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  Lerc
  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.
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  danso
  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
• suzzer99
  > 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.
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  raphlinus
  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.
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  olalonde
  All you need to know about this "quest": https://xcancel.com/austinhill/status/2041986130871251141Plus, 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.
• Syzygies
  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.
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  hardwaregeek
  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.
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  kaladin-jasnah
  > 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.
• nitwit005
  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.
• dnnehgf
  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.
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  doublextremevil
  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.
• niobe
  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
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  djao
  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.
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  int32_64
  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.
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  WalterBright
  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.
• opengrass
  Congrats to the author citing a troll on a Vistomail account anyone could re-register when AnonymousSpeech was around.
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  gridder
  Barely Sociable already explained it 5 years ago:https://youtu.be/XfcvX0P1b5g
• bnjemian
  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.
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  jmkni
  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
• sambaumann
  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
• BobbyTables2
  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…
• gorfian_robot
  this and the recent banksy 'umasking' by major news outlets is sad in our era of huge US governmental crimes and coverups.
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  leroy_masochist
  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.
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  dools
  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."
• kinakomochidayo
  Why are journalists giving this guy exposure?He doesn’t write anything like Satoshi.
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  malbs
  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
• sho_hn
  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.
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  manarth
  https://archive.is/iRBng
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  throwaway85825
  Satoshi is the guy with the PhD in distributed computing who took a sabbatical during which bitcoin was published.
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  hnsdev
  Particularly I believe that Satoshi Nakamoto is a nation-state who created Bitcoin to bypass sanctions. Simple as that.
• tclover
  Satoshi Nakamoto is CIA
• SilentM68
  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 :)
• nullc
  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.
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  vintermann
  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.
• BobbyTables2
  Seems like the IRS would have an enormous vested interest in tracking him down too…
• afpx
  I always thought it was Argonne that built it. Interestingly it seems that Adam Back did work with them. So maybe?
• n0um3n4
  Len Sassaman with contributions from others through time. We already know that.
• c83n2d8n39c9
  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
• meonkeys
  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.
• Svoka
  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.
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  chistev
  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.
• gertop
  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.
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  stevenalowe
  Why does it matter? Changes nothing except doxxing someone
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  blindriver
  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.
• talkfold
  The guy who took down Theranos spent a year on hyphenation patterns. Respect the commitment.
• joshrw
  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.
• triage8004
  Hal Finney
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  dyauspitr
  Maybe this is something to set Claude Mythos loose on. This seems like the kind of thing it would be good at.
• nodesocket
  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
• anon
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• ChrisMarshallNY
  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.
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  Simulacra
  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?
• 348asGaq7
  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.
• themafia
  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.
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  apeace
  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.
• lancewiggs
  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.
• ChrisArchitect
  Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-...
• dboreham
  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".
• anon
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  armchairhacker
  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.
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  donkeylazy456
  another pointless debate. who cares who satoshi is. only TV and magazines.
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  instagraham
  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.
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  modeless
  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.
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  4oo4
  Someone already found this years ago:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5gI 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.
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  xvxvx
  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.
• uxhacker
  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
• coppsilgold
  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.