filtered in various ways to reduce the number of candidates.

On 2) I'm wondering if focusing on words without synonyms would basically mean (as writer says) technical vocabulary. Therefore anyone interested in the technical subject at hand would have to use those words, so the overlap in technical words just tells us that Mr Back was interested in the same kind of thing that Santoshi was interested in, which is already known as Back had a history with the hashcash stuff?

Random idea: can the database identify which subject threads the overlapping synonym-less words are in? I'm guessing a lot of them will be in a small number of threads.

Also, Szabo's whole reputation comes from bit gold and years of writing about exactly these ideas

Does Carreyrou give reasons for eliminating Hal Finney from being (part or all of) Satoshi?

> 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.

That could of course just be misdirection.

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 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."

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.

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.

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.

It seems like this “journalist” speaks English. Guess who also spoke English? That’s exactly right, Satoshi did.

To me this was just the cherry on top though, there's a huge list of such correlations that seem wildly unsurprising.

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?

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

> 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.

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 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.

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.

>There's literally no reason whatsoever to hide the metadata unless he is the one.

privacy?

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.

The metadata was produced for trial.

The emails would not have been published in public except my opponent had an established track-record of abusing non-public communication that had been provided in response to subponea in order to further his con-- he did so with both emails produced by Gavin and emails produced by Martii.

On that basis, I encouraged Adam to agree to publish the message content-- which itself was not very interesting and matched what Adam had indirectly said for years as this would undermine our opponent's ability to abuse knowledge of that content for further fraud. The same argument didn't apply for the metadata: it has less to no abuse potential that we could come up with, publishing the email content also makes it clear to everyone that Wright had access to the material ... but there was always a risk that it exposed something less obvious about Satoshi or Adam that should be kept confidential.

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.

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.

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.

Did you miss the part where Satoshi came to Adam's rescue, to thwart big blocks?

https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/6EC9DDF352DC4838AE9B088AB37...

> 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:

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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?

The hyphenating patterns are particularly curious, to me.

Some supposed idiosyncrasies ('bugfix', for example) are just standard renderings amongst programmers/tech types; using those as evidence somewhat betrays the author's lack of familiarity with the field/community (as if the C++ and public-key cryptography 'evidence' didn't make that plain enough...).

> I wonder, based on the large number of distinct hyphenation errors, whether Satoshi is even from the UK or the US.

How many native English speakers are truly familiar with hyphenating compound nouns and adjectives? I'd say a majority don't know how to consistently hyphenate correctly.

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.

>This dude can seem to tell the difference between Newsgroups and Mailing Lists. Also described Newsgroups as being displayed in a particular font. What a weird mistake. It's almost like he doesn't care about the details.

It's full of clangers like that, showing that the author is woefully unversed in the subculture he's writing about. Hence why the main focus is on the personality of Satoshi and Back, trying to psychologise them into being the same person, instead of doing a technical analysis.

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).

thank you!

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

This is RustyRusell of Linux kernel fame. This is kind of the evidence that he want for a claim. First hand. Not what we just read from the NYT article.

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?

He was already the CEO of a billion dollar company and the article describes him traveling with security.

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.

Or he just lost the keys. Or the analysis is wrong and those aren't his wallets; it was never definitive.

The early Bitcoin client could send Bitcoins to an IP address. That's all he meant, no?

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'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

So... who is Satoshi?

Chances are the key to those is simply lost forever.

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...

> 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?

Nick Szabo doesn't know how to program enough to deliver the original bitcoin source code.

> In contrast to a certain convicted Australian fraudster who got caught trying to backdate his statements,

Who?

Szabo is definitely top 3 candidates or on team

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.

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!

What if he is already very wealthy and very famous … and knows there is no upside for Bitcoin if they disclose it.

The British English could be a misdirection. Satoshi was always quite inconsistent, sometimes using US spellings ('color', 'check', 'optimize'). One that always stood out to me was his use of 'gotten' – we don't typically use that word in British English, but an American English speaker attempting to disguise themselves as a Brit most likely wouldn't be aware of that fact.

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.)

People love a mystery. And people love to solve mysteries. Don't look for any deeper motivation than that.

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.

Interesting: my Occam's Razor test is "$100B sitting around untouched, how can that be?" Well, simplest answer is that satoshi is dead.

This was my thought.

I mined Bitcoin super early in the project on a spare computer. It sat for at least a week before I went back to it and discovered that it was unresponsive. Formatted the drive and tried some other nerd thing.

We also "know" it's Hal Finney, James A. Donald, Elon Musk, Paul Le Roux, Adam Back, ...

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?

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

Thanks for those, but I can't trust that a random post to a mailing list from a compromised email address, to provide backing to someone else's argument is proof of life

Reality is seldom as fun as people's theories.

> 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.

Yeah, some of the article's points really weren't persuasive.

> “Scrap patents and copyright,” Mr. Back wrote in September 1997. In keeping with this belief, Mr. Back made his Hashcash spam-throttling software open source.

^, the belief of >90% of people that have used a mailing list.

> 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.

The links are https://www.freelists.org/post/hashcash/hashcash113-released and https://web.archive.org/web/20130401141714/http://sourceforg... .

How are they "strikingly similar"?

> I brought up one of Satoshi’s quotes, but before I had a chance to explain why I was mentioning it, Mr. Back interrupted. > > Me: There’s a quote that I mentioned earlier where Satoshi says, “I’m better with code than with words.” > > 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.

That's quite a stretch.

Some other evidence was a little persuasive though.

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.

true, but reading this made me learn something new.

Turns out HashCash (system Bitcoin borrowed), was originally built to fight email spam in 1977 - https://vectree.io/c/hashcash-the-proof-of-work-system-cited...

Humans are social animals, so any mystery about another person is interesting, and wealth and fame multiply this.

It's common for older writers to insert two spaces after a full-stop. In fact, go through the cypherpunk mailing list (and many others) and you'll see it was the norm. As for Satoshi being British, he used predominantly British English but occasionally used American spellings and terms; it easily could've been intentional misdirection.

Adam Back doesn't write at all like Satoshi. Back's writings are filled with grammatical errors and he often makes spelling mistakes, which Satoshi seldom did.

Bitcoin wasn't anything extraordinarily revolutionary; it built upon others' work over decades of collaborative progress, and introduced few truly novel ideas. Very impressive work by all means, but it didn't require genius-level skill or knowledge.

Yep def the lexical pattern piece.

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.

> 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.

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.

Let's say you designed the bitcoin specifically as a currency that can only go up in value. And then it did get up tremendously in value.

If you already have a lot of money (and Adam has) then why would you cash out early? Your money is already in asset specifically designed (by you) to beat markets and be bubble resistant

He (or the enterprise) could have ample bitcoin, on other accounts... the main account is just bait for people.

Satoshi Nakamoto?

Are you Adam Back?

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.

Who doesn’t like a good mystery?

> 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.

This video is linked in the article

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.

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

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