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.

> 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.

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.

another pointless debate. who cares who satoshi is. only TV and magazines.

Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-...