alt Hacker NewsWho is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
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This article is kinda bogwater. Repeating the same points, writing as if it were LinkedIn, pretending to be technically competent while obviously not. Over and over and over, reiterating the same points but ultimately getting nowhere.
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. """
this and the recent banksy 'umasking' by major news outlets is sad in our era of huge US governmental crimes and coverups.
Not directly related but still interesting. The fellow who came up with the ide for the Architectural Uprisings we have seen around the world, is still anonymous.
Aba wouldn't have said: "Send X bitcoins to my priority hotline at this IP and I’ll read the message personally."
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.
Would be darkly hilarious if Santoshi lost his wallet long ago…
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…
You can't sell books or articles from saying something that's been said before, but Nick Szabo remains the best Satoshi candidate by a mile.
He had developed the system closest to Bitcoin, he was actively seeking collaborators to turn his system into a practical offering briefly before Bitcoin was released, and he was the only cipherpunk who conspicuously said very little when the system he'd been trying to realize for a decade suddenly appeared. Satoshi credited all his inspirations except for the most obvious one, Szabo's. No one in the cipherpunks mailing list thought any of this was odd, probably because it was obvious to them who Satoshi was.
In contrast to a certain convicted Australian fraudster who got caught trying to backdate his statements, Szabo got caught trying to front-date them. His politics are a match to Satoshi (tbf. true of all the cipherpunks), his coding style matches Satoshi, his writing style matches Satoshi if you disable the British English spellchecker. For good measure his initials match Satoshi.
I view articles like these as a good test of which investigative journalists are hacks indifferent to the truth - except for that Wired guy, who I think knows better but thinks it's righteous to lie a little to protect Satoshi's anonymity.
Believe it or not, but the answer is revealed in this videogame: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
Spoiler: it's not Adam Back!
> Ancestors of today’s message boards, mailing lists were large group emails in old typewriter font that subscribers received in their inbox. To communicate, respondents replied-all.
There was no HTML email in the early 90s. The font was the display font of whatever you read it on. Sheesh NYT.
This is the most compelling "who is Satoshi?" post I've found:
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."
Do we think CIA/NSA/FBI know who is Satoshi? Maybe not all of them, but someone in the government has to know, no?
This was a fun article, but also an oddball collection of strong and weak claims.
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.
When did Satoshi make an appearance in 2015? I couldn't find the spot in the article where the author cites it. Everywhere I've read it states his last interactions were 2010, and his wallet hasn't been touched since then either.
Based on everything I've read, I think Satoshi is Len Sassaman
Satoshi is the guy with the PhD in distributed computing who took a sabbatical during which bitcoin was published.
Should we believe that intelligence agencies like CIA or FBI doesn't know her/him?
Bad science, -- article contains a litany of points that are true for many other people (myself)-- and a number of the bits of I have personal experience with are just flatly untrue or misleading, e.g. citing Back's name at the top of a paper I coauthored as evidence of his importance to it, -- the names were alphabetic. Not that it was an important point, but I think failing to notice the names being alphabetic and including it speaks to the bar being held to the other 'evidence' there.
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.
Len Sassaman with contributions from others through time. We already know that.
fascinating. John Carreyrou is the guy who broke the Theranos story!
But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Electric%3A_The_Bitcoin_... is a bit more compelling. Satoshi is Adam Back and Peter Todd.
If Satoshi is still alive (I believe it's a single guy), then it's incredible the amount of self-control he has to not reveal his identity after all these years. Not needing the wealth or the fame and ego-stroking that comes with being behind such a revolutionary technology is enviable.
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.
I think the NSA is Satoshi Nakamoto. That makes most sense.
I'm surprised that this is the best NYT investigative journalism could do. It's well written and comprehensive, but it also contains no new information.
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.
I always thought it was Argonne that built it. Interestingly it seems that Adam Back did work with them. So maybe?
what if satoshi is not one person but a phenomenon, a group of minds... the interesting thing about the technology is that it is a public ledger and everything that goes along with that when you tie it to the metadata trails across the networks people use it on... ohh the implications
Why are journalists giving this guy exposure?
He doesn’t write anything like Satoshi.
Why does it matter? Changes nothing except doxxing someone
Seems like the IRS would have an enormous vested interest in tracking him down too…
The guy who took down Theranos spent a year on hyphenation patterns. Respect the commitment.
I don't believe anyone claiming that Satoshi is still alive. There is zero chance any human who put so much effort into creating something would remain silent while it became a $2 trillion phenomenon that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Satoshi is certainly dead.
> mailing lists were large group emails in old typewriter font
lol
> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.
Dr Watson at work. Facepalm
Hal Finney
I have always thought Satoshi must be dead (as a couple of past suspects are).
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.
This is not really covering anything new - BarelySocial did the same thing in 2020 - and is circumstantial at best, but from all the candidates, Adam Back is by far the most likely.
On the other hand, who cares.
This article makes me think we are too generous to journalists.
It seems like the main "evidence" is linguistic oddities. If this were a police investigation they would use this to get a warrant and then find the real smoking gun. They wouldn't put someone in jail for spelling errors. It's not quite the same here: but they went and published an article in the New York Times. I think its naïve to have done that.
I have now read about 100 articles claiming to have found the Bitcoin creator.
I thought bitcoin was cool for about 6 months back in 2014, and read everything I could about it. For the life of me I simply can't understand how people are still so interested in it or who created it.
It would not surprise me. Adam Back seems to have good connections to the deep state people, too. His company is merging via a SPAC with a Cantor Fitzgerald (Lutnick owned) company.
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.
Every time I see one of these articles about "unmasking" Nakamoto, I always wonder the same thing: why? I don't really see a compelling reason to unmask this person. Surely there are other more important things a journalist can spend their time looking into. It's the same with Banksy: why?
What if Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he is, lost the key to his wallet?
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?
> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. >So does Bitcoin... > And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.
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._
I like it. In particular the descriptions of how he reacted when confronted. The public key anecdote is a red herring - there is far more convincing evidence in the article.
My working hypothesis has always been that Satoshi was a CIA or NSA working group partly to fund black ops. Also, it could be that Bitcoin was a psyop to get people used to digital currency followed by the bait and switch to CBDC. Seem to be working.
Why would a newspaper openly try to doxx someone who did nothing wrong?
Clearly the guy doesn't want to be public and there is no public interest in figuring him out either.
Wouldn't Satoshi own some bitcoin in first blocks? Like about 60 billion worth of bitcoins, the largest wallet in existence? For me this is necessary and sufficient proof of their persona.
Anyone who has access to Satoshi's account is worth $100B. If Satoshi were still alive some of the BTC would have been moved at least a little but they haven't.
Whoever Satoshi was is now dead.
Terrible article. The real Satoshi is Nick Szabo and no one else is even close. Hal Finney, Wei Dai, etc. New York Times’ quality has really gone downhill.
Maybe this is something to set Claude Mythos loose on. This seems like the kind of thing it would be good at.
It is getting to the point where all the top (living) credibly accused Satoshis are incurring all the cost of being outed as Satoshi without getting any of the upside.
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.