> 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.
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."
The more similarities you find, the closer the match. It's in no way proof, of course. But it does provide good reason to look closer
>>> math.log(8_000_000_000)
22.80270737862625The search space of hackers is a small subtree of all humans. So it's like a smaller tree of groups in Wordle that contains the letter "H".
However, in reality there is no binary "hacker" bit, so maybe we're back to the brute force 33-bit space. And then, you don't know Satoshi's unique signature, and it's worse if Satoshi is a group.
Come to think of it, do all hacker news posters even share a hacker bit?
I still rely on information-theoretic proofs at work, they just don't involve messy humans.
Then there's not altogether unlikely chance that Satoshi is a nodding homage to Nicolas Bourbaki, each contributor holding part of a multiparty voting key.
“Get this, his PhD thesis dealt with a computer language called C++, just like Bitcoin papers used” seems both confused and impossibly lazy to me.
> “Scrap patents and copyright,” Mr. Back wrote in September 1997.
> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license
Really?
Like saying “get this, his college-aged musical interests included the Urban American musical style known as ‘Hip Hop’; therefore Tupac didn’t really die and this is him.” Heavy on insinuation, light on seriousness. Strong “…you’re not from around here, are you?” vibes.
What does this kind of journalism hope to accomplish, anyway? Beyond bothering middle-aged nerds for gossip? And providing a frame for the author’s cute little sleuth jape?
“Good reason to look closer” assumes there’s good reason to pick through ancient rubble in the first place.
For example it sure seems like his mountain of circumstantial evidence fits better with the theory that “Satoshi” could be a pen name for a small group of people—maybe even the small group whose history he traces and whose styles he has trouble teasing apart—rather than one “suspect” (as he calls it). But we don’t even really weigh that possibility seriously.
So, like—why are we coming at this one guy by name and spooky hacker photo in the New York Times, with the suggestion that he has $110 billion under his mattress? All these speculations and arguments have been done over and over—what does this reporting add that’s worth 12,000 words?
The colorful journey down a dead end, fine—but leave it at “My Quest,” don’t do the weasel subhed “the trail of clues […] led to Adam Back” to insinuate that it proved what it set out to prove. Or even added anything significant to the well-trodden record.
Does it? I didn't come to that conclusion. Do share!
>So, like—why are we coming at this one guy by name and spooky hacker photo in the New York Times, with the suggestion that he has $110 billion under his mattress? All these speculations and arguments have been done over and over—what does this reporting add that’s worth 12,000 words?
Well, they identified this guy and the reporting here is better than the others I've seen in the past. This article obviously has nothing to do with what past writers wrote, so I don't really get the point of pretending like it all comes from one place.
>The colorful journey down a dead end, fine—but leave it at “My Quest,” don’t do the weasel subhed “the trail of clues […] led to Adam Back” to insinuate that it proved what it set out to prove. Or even added anything significant to the well-trodden record.
Yawn
Same goes for the rest of your list.
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.
> In keeping with this belief, Mr. Back made his Hashcash spam-throttling software open source.
> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license, which allowed anyone to use, modify and distribute it without restrictions.
The numerous observations such as this only seem impressive to people who don't know anything at all about the subject. Occam's Razor suggests that the reason that such irrelevant observations were included is because Carreyrou doesn't know anything at all about the subject.
> When we compared those errors with the writings of our hundreds of suspects, Mr. Back was a clear outlier. He shared 67 of Satoshi’s exact hyphenation errors. The person with the second-most matches had 38.
The article does not improve.
Occam’s razor suggests you’re doing this because you want the article to be wrong and want to pretend to be a genius, not because you actually think it is
The article is written as if it's by some crazed conspiracy theorist. It's dripping with confirmation bias at every turn. Tiny coincidences are seized upon to confirm the author's suspicions whereas other explanations are minimized.
This kind of one-track reasoning almost always turns out to be wrong. Did the author accidentally stumble upon the truth? It's possible. Back has all the right qualifications to be Satoshi. But so do many other people.
Just a bunch of weird stuff in this article.
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.
Who?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-28/craig-wright-not-sato...
But I've also not seen anything suggesting he wasn't good enough of a coder to make it himself. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science.
Incredible gell-mann reminder for reporting...
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?
If you can't manage that then publish fiction books.
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.
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.
If you're in a nice enough place to dedicate the time to a project like Bitcoin is that something you really need? If you have sufficient frame of mind to develop Bitcoin that's probably not something you want in the first place.
I can only assume you haven't met very many engineers!
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.
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.
This is obviously that which we know of and we're both essentially agreeing as the NSA/CIA work together often and in secret ala Stuxnet.
I know coincidences happen but that’s one hell of a coincidence
But I don't know how to square that with the "Finney was running a marathon while satoshi sent emails" claim.
Indeed. Would anyone on the short list have known of this neighbor?
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.
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.”
I don't think you can attribute this to financial incentive. The actual Satoshi could forfeit 90% of their BTC and still have more than they could know what to do with.
At those kinds of levels I can see personal security being a higher consideration.
Either way it would give no indication who might be Satoshi because all candidates would have a similar incentive if they were Satoshi, and you are measuring the absence of information.
We're talking new technology where you're running fast and loose. It's absolutely possible, and I'd say a big reason why someone would not want to admit to being Satoshi.
I'm Satoshi, but I also lost billions because I messed up a Debian upgrade.
The motivations behind Bitcoin were clear.
All the wealthy people I know don’t really do it for the money. The money is the gauge or the metric they use to judge how well they are playing the game but what motivates them is the love of the game and their sense of purpose.
If someone was to truly believe that Bitcoin was going to be a gold/USD/Eurodollar/swift etc. replacement then their metric of success isn’t money if they got in early.
That would be very funny. I used to own a whole bitcoin when it was worth nothing.Didn't think it would be ever worth anything and formatted my hard drive to change distro.
Apologies if its mentioned in TFA, I only got halfway through it... the author's self-indulgence was getting to be a bit much
Ha, that may be technically true but when did you ever find a billionaire who would be OK with it?
there are automated tools for this now that students use routinely so that their papers don't get flagged as AI whether they wrote it or not
there would be lots of people that looked this up as it has been discussed a lot on those same mailing lists before being so commonplace
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."
In reality, they measure a bunch of things that may indicate lying, but they are just as likely to indicate that a person is nervous or reacting to the fact they're being tested at all.
They're typically inadmissible in court these days, however, there is still a pretty solid amount of blind trust in their results.
That part of the article gives a similar "lie detecting" hypothesis, just without the machine.
Naturally, this journalist doesn't seem to care much about any of that, or that it wouldn't really change anything at this point besides making the life of whoever it actually is hell.
