Adam Back Denies Being Satoshi Amid NYT Probe

Back says Satoshi's unknown identity is good for BTC as it places it as a mathematical commodity rather than someone's project.

Adam Back has once again denied claims that he is the mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

The latest denial comes after an investigation by New York Times reporter John Carreyrou pointed to him as the most likely candidate.

Back Pushes Back

Following the NYT’s publishing of Carreyrou’s piece, Back took to X to reject its conclusion.

“I’m not Satoshi,” he said flatly.

The Blockstream founder also explained that he had been one of the most active posters on the Cypherpunks mailing list, loudly interested in electronic cash and cryptographic privacy from around 1992 onwards.

Two things are important here: first, his focus on e-cash and online privacy meant that people looking into Satoshi’s true identity would have found many Bitcoin-like elements in his past work; and second, the fact that he posted on the lists so often left a big enough paper trail that those same researchers would keep finding his fingerprints.

According to him, his posting volume meant that he would have likely weighed in on any given thread more than someone else with identical interests but who posted twenty times less.

On the question of who Satoshi actually is, Back reiterated that he doesn’t know and that, for him, that is the right state of affairs.

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“I think it is good for bitcoin that this is the case,” he wrote, “as it helps bitcoin be viewed a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity.”

What the Investigation Claims

Carreyrou’s argument runs through several layers. Back is British, was active on the Cypherpunks mailing list in the 1990s, and invented Hashcash, the proof-of-work system Satoshi cited in the Bitcoin white paper.

The journalist also claimed to have matched more than a hundred words and phrases from Satoshi’s writings to Back’s archived mailing list posts.

In addition, he drew a line between Satoshi’s habit of embedding political messages in Bitcoin’s design and a 2002 post in which Back, apparently out of curiosity, asked about the 1933 U.S. gold seizure. This was the same event Satoshi encoded into Bitcoin as a statement about government monetary overreach.

Carreyrou also pointed out that Back had a background in distributed computing and C++, the language used to write BTC’s original code, which fitted Satoshi’s known profile.

However, in a post on X responding to a user, he acknowledged that such connections did not necessarily add up to certainty.

“The only true smoking gun is cryptographic proof and only Adam can provide that,” he wrote.

Back’s emails with Satoshi, made public during the London fraud trial of Craig Wright, the Australian entrepreneur ruled not to be Satoshi by a UK judge in 2024, show Satoshi reaching out to Back in August 2008 to check a citation before publishing his white paper.

Most people would read those emails as evidence that Back and Satoshi were two different people. However, Carreyrou’s counter is that Back could have sent them to himself as cover. That argument has not gone over well.