Satoshi Sweepstakes: NYT Puts Adam Back in the Hot Seat (Again)

The New York Times dropped another investigation on Wednesday, this time arguing that Adam Back — the British cryptographer behind Hashcash — is the most likely person hiding behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym. Back, naturally, denied it, pointing reporters to his post on X where he's maintained the same tune for years: he's not Satoshi. In the post, he noted his early focus on cryptography, online privacy, and electronic cash, with an active interest dating back to 1992 on the cypherpunks list that eventually led to Hashcash and other ideas. Because apparently, if you've been nerding out about digital money for three decades, you definitely invented Bitcoin — or at least that's the logic. Meanwhile, the rest of us are just hoping someone eventually finds the receipts.

The investigation was handled by John Carreyrou, the French-American journalist famous for taking down the Theranos fraud. His report claims Back — who got a citation in Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper — was actively discussing electronic cash for years, then went quiet right as Bitcoin (BTC) showed up, only to resurface after Satoshi vanished. It's one of Bitcoin's oldest mysteries getting a fresh coat of paint, putting one of the protocol's earliest and most influential cryptographers squarely in the spotlight. But as always, the evidence remains circumstantial without any cryptographic smoking gun. Somewhere, Satoshi is either laughing, sipping pina coladas, or both — because the man who built a censorship-resistant money system has successfully hidden from the entire financial media industrial complex for fifteen years.

Carreyrou's team also leaned on stylometric analysis, arguing Back's writing shared quirks with Satoshi's — formatting habits, hyphenation tendencies, and overlapping technical language. Among Cypherpunks, Cryptography, and Hashcash mailing list participants, only Back hyphenated "proof-of-work" and referenced the obscure Russian currency WebMoney, both showing up in Satoshi's emails. Back was also one of just two who wrote "partial pre-image" the same way Satoshi did, and the only one who discussed "burning the money" for digital coins. So there you have it: hyphenation habits and WebMoney knowledge. If that's not a cryptographic smoking gun, I don't know what is. Maybe a memo from 1993 with the word "bitcoin" spelled with two T's.

Back's career path only adds fuel to the fire, according to the report. He avoided Bitcoin early, then in 2013 dove in headfirst, co-founding Blockstream