I grew up evangelical and I've noticed this tendency in myself, and saw the connection to how the authorities at my school or church basically demanded dishonest performances or apologies under threat of physical punishment. Several friends over the years have said roughly the same, so I have an armchair theory this is pretty prevalent for that sort of childhood.
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.
privacy?
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.
Satoshi is either dead, or he lost his keys and probably wishes he were.
That aside, I don't agree with the premise. Back might be Satoshi, but there's nowhere near enough evidence in Carreyrou's article to reach that conclusion. He should have run it by some other veteran figures in the crypto community, so they could point out how quotidian some of the language and tropes being cited really are.
> I also don't know who satoshi is, and i think it is good for bitcoin that this is the case, as it helps bitcoin be viewed a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity.
That’s as close to admitting it as you can get
I would be coughing up those email headers if I were him. Or forging some, if necessary.
if he doesn't have the key then of course he's motivated to make sure bad people don't think otherwise (but the usual thing about bad people is they don't really have a habit of giving up without a fight, so if someone really thinks he has the keys he cannot do shit to convince them otherwise, so he's again back to hiring security)
There is no reason to cooperate with journalists with a slant.
Kind of a disappointing piece of work from the guy who took down Theranos. His journalistic talents are sorely needed elsewhere right now.
I don't think the emails exist. What was published in court records, lacking metadata, could easily be forged. The metadata is harder to forge. Not impossible, but harder, especially long after the fact.
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.
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.
> It was the beginning of an era in which Mr. Back quickly amassed influence and became a ring leader in the still small Bitcoin community. To staff Blockstream, he poached the top Bitcoin Core developers from their day jobs at companies like Google and Mozilla, giving him tremendous sway over the digital currency. He also became very wealthy: Over the next dozen years, Blockstream and its affiliates would raise $1 billion in funding and Blockstream would reach a valuation of $3.2 billion.
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g
I 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.
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
But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Electric%3A_The_Bitcoin_... is a bit more compelling. Satoshi is Adam Back and Peter Todd.
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...
Spend this effort investigating corruption.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
One can always suppose the identified individual is a double, triple, quadruple agent.
One level higher than you.
yes in general it's not good reasoning but given that in this case we know that we're talking about someone who tried to stay anonymous and comes out of the cypherpunk culture we can pretty much assume that if they've been interviewed they've denied it.
It's not like that accusation is random, it's that this is what the real Nakamoto, whoever it is, would have said
Adam could have released the email metadata and that would have absolved him, but he didn’t.
What if he gives an metadata that doesn't reveal anything? Then, you'd argue that he did that metadata.
Reasoning: They have the chops to create the world's first system where consensus, scarcity, and ownership exist without a central authority... But, they also lack the ability to write a Perl script to "Send Later". Checks out.
What the parent is suggesting is that Finney covered his tracks by leaving digital fingerprints (as Satoshi, supposedly) while he was actually out running. This requires that he not only thought someone was tracking Satoshi's email activity, but also tracking his own whereabouts. I can see someone trying to hide their digital identity, but intentionally setting up false alibis seems insanely paranoid to me, which is why I don't buy it.
But regarding Back, the article also points to periods where Back goes dormant while Satoshi becomes active or vice versa. That's not the behaviour of someone who is particularly devious at constructing false alibis.
Likewise, the argument discounting szabo because he exposed some ignorance of Bitcoin is exactly what someone might do to throw off the scent.
It was running on outdated software with known vulnerabilities
(part or all of)
The reporting already establishes all three parties (Satoshi being the third) were familiar/friendly with one another. The reporting says that Finney was the recipient of the first ever Bitcoin transaction, which seems like a completely natural thing to do if the two of you are working together.
Finney's name also rises to the top in a few of the author's analysis, while also noting:
> "But his analysis had been hampered by the fact that most of Mr. Back’s papers were coauthored with other cryptographers, which made it difficult to know who really wrote them."
Hal Finney's passing also helps explain how such a monumental secret of Satoshi's identity has remained a secret for so long. The only other person who's in on the secret is Back himself.
Edit: To add further conjecture, it wouldn't surprise me if Satoshi's wallet is locked away in a trust or tied up with Finney's estate. I can imagine a scenario where the keys to the wallet are legally unobtainable until such time that both Finney and Back have passed, at which point the wallet is liquidated and its proceeds donated (Finney previously raised money for ALS research).
That implies it's just Back who was the Satoshi poster. And if so, you don't have any evidence Finney is a technical co-founder.
I do think there's something to my idea that the reason we haven't seen any activity from Satoshi's wallet is because it's being held in some sort of trust. An individual might not go to the trouble of setting something like that up, but a collective might be more inclined to do so. I haven't seen anyone else float this line of reasoning before and it seems to make more sense than the prevailing theories.
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.
One can only narrow the things they care about to those they can verify (or personally affect them) and go after primary sources themselves and form their own conclusions. I'm no longer convinced that modern journalism is good for anything more than starting bonfires.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/sugar-weasel-the-clown-escor... This article by Vice is 100% bullshit. Vice basically published this PR piece for the guy as a favor. A lot of articles that you read are really coordinated press releases -- like the initial Blake Lively v Justin Baldoni NYT hitpiece. Yes, I know this is dumb and totally entertainment and not "news", but this article actually harmed the business of the actual guy that Weasel ripped his shtick off from. Aaron Zilch used to rant about this guy and how bullshit this article was for years. There's a small clown kink/BDSM community in Vegas and those in it at the time this was published all called it out for the bullshit it was. Asked Vice for a correction/retraction and they did nothing.
Somebody handed them a clickbait story and they published it for the clicks.
See also, Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
Most reporting is garbage once you get into the details.
> Pretty compelling story. Not necessarily for its revelations, but for the fact that John Carreyrou and the NYT decided to publish it at all.
(There are some other safeguards, but they're highly situational.)
The conflict between journalism and "doxxing" is a Redditism that people are frantically trying to import into real life. Maybe Reddit norms will upend the longstanding norms (and purpose) of journalism! But nobody should kid themselves that the norms have always been compatible.
But I think this "Redditism applied to real life" is actually society grappling with the ethics of public safety and social accountability in the 21st century. Is it okay to dox a 16 year old Twitch streamer? Or a wealthy Satoshi? Or a crypto-Nazi? Laws only define so much, and we (society) have to fill in the gaps, which is messy. I think we're figuring out where the line is in real time.
