New York Times claims to have found Satoshi Nakamoto

A New York Times investigation by John Carreyrou claims that a British cryptographer named Adam Back is the strongest candidate (so far) to be Satoshi Nakamoto. The research cites overlaps in writing style, ideology, technical background, and old posts that described key parts of Bitcoin years before its launch.

Carreyrou is a renowned investigative journalist and author, known for exposing the massive fraud at Theranos while working at the Wall Street Journal.

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Here is an excerpt from the publication:

… As anyone familiar with Bitcoin history will tell you, Satoshi was a master at the art of maintaining anonymity online, leaving little, if any, digital footprint. But Satoshi did leave behind a body of writing, including a nine-page white paper (PDF) describing his invention and numerous posts on the Bitcointalk forum, an online forum where users gathered to discuss the software, economics, and philosophy of the digital currency.

And that corpus, as it turned out, had expanded significantly during the fraudster’s civil trial , when Martti Malmi, a Finnish programmer who worked with Satoshi in the early days of Bitcoin, published a collection of hundreds of emails he had exchanged with him. Emails sent by Satoshi to other early Bitcoin users had surfaced before, but none came close to Malmi’s in volume.

If Satoshi was ever to be found, I was convinced that the key lay somewhere in these texts.

On the other hand, others must have followed this path before me. Journalists, academics, and internet detectives have been trying to identify Satoshi for 16 years. During that time, more than 100 names have been proposed, including those of an Irish cryptography student, an unemployed Japanese-American engineer, a South African criminal, and the mathematician portrayed in the film “A Beautiful Mind.”

The most tantalizing theories had focused on coincidences that aligned with what little was known about Satoshi: a particular coding style, a mysterious work history, an expertise in the basic technical concepts of Bitcoin, an anti-government worldview. But there was always an alibi or some other inconsistent or contradictory element. Each failure had been met with glee by many members of the Bitcoin community. As they liked to point out, only Satoshi could definitively prove his identity by moving some of his digital coins. Any proof other than that was not acceptable.

It seemed foolish to think that I could somehow solve a case that had confounded so many others. But I craved the thrill of a big, demanding story. So I decided to try once again to uncover the mysterious creator of Bitcoin.

Back, for his part, denies that he is Satoshi, writing in a post on X :

“I am not Satoshi, but I was early on focused on the positive social impacts of cryptography, online privacy, and electronic cash, hence my active interest from ~1992 onwards in applied research in ecash, the privacy technology on the cypherpunks list that led to hashcash, and other ideas.”

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