The true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of Bitcoin’s founder, has remained a mystery for many years. However, new research published in the New York Times suggests that Satoshi may be Adam Back, a British cryptologist who did some of the earliest and most influential work on digital assets. Buck denies that he is Satoshi.
People have been trying to track down the father of Bitcoin for decades without much success. Based on Buck’s denials, it’s not clear whether Times technology journalist John Carreyrou, known for his coverage of defeating Theranos, has come much further than anyone else.
It fits the profile of the person who would likely create the first cryptocurrency. He created Hashcash, the proof-of-work system that Satoshi used to mine Bitcoin, and currently serves as co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, a company that builds the infrastructure for blockchain-based payment systems. Mr. Buck even agrees that Mr. Carreyrou is a reasonable suspect, and it is likely that Mr. Satoshi is a 50-year-old British cypherpunk like himself. (In that case, yes, the use of Japanese nicknames is strange.)
However, Carry Lou doesn’t have any undeniable evidence to close the case.
To stake my claim, I collected an archive of emails sent on three crypto list servers between 1992 and 2008, during a period when the pseudonym Satoshi was active on these forums. Carreyrou fed the archive into an AI that identified similarities between the writing styles of Satoshi and other active contributors. For example, Satoshi didn’t hyphen compound nouns and sometimes confused “it” with “it’s.”
Back had the best match, but wrote to X that the evidence was “a combination of chance and similar phrases from people with similar experiences and interests.”
Satoshi’s case is still unsolved, but I have to admit that Carry Lou’s use of AI was very clever.
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