There are many people, both FOSS devs and working for major corporations, that have contributed or singularly been responsible for very impactful technologies, but in general, if that person wants to keep their persona discreet and there is no evidence they have done anything of public interest, the reporting remains purely on what they have done. Akin to why Wikipedia generally has rules for notability (I’d argue Satoshi falls under ONEVENT if we are strict here).
To me, the way you describe it, the line appears to be less in whether there may be a public interest and more whether there is public attention. In other words, is the line in the sand whether people should know this or whether they want to (and thus buy copies)?
Genuinely asking, is there a rule set on this the NYT should adhere to? What is the APs position for dem asking a pseudononymous character only notable for a specific thing?
There is no wait they can be 100% sure, so they will ruin someone's life over what?
What harm is caused by this article, do you think? He is already incredibly wealthy, already has security, and many people already assumed he was Satoshi Nakamoto. Claiming that someone invented a world altering technology is neither libel, nor defamation, _even if it an intentional lie_. If it is not a lie, or is merely a mistake it _certainly_ is neither.
> What harm is caused by this article, do you think?
Historically, newspapers often published the full name and physical address of every person they covered, from judges to drunks to rape victims to people suspected of a crime. I'm sure people back in the day called that pure journalism, but I don't think we'd call it "good" today. Our standards today might also not be as good as we assume.
Also, has others have noted it’s trivial to put other a list of wealthy people. In fact, it’s probably better to skip the Forbes 400 list who probably have some level of private security. Just go through the board member lists of Fortune 500 companies.
"Hey this guy probably had an access to a few billion USD worth of btc, maybe still has, his name is X, he lives in Y. He wishes to be anonymous but he knows C++ and we got him!".
The thing is, up until the advent of the internet it basically didn't matter - although in some cases, e.g. the German left-wing terror group "RAF", rich people did end up getting v&, in some cases killed. But that was a rarity.
But now with the possibilities of modern technology? Being able to be active on the Internet without hiding behind a pseudonym is a rare privilege. Wrong political opinion? Some nutjob from the opposite side can and will send anything from "pizza pranks" to outright SWAT to your home (or your parents, or ex-wife, or anyone they can identify as being associated with you). And if you got money? Stalkers, thieves, robbers, scammers, you will get targeted.
And if Satoshi's holdings now exceed $1B, well, for better or worse, multiple courts have ruled that billionaires are inherently public figures, because of their "outsized effect on public discourse".
Either way, why can't they just deal with it the way other obscenely rich people deal with it?
You can’t just say “but this is doxxing” and expect people to know what you are talking about and also attach the same negative label to it as you do the same way you would when you call out murder or theft.
I personally don’t find “doxxing” that useful as a concept and as a guidepost to what I consider ethical or not. People who use the concept tend to be extremely zealous with at, to a point where anything identifying anyone is doxxing (and doxxing is to those people self-evidently unethical) and that just doesn’t seem useful or practical to me at all.
As to this particular case: if you create something as corrosive, destructive and powerful as Bitcoin society should know you. You don’t get to hide in anonymity at all.
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.
I'm sure you can tell us, and I'm sure you all will attest it, but is it true though?
You probably wouldn't "out" Satoshi if it was one of you working on anonymous payment systems on the mailing list, and it very obviously is - there were like ten people at most, if we're generous, who were working on what was at the time an extremely nice cryptography topic.
Which is fine I guess, bit the attestation doesn't mean much.
On the other hand, just go read Adam's twitter. Half the time it is incomprehensible word salad because Adam clearly still does not proof-read his communications. Yet Satoshi's emails and forum posts were always considered and well-crafted.
In any case, I have no stake in this. I don't even own bitcoin anymore. It's just frustrating to see people's lives continuously turned upside down for no reason other than to drive clicks towards the NYT, without even the most basic journalistic integrity.
And it seems also the thing you mention about taking money on bad terms should be independently verifiable, which the journalist writing this article should probably have checked.
I have trouble believing Satoshi would pursue a venture capital startup founder life in his personal life, assuming he didn't burn his wallets. I would find it a lot more likely that he pursued an academic career at his own tempo, writing a paper here and there, maybe teaching undergraduates even, etc. But that's a lot closer to my dream life, so maybe I'm biased there as well!
That's a bit like a mathematician trying damn hard to prove something, proving it for most cases, and then be totally unaware of the proof six months later, relying on his own proof and proving it for all cases. That doesn't sound like it happens very often, especially not for heavily online academics.
Are you sure he wasn't just politely nodding along to the entrepreneur explaining his invention to him?
Which is fine. Nick was only just starting to learn about bitcoin at this time. I didn't understand this until much after I was first exposed to bitcoin, tbh. Much of how bitcoin/crypto works, although we take it for granted now, was very non-obvious to people working on ecash-like systems at the time. Bitcoin basically violates every inviolable constraint that cypherpunks had put on digital money systems.
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...
Doesn't wondering such disqualify you as reasonably informed concerning any online culture related topics, let alone something connected to cypherpunk ideals? Pseudonyms were always the norm, it was always weirder to see somebody operating out in the open when they were plotting ways to use technology to asymmetrically alter society itself.
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.
Which I find highly suggestive about the true nature of the creator(s) of bitcoin.
I'd argue this is the best reason to remain silent as much as one can.
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.
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.
I don't believe any live human being has the wherewithal to not use any of the $100B+ in the Satoshi wallets, which has led me to believe it was Hal Finney. Back and Finney both being in on it would explain some of the email timing as well
(It is so basic, I’m still confused by people asking how could he not sell those coins. Because the answer is simple: to whom?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dunno it assumes their cypherpunk group must always discuss strictly cryptography and never discuss anything else. It could be just some off-topic ideas floating around in their community.
For me, the only solid, damning evidence would be statistical methods of text analysis like they do to prove authenticity of a literary work.
That could be a valid methodology if you pre-registered the list of quirks before doing the investigation.
But in this case the journalist clearly didn't do that, but tweaked the set of quirks until they produced the desired outcome.
>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.
The bias is built into it.
This is scientifically verified and yet nobody does anything about it.
100% of the people who have died have been exposed to DHMO.
So dismissive of all the transhumanist efforts to eradicate death!
[0] https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-... [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
(I needed to be able to post that to HN tonight.)
They also consumed all of the french fries and burrito coverings, and were otherwise reduced to eating Flaturin -- "Hand-to-Mouth Goodness". Let us also not forget about the Great Trash Avalanche of 2506.
It was only towards the very end that they came 'round to using water (from the toilet!) for crops, put the smart dude in charge, and they all lived happily ever after.
Perhaps it'd have been a better fit if they actually killed the protagonist, Not Sure, and faded to black after the last edible plant was shown to wither and die. Maybe the end credits could have even included sepia-toned photos akin to those from the Siege of Leningrad, with slow Ken Burns-style layered pans and zooms documenting the peril.
