NYTimes Blockbuster: We Got Satoshi

You’ll never get me to say anything bad about the guy who uncovered the full extent of the Theranos con. In this time of Passover, had John Carreyrou done nothing but write Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup and the Wall Street Journal articles that preceded it, it would have been enough for us.

But Carreyrou’s assertion today in the New York Times that he’s solved the mystery of Satoshi and it’s Adam Back … we don’t think so.

Carreyou begins his million-word Times article describing how he had long been obsessed with solving Bitcoin’s original riddle – the identity of its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto. By the time the HBO documentary “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” aired in 2024 and made its weak claim that Satoshi was Canadian software developer Peter Todd, Carreyou had already spent several years trying to answer the question definitively. And given up.

It’s a story that’s vexed plenty beyond HBO. Our own original reporting on Satoshi wannabe Craig Wright remains one of the best-read stories in the history of Modern Consensus.

Now, Carreyou points to 55-UK computer scientist Adam Back as his prime suspect. Carreyou cites similarities in writing, British spellings and vocabulary, and the timing of his research. In fact, Back was definitely one of the earliest people contacted by Satoshi in 2008. Back’s Proof-of-Work system (Hashcash) was cited in the original Bitcoin whitepaper, placing him near in time and mindspace to the project’s birth.

But some of Carreyou’s specifics either don’t add up or don’t amount to much. In comparing Back’s writing, he noted, “Satoshi put two spaces between sentences and used British spellings. He sometimes confused “it’s” and “its” and ended some sentences with “also.” He spelled “bugfix” as one word instead of two and “half way” and “down side” as two words instead of one.”

These are commonplace mistakes or at least not idiosyncratic enough to resemble a model of car let alone a make.

There’s also the Batman-Bruce Wayne assertion. According to Carreyou, “When Satoshi appeared, Mr. Back disappeared.” He writes, “After unveiling his invention [in 2008], Satoshi spent two and a half years trying to improve it. Then, in 2011, he famously disappeared. Mr. Back followed that same pattern, but in reverse. For more than a decade, whenever Cypherpunks discussed electronic money, Mr. Back almost always chimed in. But when Bitcoin, the closest manifestation of the vision he had laid out, was announced in late 2008, Mr. Back was nowhere to be found. Six weeks after Satoshi disappeared, Mr. Back posted about Bitcoin for the first time.” That’s not exactly a tight timeline. And it could easily be the behavior of someone hoping to be perceived as Satoshi.

But that’s the most compelling counter-evidence. Back himself has strongly denied being Satoshi, including this morning after the Times published. If he was actually Satoshi, but wanted people not to believe he was, he could easily have posted as Satoshi and Back simultaneously. The non-overlapping reads more as coincidence or intentionally trying to be perceived as Satoshi than it does as actually being Satoshi but not wanting it know.

As Back writes in his denial on X, “i’m not satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash, privacy tech on cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas.” (the whole thread is very much worth reading; whoever Back is or is not, he’s a hell of an articulate dude and innovator.)