Back-to-back: New York Times targets Satoshi again with Adam Back as $78 billion BTC stash raises security concerns

Another mainstream attempt to identify Bitcoin’s creator landed with Adam Back, a British cryptologist and co-founder of Blockstream.

This week, the New York Times published an extensive investigation alleging that Mr. Buck is the man behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym, relying heavily on Stylometer analysis of writings and decades-old online records.

He immediately categorically denied the allegations against X, stating:

However, the big question within the Bitcoin development ecosystem is whether this latest theory is wise or definitive. It’s a matter of physical safety. What happens to the next person who becomes a living target?

For the cypherpunks and developers who maintain the world’s largest cryptocurrency network, having Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity revealed is not an abstract honor. It’s a major security responsibility.

Data from Arkham Intelligence revealed that an estimated 1.1 million Bitcoins were stored in dormant wallets linked to Satoshi. The asset currently trades for more than $72,000, which means if the stash is private, his net worth would be around $78 billion.

And given that Bitcoin’s recent all-time high was over $126,000, perceived wealth often calculates to be much higher.

Therefore, falsely portraying ordinary people as owners of this vast and inaccessible wealth puts them at risk of extortion, robbery, and cartel-level kidnapping.

Foaming force measurement seine

The latest unraveling effort was spearheaded by investigative journalist John Carreyrou, famous for exposing Theranos fraud, and AI Project editor Dylan Friedman.

The pair spent more than a year compiling a database of 134,308 posts from 620 candidates who discussed digital money on crypto mailing lists between 1992 and 2008.

The study applied three separate writing analyzes: filtering for grammatical quirks, British spelling, double spacing between sentences, and alternating use of terms such as “email” and “e-mail.”

Dragnet identified 325 different hyphenation errors within Satoshi’s corpus. Buck is said to have shared 67 of them, narrowing a pool of hundreds to just one.

Technically, the Times highlighted that Buck outlined nearly every core feature of Bitcoin when it was on Cypherpunk’s list from 1997 to 1999, a decade before the top cryptocurrency whitepaper was published.

They also noted that he proposed a decentralized electronic cash system with privacy, built-in scarcity, and publicly verifiable protocols, ultimately combining his Hashcash invention with Wei Dai’s b-money concept.

Additionally, the article points out that Buck suddenly went silent on mailing lists when Satoshi announced Bitcoin in late 2008, but only returned to public comment in June 2011, six weeks after Satoshi disappeared.

Confirmation bias and the “Yacking” defense

Buck’s rebuttal highlights the flaws inherent in using data to retrospectively profile ultra-niche and highly active communities.

At Social Media Platform He noted that the idea of ​​decentralized electronic cash prototypes is prevalent in these circles.

Buck cited grammatical overlap and pointed out glaring statistical blind spots, saying:

Thinking about it this way, there is a strong confirmation bias to find Satoshi’s comments consistent with his. Buck argued that people who post 20 times less often will naturally match fewer hyphenation errors.

Blockstream’s co-founder suggested this explanation to Carreyrou as one that should be statistically corrected, and said that the remaining similarities were due to coincidence and a combination of shared language among cryptographers with similar interests.

However, the broader Bitcoin security community was less diplomatic.

Casa co-founder and chief security officer Jameson Ropp slammed the publication, saying:

The cycle of real-world harm

The industry’s hostility to these investigations is rooted in dangerous recent precedent.

The Times report comes less than two years after the HBO documentary “The Money Electric” slammed Canadian developer Peter Todd.

Todd publicly denied the allegations as baseless. But the damage was immediate. As WIRED subsequently reported, Todd was forced to go into hiding due to serious physical threats associated with his sudden false perception of his wealth.

This cycle has followed Bitcoin almost since its inception, and its origins date back to Newsweek magazine’s infamous Dorian Nakamoto expose in 2014, which caused a media uproar outside a California man’s home.

In each case, a major retailer assembles the pattern. The named individual is forced to disavow it. The market has largely shrugged its shoulders. And subjects must overcome serious personal consequences.

Institutional threats to open source

Beyond the physical dangers, attributing a living founder to Bitcoin poses a serious institutional threat. If Peter Todd’s case demonstrated personal risk, Craig Wright’s story demonstrated the legal weaponization of Satoshi’s identity.

For years, Mr. Wright has used his self-proclaimed Satoshi position to launch a series of lawsuits, threats, and threats against Bitcoin Core developers.

But it took a massive and coordinated legal effort by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) to stop him.

The UK High Court ultimately ruled that Wright had repeatedly lied and forged documents, describing his actions as a campaign of fraud, harassment and oppression to actively block the development of cryptocurrencies.

The court documents help explain why developers fear a revival of the founder myth. Granting Bitcoin to a living human being serves as a mechanism to assert ownership, control, or moral authority over an open source protocol that is explicitly designed to survive without centralized leadership.

Alternative theories continue to emerge. Matthew Sigel, head of digital asset research at VanEck, recently named Twitter founder Jack Dorsey as a possible candidate, citing the timeline and technical similarities in the situation.

However, within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, Bitcoin lacks a central figure, the most important and loaded pillar.

As Buck himself pointed out, remaining leaderless allows Bitcoin to be neatly viewed as a new asset class: a digital commodity that is mathematically rare.

So any new attempt to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto will pull the network back into the centralized, founder-centric legal system it was designed to escape.