But, I mean: It was supposed to be a comedy. :)
Seriously why would gov use pgp? They would be the last group i would expect to use something like PGP.
You mean the people responsible for not allowing us to embrace Nuclear 30 years before we should have?
Sorry but we still live in a democratic society, as much as Sam Altman would convince you otherwise. The buck stops at failing to convince those we entrust with power to make pro-nuclear regulations.
Learn to organize better or continue failing at influencing society.
As witnessed by the US inability to build anything for a generation or two. It’s all NIMBY (or worse) all the time.
Anti-anything is fighting a nearly unwinnable asymmetric political fight these days. Eventually times will get hard enough where this flips, but we are nowhere close to that yet.
the problem is that those people who don't agree with me are also not taking the externalized cost of non-action.
You're going to have to go out and speak with people that disagree with you person to person to try to convince them to join your cause.
If you can't do this, you won't succeed.
Signal, the free encryption app used by journalists
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.
Could you expand on this please?
A man in the middle attack would maybe work in rare cases, at great cost, and then you'd get one or two messages and immediately make people aware that they'd been attacked. It's not worth it. I'm confident the TLAs never bothered to do it against anyone with public keys on a key server, the minimum effort you could make to guard against MITM attacks.
> 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.
> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.
Amazing! I bet they both for loops too! I heard Bitcoin relies heavily on for loops.
Infuriatingly, to people who don't know much about programming, these pieces of 'evidence' might sound quite compelling, because it will all sound equally obscure to them.
I'm only a quarter of the way through this piece, but I'm finding it very hard to take seriously.
A NYTimes journalist? I wouldn't bet on it. The experts might be smelly nerds, they'd cramp his style.
> 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'm now worried I've secretly been Satoshi the whole time.
Lmao. I really expected better from the guy who unmasked Theranos.
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.
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.
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).
Personally, I think Satoshi was Hal Finney.
> The following year, in 2015, the Bitcoin community fractured over a proposal to increase Bitcoin’s block size. A faction led by two Bitcoin developers, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, wanted to make the blocks much bigger to accommodate more transactions. But this was controversial...
> Mr. Back fiercely opposed increasing the block size. In a series of posts on the Bitcoin-dev list, he warned against Mr. Andresen and Mr. Hearn’s proposal in increasingly strident tones.
> 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.
I now realize that the Satoshi email was after Hal Finney's death so that changes my opinion.
From OP:
> Satoshi supported big blocks in his writings and empowered the pro-big block Gavin when he disappeared
This isn't correct. In fact, the linked email in the article says the opposite https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/6EC9DDF352DC4838AE9B088AB37...
>
> This isn't correct. In fact, the linked email in the article says the opposite
Characterizing the arguments are big vs small blocks, seems wrong.
There appeared to be broad agreement that the block size needed to be increased, however there were 4 competing proposed solutions(BIP 100, 101, 102, 103), and consensus on which approach to take could not be reached.
Gavin decided to push ahead with BIP 101, and both Satoshi and Adam agreed that it was reckless to proceed without better consensus.
The small block faction, of which Adam was absolutely one of the ring leaders, were willing to do literally anything to win. They were and still are collectivist totalitarians. Above it was described as a debate, but it wasn't, it was more like a war. Amongst other things, the small block faction:
• Launched botnet attacks on any node or company that expressed support for big blocks. They took Coinbase offline, they took any mining pool offline for merely allowing users to vote for big blocks. They took out entire datacenters because it hosted a single node expressing support for bigger blocks in its version handshake. One of these attacks was big enough to take out the internet for an entire rural ISP.
• Constantly lied about everyone who was working on bigger blocks. I've actually met people who said they didn't trust me because I worked for British intelligence. I've never worked for British intelligence!
• They wrote a tool to fuck with the vote we were trying to run. Back was fully in support of such tactics: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3hb63g/bip_suggest...
• They constantly manipulated people, promising them they'd work on a compromise solution whilst actually refusing to do so and organizing conferences with rules like "nobody is allowed to discuss solutions to the problem" or "nobody is allowed to make written notes".
... and more. I don't recall Adam expressing any opposition to these acts or trying to stop them. Frequently he was directly engaged in them (not sure who was behind the DDoS attacks, but none of the Blockstreamers publicly asked them to stop).
Satoshi's account had been hacked at that time, and one of the main arguments for raising the block size was simply that it wasn't controversial at all - it was in fact the planned roadmap for Bitcoin from day one, that everyone had signed up to and that Satoshi had discussed. Given their willingness to lie to everyone else and use outright illegal tactics to win, would a small blocker have forged an email from Satoshi? Absolutely they would, which is why nobody cared about it and it made no difference. Especially as that email inexplicably refuted a position Satoshi had repeatedly defended for years, without explanation.
The case for Jack Dorsey is much stronger than the Back claim.
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/6EC9DDF352DC4838AE9B088AB37...
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/55D1C81D.4070402@olivere.de...
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/1c295af4831b1a0f6fc85dc6dab...
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.”
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...
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
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.
If "Satoshi" were to ever try cashing out some of "his" BitCoin, I suspect that things could get interesting.
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…
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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?
Based on everything I've read, I think Satoshi is Len Sassaman
> Then, out of the blue, Satoshi appeared on the list with an email that neatly dovetailed with Mr. Back’s position
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.
Whoever Satoshi was is now dead.
Plus, 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.
If you're interested in serious research about Satoshi's identity, try this paper instead: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.10257
That’s about the level of investigative journalism performed by NYT here. Thanks for being sensible.
He could have lost the key and doesn't want to be a target or ridiculed. Happened to a lot of people.
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.
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.
He doesn’t write anything like Satoshi.
It is more plausible that Satoshi was a rogue AI, ET, the Illuminati or future time traveler instead of one single person :)
There was no HTML email in the early 90s. The font was the display font of whatever you read it on. Sheesh NYT.
Spoiler: it's not Adam Back!
Hal Finney is the strongest alternative, but even there, I’m not fully convinced. Hal had the technical profile, mined early, and received the first transaction. But he also feels almost too obvious. I believe, just as Adam Back's hashcash, Hal's RPOW was a precursor.
I lean toward Len Sassaman, who was deeply embedded in the exact world Satoshi seemed to come from: remailers, anonymity systems, OpenPGP, and privacy-first engineering. Same things that got his conversations with Adam and Hal going... Adam here is probably just protecting his friend's legacy
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.
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.
Clearly the guy doesn't want to be public and there is no public interest in figuring him out either.
He had a calm, cool, consistent, professional demeanor. Always worlds different than the people people claim him to be.
