It’s a bit like the sea serpent of cryptocurrencies: who really is Satoshi Nakamoto? A basic answer is obvious: it is the creator of Bitcoin, who laid the foundations of the most famous cryptocurrency in 2008, in a white paper. He owns a priori a good part of the first Bitcoins, mined at a time when the calculations were simple, and – above all – it is a pseudonym. The big game for the media is therefore to find out who Satoshi Nakamoto really is, and The New York Times think, this time, that I have found the answer.
Cryptocurrencies, blockchain (1/2): the article to read if you don’t understand anything about it
For our colleagues, it would be Adam Back. This is not the first time he has been suspected of being Satoshi Nakamoto. An obvious clue is that the Bitcoin white paper refers to Hashcash, a process invented by Adam Back in 1997 to limit spam in emails. But that’s just a hint.
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In absolute terms, there are few people with the mathematical and technical background necessary to create Bitcoin, but there have still been several suspects over the years, without Satoshi Nakamoto being unmasked. John Carreyrou used methods that go beyond looking for clues on the technical side: he analyzed the few texts actually associated with Satoshi Nakamoto.
He found clues that tend to prove that Satoshi Nakamoto is an Englishman who was trying to hide his identity with American slang (until now, it was the opposite that was accepted, an American pretending to be a Briton). He also analyzed Adam Back’s X account and discovered that certain unusual terms in Satoshi Nakamoto’s texts and emails are found at Back. More broadly, Adam Back and Satoshi Nakamoto have common interests, similar ideas and often arrive at identical conclusions. We will spare you the numerous explanations, which you can read in the article, but they are convincing… which is logical in an article of this kind.
However, it is Stylometry which gives the most weight to the investigation, coupled with the analysis of grammar and certain language tics. The article talks in particular about hyphens, which is almost ironic in 2026: the use of the em dash (which I often use) is for example seen as a text sign generated by an AI… A simple example: do you write email or e-mail? By analyzing the uses, certain errors and certain tics, the authors of the article fall in all cases on Adam Back.
Adam Back of course not
Adam Back obviously denies being Satoshi Nakamoto and indicates that these are coincidences, notably because (according to him), he shares interests with Satoshi Nakamoto (which is difficult to deny).
But in reality, the result of the investigation – quite convincing – matters little in reality, for a very simple reason: money. One of Adam Back’s companies, Blockstream, specializes in cryptocurrencies and is valued at more than $3.2 billion. And the founder of a company like that simply can’t publicly announce that he has around 1.1 million bitcoins (around $80 billion), if only because of the risk of a crash.
To date, this is probably the most convincing and in-depth investigation into the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, but it provides no direct proof. And there is little chance that proof of this type will ever arrive.