You'd have to believe these public figures were playing 4D chess where they invented a persona and spent a couple years impeccably roleplaying it with no mistakes only to abandon it.
Aside from it being incredibly difficult, unlikely, and premeditated to do that, you can read the posts of Szabo et al and see they literally don't have it in them.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking of that Show HN 10 years ago that deanonymized all of our HN alt accounts with a basic trigram comparison or whatever it was, even alt accounts with three short posts.
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.
Not only that, but the exceedingly niche C++ language and the MIT license!
It's very common for this to happen when media are trying to unmask an anonymous figure. There are parallels with the furore around Burial's nomination for the Mercury Prize, journalists picking any number of seemingly random and unlikely well-known names to attribute as being him, when the truth was that he really just wasn't interested in publicity and preferred to live in peace and quiet. Now, in the days of social media etc. it seems even more unimaginable to them that someone would want to remain in the background and not claim the limelight for their work.
Some people like mysteries.
I was articulating why someone might want to know, as tavavex asked.
The zodiac killer still has an active subreddit! https://old.reddit.com/r/ZodiacKiller/
> Maybe hurting him or trying to profit off of the knowledge somehow, or even just becoming famous for being the person who found Satoshi Nakamoto.
Yeah, there's likely some pride/ego involved, and sadly trying to hurt the person most responsible for cryptocurrency.
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
Of course at this point the only "sane" reasons for someone to not touch the wallet is that they are sitting on so much BTC anyway, they don't want to cause the price to drop, or the keys are lost (but the person is alive), or the person is dead.
If someone has access they can hire security for a few billion dollars and still have some change.
If we count "insane" reasons then of course there are quite a few more. Such as ideological motivations.
So at the time of his arrest (after which he was in federal custody and the DEA were monitoring all his use of electronic devices) Bitcoin had only been in existence for three and a half years.
The drug trafficking and Le Roux's various other criminal enterprises all started happened in the mid-late 2000s, before Bitcoin was worth anything
(But losing keys is very easy, especially if the feds take your devices and your means of buying new ones, and freely accessing potential backups.)
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.
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.)
I know the author isn't claiming this is definitive evidence, but I think it's so comically weak it is probably not worth mentioning at all.
Satoshi’s wallets are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and there have been kidnappings/torture/murders for much less than that.
Do they just not care about the ethical implications?
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.
And if he comes to harm as a result of someone believing the NYT?
The NY Times isn’t calling for violence.
And the negligent driver also didn't mean to cause injury, yet we have laws on negligent driving.
If the NY Times would have known that harm could come to someone by having information published, they should consult and/or take measures to prevent that harm (or at least, take measures to minimize it).
But don't worry, they'll definitely solve this crime, because the clearance rate for impersonal crimes that don't involve family, friends or business associates is famously high. ...oh wait.
It’s another day, why hasn’t some nut captured Back yet and done any of the fearful things you’re insinuating yet?
In fact why didn’t someone just kidnap and torture ALL of the possible Satoshis? The names have been known for quite some time. I’m sorry but your theory that revealing who Satoshi is, is bad doesn’t hold water.
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.
If you priced Gates backwards in gold, his $102 billion is about $13 billion two decades ago. He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
Gold is a weird one. It’s has a hell of a run over the last decade. I’m not sure it looked so rosy in 2015. I kinda feel like betting on gold is betting on the end of civilization. I don’t really want to be right.
Someone selling single Satoshis from Satoshi's stash would herald the second coming of Satoshi. Can you imagine the hype?
Partially due to scarcity, but also due to hype.
As a weaker point: I would expect an increase in the market capitalisation of the bitcoin float. Ie if you multiply the price of bitcoin by the amount of movable bitcoin right now and after the first Satoshi is sold, you compare with the new price of bitcoin multiplied by the newly enlarged amount of movable bitcoin.
The strong claim is that the price per bitcoin would go up, too. Not just the market cap of the float.
> It could also cause panic selling as it might indicate the wallets have been brute force cracked.
Suppose I brute force cracked it to get access to the bitcoins. I would:
Quietly amass a large offsetting position in the bitcoin futures market (and wherever else you can do this), before I make any moves. Then (assuming I couldn't hedge my whole exposure at decent prices) I would use all means available to pretend that Satoshi had woken up again. Eg use specially fine-tuned LLMs to mimic his style to post on the usual mailing list etc. Some people will believe you, some won't.
I'd say post a bit in Satoshi's name to build interest. Then skeptics will say: prove it. And you 'prove' it by selling moving a few Satoshis between your own wallets back and forth. (Don't sell anything yet.) The hype will build, and you sell into it on the futures market.
The last step is important, because you can get rid of your bitcoin exposure this way, without any trace on the blockchain. So you can even vow to never release any of the stash on the market and other shenanigans. That should help the price.
Well, the futures will come due eventually, and then you can move the stash. The price might or might not crash, but you don't care, because you already locked in your profits on the derivatives.
I agree with you, but isn't the value of gold also almost entirely due to hype? Sure, there are some industrial applications, but those are minor components of demand for gold.
Hype is just another way of saying "people obtain pleasure from owning this thing" and that's pretty much what sets demand for most goods. Don't even get me started on diamonds. The whole wedding ring having a diamond is hype.
Bitcoin just makes this explicit and impossible to deny.
But a bitcoin in your vault by itself is indistinguishable from a shitcoin I just made by forking bitcoin with the same code but a new genesis block. Or even more pointed: the alternative futures of bitcoins after any route not taken by the community after any hard fork.
In any case, I agree that much of the value of gold comes from social conventions, too, yes.
The dollar is trading pretty much at 30-year historic highs relative to all other currencies. You have to go back to ~2000 to find a stronger era, and then the 1980s before that.
That hasn't been his goal. For the last two decades he's been running a huge charitable foundation...
Gates's relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein started in 2011, a few years after Epstein was convicted for procuring a child for prostitution
I see.
Someone can do more than one thing.
I assume you think you're adding some kind of value to the discussion, here. But who knows, maybe you just really fucking love malaria.
Do you know what an assertion is?
You can't price dollars in gold to measure value. Gold doesn't measure value better than the dollar at any point in time, let alone over time. Just use the price index for one currency, or the relative price indexes across currencies.
However, since the world largely went off the gold standard, the purchasing power of gold has been a lot more volatile.
It always baffles me that people have near religious faith in a Holy Satoshi that walks away from billions of dollars “for the sake of the game”.
If he’s really so unconcerned with money or fame, it would be far more interesting for him to build it up precisely to blow it down. That’s some cosmic coyote kind of behavior and that I will always get behind.
I'm not so sure about this. Bitcoin thrives on vibes. The second coming of Satoshi (as evidence by control over his wallets), would surely drive a lot of Bitcoin hype.
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.e. it makes sense to have a long term planned migration of what's active rather than any type of instantaneous rush/change.
I don't know of any law against it except for specific populations like law enforcement and even those usually have exceptions for journalism.
So the real truth is "it depends". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The right to privacy here never meant "noone may know that I exist".
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....
(nice permalink URL guys.)
So if Forbes publishes a list of the richest people in the world, it makes them targets?
This is just a strange situation where someone has made billions without their identity being known, without being a criminal.
Or they appear(ed) in public to make something of being in public (such as lobbying, or civic activities, or philanthropy etc). This makes any article about them not a doxx - they already revealed themselves publicly. You cannot segregate public affairs of the person with private affairs.
For now they are busy killing their wives and relatives, but eventually they will run out of money for alcohol and will have to find a "job".
Security through obscurity actually works in real life. There are lots of people that hide all their lives in a humble way, only to get discovered as millionaires after they die. Because you don't have hundred, thousands of bots looking for "vulnerabilities" on everyone's life at almost zero cost and big potential profit.
It was upending his psychiatry practice because he blogged, albeit in anonymized fashion, about his patients without disclosing it to them which I'd say is unethical but at the very least in the interest of his patients to be made known to them. I would be pretty pissed if I recognized something I told my psychiatrist on an internet blog. Frankly given how strongly one has to consent to even legally process clinical data I've never been sure if that was at all legal.
When someone's identity is in the public interest an investigative journalist isn't doxxing anyone, they're doing their job. Both true for Nakamoto and arguably Scott
There are ~50k psychiatrists in the US. Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott. Mathematically, that means knowing "Scott is a psychiatrist" brings you down to ~5 people. Even if we assume there's some outlier clustering of people named Scott who are psychiatrists, we're still talking about some small number.
Surely adding in the middle name essentially makes him uniquely identifiable without an other corroborating information.
Seems to be more like one in 425 per SSA.
The magnitude is so small that anonymity is essential broken.
Doxxing also increases public knowledge, but knowing who’s behind some online pseudonym is much less useful than patient anecdotes (what would you do with the former? Satisfy your interest (or what else do you mean by “public interest”)?). Moreover, unlike anonymous patient data, it has a serious downside: risking someone’s job, relationships, or even life.
Cade Metz wrote the article under his real name, and his home address is public information, but presumably he wouldn't appreciate it being published on the internet. Why is that any different?
The journalist themselves is a real piece of work: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/463503-sarah-jeong-out-at...
Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven't been on their mind for a long time, and them preaching to anyone about ethics is rank hypocrisy.
People can opt to not read and pay such people.
> You’re wrong. NYT does pay attention to subscriber cancellations. It’s one of the metrics for “outrage” that they take to distinguish between “real” outrage and superficial outrage. What subscribers say can back up dissenting views inside the paper about what it should do and be.
“How do you know if a conspiracy theorist is really on to something?”
“Check the missing persons list.”
You weren't messing, she seems lovely.. /s
Unfortunately looking back it seems pretty plausible that chinese gov censored her exactly because of her blogposts about how she is in danger in china.
Real consequences for the interviewee, all for some clicks. That's not journalism.
This is just her talking about herself and I am not sure how this is about chinese gov politics or how it is damning/doxing her.
Anyway her response was to find home address of one of the editors and put it in her next video. If i would be journalist and somebody did that to me i would expect my company to use their lawyers.
Just like Knight Rider and Matlock had to deliver enough entertainment to keep you from switching channels and instead have you watch the next beer ad.
Naomi has huge youtube and she is very public figure in Shenzhen.
She has very weird opinion on Chinese government, she acts to like it but on the other hand with her sexual orientation (which was public knowledge, plastered all over reddit, twitter etc. way before any articles) and her admitting to bypass Chinese firewall etc. which is illegal.
Kinda weird, to do this, when you're public person.
And weirdest of all, she has/had Uyghur girlfriend and she basically said, that because of us (US/EU people) boycotting China for Xinjiang concentration camps for Uyghurs, nobody in Shenzen wants to hire Uyghur people, so WE are to blame.
I don't know if she really meant it, or she'd post it to twitter to suck Chinese government, you know what.
Imho, with grain of salt too, I think she was partially managed by Chinese agency way before any articles, and they got angry because she was unable to steer the article to "China great, West is bad".
Because I have experience what Chinese agencies are willing to pay for mediocre influencers in my small EU country (10mil. people) just to visit China and make videos how they're "great". And they have 1/10 following of what Naomi has.
It's not like she's any browner..
Her being nasty elsewhere doesn't surprise me...
Other people use the formulation racism = prejudice about race, and end up talking past each other.
“Systemic racism” seems to a modern answer to this vagueness. I suppose the other side would be “individual racism”.
The “classic” definition of racism is something like “a system of oppression based on race”. People pull that out to explain why “[minority] people can’t be racist”, but that that definition isn’t about people. It’s about systems, so if we take that definition, no individual can be racist. Most of the same people who trot out this definition will still call majority-race individuals racist (clearly using a different definition). It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand to swap definitions in a self serving way like this.
> racism = prejudice + power
This seems like an oversimplified perversion of the “systemic” definition and doesn’t make sense if you actually consider it. By this definition a poor white woman basically couldn’t be racist, while a rich black man could.
I do agree that in this particular case the lady in question seems rather nasty, and the whole woke movement seems to be quite the circular firing squad.
Much like the "unmasking" of Banksy or Belle de Jour. Why do it other than nosiness?
Is the person committing a crime? No? Then leave them in peace.
This is just a journalist using the resources of NYTimes to show off that they can exert control over someone else.
I get you mean whether they are causing any actual harm though (and agree for many such unmaskings), it was just an amusing juxtaposition of literal statements.
> The New York Times published an article about the blog in February 2021, three weeks after Alexander had publicly revealed his name.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#The_New_York_...
In other words, imagine some investor had those billions, and could buy the key. Should they? A thing is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.
But I predict that modest selling would increase the bitcoin price. Just imagine the hype from the Second Coming of Satoshi. Bitcoin would be front page news in mainstream newspapers for that week.
“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.
No one defending privacy is claiming situation like a pedophile keeping a slave children in their basement should be undetectable because privacy should be an absolute barrier that let people whatever atrocities they want within private doors.
On the other hand, those who seriously care about privacy won’t believe it’s fine to have some laws supposedly enacted to protect the children but actually just implement general presumption of guilt and everyone being spied permanently.
By that logic we don't need judges.
Just read what the resp. law says and 'apply' it.
Bizarre.
Everything needs analysis of second order effects. Otherwise you wreck lives without even realizing that's what you're doing. It's the negligence of a drunk driver.
On the other hand, this also applies to Bitcoin. Satoshi, if he is real and alive and in control of his wallet, is a billionaire. Billionaires need to be kept under careful watch unless they, too, wreck lives without realizing.
Another character drowns the journalist in a toilet.
Second order effects can become a consideration, but the bar is high. Usually “will this place someone in immediate, specific danger of harm” vs potential risks.
As a recent example, journalists covering Iran in the past week had sources confirming the downed airman was located, but that the extraction planes had been unable to take off, and held off on publication. Same for advance knowledge of the Maduro raid. Both examples have been confirmed publicly by those journalists.
Not defending this particular decision at the moment, but someone who potentially controls Satoshi’s wallet has much more ability to protect themselves, and their desire to remain anonymous wouldn’t factor in.
Not cool?
They also can't easily sell that amount quickly without repercussions (and without another institution like an exchange).
You're right, but only to a limited degree.
Journalists just told everyone you are billionare, but you're just average SWE on $120k / year and absolutely no money for hiring small army of guards. Neither your own government agencies keep your back protected like they do for usual high profile people.
Now go find a proof for mafia that you are not in fact have a billion bucks on USD stick.
This has happened in this Satoshi hunt multiple times already. I mean finding that some random crypto related SWE is Satoshi when they are not.
FWIW, in this instance Adam Back is also a non-secret billionaire, mostly from his public involvement in a number of ventures within the Bitcoin ecosystem. The difference is closer to 1 order of magnitude than the 4 you're proposing.
Also there is massive difference between being rich, or even a super rich and literally hidding $50B under your bedsheet on USB stick.
No one expects that putting a gun to even a super rich person head will buy you a small country. You can kill a billionare, but you cant extract much value out of it other than $100k on their credit card and $500k watch neither of which you can really sell.
Havimg keys to $50B on USB stick is different level of danger.
If the receiver doesn't immediately move the bitcoin, the receiver is at risk of Satoshi stealing them by retaining the private key and moving them later.
Even if the receiver trusts Satoshi, if the receiver wants to spend the bitcoin on anything, there's the same problem again.
Bitcoins across old unused wallets worth $30B to $80B depend of how you count it.
It's worth considerably less if you make any attempt to count it accurately. The market capitalization reflects the fact that old unused wallets are unused. If they stopped being unused, market capitalization would drop.
If the system does crash, nothing of value would be lost. And we would be rid of ransomware.
> 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.
There may be credible journalists at some major print newspapers, but I don’t think there are many people who actually believe that any major US-based journalism outlet defaults to credible any more.
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.
Because in this particular case it endangers subject's life.
You're assuming and extrapolating.
"this particular case" ≠ "never"
I don't have anything to add that isn't already argued in other comments in this thread. I'm just pointing out that your opinions are not logical derivations.
This seems like a stretch. Mr Back is already a well-known wealthy person who (presumably) owns lots of crypto. I think it's a stretch to think this article significantly increase the danger to his life.
Those sweet, sweet clicks, and the eyeballs they bring along with them, of course
Readership, clicks and views
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.
More in the range of 100 billion
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.
(Of course, we could extend the same game and deny the moniker of 'newspaper' for a rag like that. But at some point, we are drifting too far from the mainstream accepted definition of words.)
I was replying purely to 'Oh really, there was a vote?'
Most places have votes every few years. And the elected representatives can generally make and amend or keep laws. The candidates can also generally make any promises they wish to make, and if the general public wants some specific laws changed, it's often a good idea for candidates to make that a part of their platform. And if people generally don't want a law changed, candidates tend to ignore them. Basic representative democracy stuff.
(We manage to mostly avoid that in Singapore.)
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.
Sure, rationally I agree, but clearly a lot of people do care. It may not matter in any substantive way who Satoshi is but people still care.
> There is no artistic intent to interpret
Is that the case? Obviously there is no artistic intent as bitcoin is not art, but it's not clear to me why the intent of an artist is important but the intent of a technologist is not.
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?
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.
Nobody seems to be angry at the inventor of coins and bills, though.
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.
This is such poor quality writing, I'm kind of shocked to see it in nyt. It reads like a family guy cutaway lampooning a whodunnit.
I honestly can't believe this warranted a full piece. I was wondering if this a symptom of the author going down some llm psychosis rabbit hole?
_youre absolutely right, you've repeatedly shown signs that back is satoshi. The pattern is clear: back isn't just some cypherpunk, he's Satoshi._
Because aba knew about how email worked, unlike Satoshi. A hotline is not at in IP, it is at a domain with an MX record. Satoshi was a Windows guy.
I've read somewhere that there are some very big bitcoin wallets nobody has touched since long ago. So it's safe to assume the keys are gone.
Does it matter if a large proportion of bitcoins are gone from the network?
"Now, there are only two of the accused who were British and only one of those has two spaces in every one of his papers. Figure it out people. It'll take you 15 minutes."
british guy.
the paper has two spaces after periods, and only one of these two british guys has two spaces after each period.
seems pretty conclusive.
it's Adam Back
The biggest new contribution to the Satoshi question seems to be ad hoc stylometry. To have faith in his methodology, he should be testing it on identitying other people. If he were to show me that a repeatable methodology that doesn't require hand tuning can identify other people with low error rate, and it said Back=Satoshi, that would be much more convincing.
Like so much tech writing done by non engineers, there are many places where mundane things are made to sound remarkable (e.g. Black's thesis used C++, the "heated debate").
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.
Satoshi can't spend any of his bitcoins without tanking bitcoin's price. So Satoshi needs to find some other way to support himself. Creating bitcoin related companies is one way.
Or they just lost access.
Losing access by intentionally deleting the keys? That agrees with my point that he knows it would cause problems to spend them, and decided not to spend them.
Losing access by accidentally deleting the keys? Would Satoshi really be that careless?
1. Someone so purely interested in the tech and not money they'd give up the wealth 2. Governments, specifically the ones that don't consider a few billion to be a lot 3. Someone who's dead
The value of the bitcoins in those early wallets isn't real, because they are the most watched bitcoin wallets in existence, and any movement there would send shockwaves through the crypto space.
First, they could just liquidate all their other BTC before moving the Satoshi coins.
Second, even with a significant price impact, the net worth of an additional 1M BTC would surely outweigh any realistic price slippage.
Third, the price probably wouldn't even crash that much. We're talking about a 5% increase in supply... which rationally, should result in a ~5% dip in price. I know the market would overreact, but I doubt it would be by much more than say 20%.
Do note that the selloff would be automatic, huge wallets are monitored 24/7.
If I was Satoshi, I would go a to big bank and sell the private key directly for huge discount. Still a billionaire, no trace.
And assuming they have lots of other bitcoin to liquidate first, the reasons to liquidate the early coins are basically gone. If they believe the price will continue to rise, and have enough wealth from later coins, they'd have little reason to rock the boat.
But if he did want to spend he could just start from his last coins backwards.
>The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea
Here are 2 people in 2013 expressing that idea: [4][5].
[1] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-...
[2] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/more-on-block-mining-history-...
[3] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/24/satoshi-s-fortune-a-more-accu...
e.g. Pick a name that puts people on a false trail.
Edit: I see you addressed this elsewhere. Thanks for contributing!
... why is it important?
I mean, let's say it was not a state guy but some agency, like with the xz utils backdoor (that was most likely not a solo dev, the coordination, time and planning seemed to indicate a state actor; also peculiar to see western-style folks use asian names here). Would that change the situation with regards to bitcoins?
Ultimately what should matter is whether xyz is secure or not. I just don't get the epic fascination with "who is mystery man 101".
"Anyway, here's my article where I try to make the creator's identity known"
Changing requirements ad-hoc throughout the article, picking and choosing ideal matches rather than objective ones, etc. basically trying to make the data fit the problem by force.
Author, over time, gets more desperate to be "the one that found Satoshi" and loses the plot entirely.
I mean, what the hell is this bullshit?
""" 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. In other words, for a few seconds, Mr. Back had let the mask fall and turned into Satoshi. """
On the other hand, who cares.
Dr Watson at work. Facepalm
lol
In other words it is almost irrational to deny it is you (if it is really you) if you are outted after a major investigation by the paper of record, so it is rational to take Back’s denial as honest.
His security is already screwed anyone who is incentivised to harm him for billions will already do it for tens of millions (or if they think there is more than 50% chance Back is a multi billionaire), so he might as well take the credit for it and live with the consequenes if it is really him.
It's interesting how those who are looking to expose Satoshi often ignore some pretty obvious clues and facts. Though given that I respect his/her anonymity, I'll leave it at that.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-04-08/rob...
I can see how some people get more excited and want to follow stories more closely but as I get older I notice how most of the time I don’t value it as much, and like trustworthy sources that deal with the detail to provide useful summaries and highlights for me.
Two of the problems with this article, among others:
> we identified 325 distinct errors in Satoshi’s use of hyphens.
> Mr. Back was a clear outlier. He shared 67 of Satoshi’s exact hyphenation errors. The person with the second-most matches had 38.
> It was when I was walking him through the similarities between things he and Satoshi had written.
> Implicit in that was an acknowledgment that he had been the one who wrote the quote.
If I'm in a conversation comparing my similar quotes, and 2 or 3 deep into the list, do I even need to know my specific quote before responding with why I might have said something similar?
The quotes in question:
> Satoshi: I'm better with code than with words though.
> Back: I'm better at coding, than constructing convincing arguments.
This article seems to conclude that a specialist in a domain sounds very much like another specialist in that domain, over the span of two decades, no less, cherry picking tiny bits of output over the two decades, so therefore they must be the same person. And on top of that, ignores evidence to the contrary, like the massive gap in hyphenation errors. LoL. Science & logic this article is not.
I wonder, based on the large number of distinct hyphenation errors, whether Satoshi is even from the UK or the US. Add in the use of a Japanese alias, and the Tokyo-based anonymizer, and the evidence starts to point towards a non-UK/US origin.
And then, not cashing out any of that massive hoard of wealth, how very Zen of them.
The article claims Adam Back "disappeared" on the cryptography mailing lists exactly when Satoshi Nakamoto became active (late 2008) and only "reappeared" around the time Satoshi stopped posting in 2011.
Back's rebuttal: He was highly active, "a lot of yakking" on the relevant lists and forums during Bitcoin's early years. He points out that his high volume of posts on electronic cash and cryptography topics naturally makes him visible in searches, creating confirmation bias when filtering for "Satoshi-like" activity.
The NYT analysis apparently missed or underweighted his continued contributions in developer chats, Bitcoin-related discussions, and other lists/forums.
The stylistic argument is weak. In 1990s technical mailing lists and Usenet, Many cypherpunks showed similar inconsistencies. The article treats these as highly distinctive "fingerprints" rather than common artifacts of the era's informal technical writing.
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.
* I'm extrapolating this timeframe from the quotations compared in the article.
In early days of Blockstream I remember him and Greg Maxwell spitballing ideas about Bitcoin, and he was clearly intellectually feeling out the constructions as novel concepts.
I have spent my fair time with geeks, myself included, and this "shiny new thing" geek excitement is distinctive. And Adam is a typical nerd for whom guile does not come easy, if at all.
I realize this is not a transferrable proof, but I stand by it, for what that's worth.
Journalists see this as their Moby dick story, their Jimmy Hoffa, as the real Satoshi knew that for Bitcoin to work and be taken seriously, he/she/it would have to be anonymous and take no part in it. Truly decentralized.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwVXC1Lf00k
[2] https://bitslog.com/2020/08/22/the-patoshi-mining-machine/
So the risk of centrally founding another digital currency was clear at the time and e-Gold was discussed by both Back and Finney.
Launching without a single point of failure, a single arrestable founder was critical to the success of Bitcoin.
1. He kept citing things like PGP, C++ and distributed systems as things in common between Satoshi and Back, but would have described 75% of pragmatic comp sci folks at the time.
2. His end section about word correlations where he started with Back's weird isms and then started finding them in Satoshi's writings seemed like pure Texas sharp shooter fallacy. He started with broader scoring mechanisms and when those didn't work he started seeking out measures that fit his case better.
All of this based on a vibe of how the guy seemed in a Netflix documentary.
I have no idea if Satoshi is Back or not and would love to close this chapter. But this "reporter" seems to have started with a conclusion and then tried to find data that proved the conclusion.
Secondly, as a technical person reading this written for a non-technical audience, it reads like the journalist wanted his high for most and nothing else.
xvxvx•2d ago
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.
someperson•2d ago
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
jahnu•2d ago
"Sorry director, the experimental project was a failure. We deleted it all now to clean up and free resources. Oh and yeah unrelated, I need to hand in my notice. Want to spend more time with my ...er... family. Thanks."
cucumber3732842•1d ago
But other than that it would make a good show.
WhereIsTheTruth•2d ago
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
Lammy•1d ago