A lengthy investigation by The New York Times has recently been going viral, and it has been stirring a huge buzz. They spent more than a year digging deep into the mystery surrounding Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity, and in the end they pointed the finger at Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream. Honestly, I was quite shocked to see this conclusion—after all, this mystery has stretched on for 17 years, and finally someone has had the courage to be this direct.

Reporter John Carreyrou is no pushover—he’s a Pulitzer Prize winner and has previously exposed the Theranos scam. This time, he started filtering through more than 34,000 potential leads and ultimately zeroed in on 55-year-old British cryptographer Adam Back. The logic behind the investigation is actually quite solid—he cross-references everything from writing style and technical philosophy to historical context.

The evidence he lays out is definitely interesting. Back was a core figure in early cryptopunk circles, and as far as the 1990s he was already discussing decentralized electronic cash. His ideas included proof of work, controlling currency scarcity, and the concept of verifying transactions without trusting a third party. More importantly, the Hashcash mechanism he invented was directly adopted by Bitcoin as the foundation for mining. There’s also his proposal to combine Hashcash with Wei Dai’s b-money, which happens to match the technical path Satoshi ultimately used to realize Bitcoin.

At the level of ideas, both are heavily influenced by cryptopunk culture, and both treat the traditional banking system as something that needs to be replaced. Their writing styles also have many similarities—how they use specific technical terminology, the mixing of British and American spellings, and inconsistent hyphenation. The most interesting part is their unconventional hyphenation of “proof-of-work” and a rare expression like “partial pre-image,” which very few people used in the cryptography community at the time—Back just happened to be among those few.

The timeline is also suspicious. Satoshi was active from 2008 to 2011 and then suddenly disappeared, while Back during that period seemingly did not publicly participate in Bitcoin discussions—but after 2011, he quickly entered the community and became a core figure. Interestingly, in the 2015 block size debate, there was an email that many viewed as Satoshi’s “comeback”; the stance and wording in that email are highly consistent with Back’s views from before.

However, Back himself quickly denied it. He said he’s been active on cryptopunk mailing lists since ’92. Because his posting volume is far higher than others’, it’s easier for people to connect him to electronic cash topics. He believes this is simply a statistical bias, and that the other evidence is just coincidence. He also emphasized that Satoshi would need specific skills to invent Bitcoin, and that he and many others, in design attempts during the previous decade, were “so close to the final solution that it looks within reach, but in fact never truly touched the core.”

Interestingly, while Back doesn’t know who Satoshi is, he believes this anonymity status is beneficial for Bitcoin. After all, Bitcoin will reform the monetary system, and in many countries it is still in a gray area or even illegal—so early exposure of the identity could face enormous risk.

The community’s reaction to this investigation has been intense. Bitcoin core developer Jameson Lopp was blunt: drawing a huge target on Adam Back based on such flimsy evidence is shameful. Crypto KOL Todd listed several rebuttals as well—Satoshi once asked Back questions in a natural tone; the Bitcoin codebase uses C++ and is completely different from Back’s programming style; Back even said he regretted not getting involved in mining earlier, and his philosophy leaned more toward value storage rather than the early electronic cash idea. There’s also that Back tends to apply for patents, whereas Satoshi chose to release everything fully open source.

As it turns out, the farce surrounding Satoshi’s identity has played out many times already. In 2014, Newsweek pointed to Dorian Nakamoto, a Japanese-American physicist, but that claim was later disproven. In 2016, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright claimed to be Satoshi and even applied for copyright—yet a court ruled his claims did not hold up. In 2024, an HBO documentary shifted the focus to Canadian developer Peter Todd, who also denied it. In the same year, a Brit, Stephen Mollah, also claimed to be Satoshi, but again, no verifiable evidence was provided.

Most of these attempts triggered short-term public attention, but they still never managed to end the mystery with hard proof. What can truly settle it, remains only the signature of a private key. Over time, Satoshi’s anonymity has instead become part of Bitcoin’s narrative. Today, Bitcoin’s network has been operating for years, and its value comes more from global consensus than from the founder’s identity. This mystery will likely continue to linger; after all, Satoshi’s holdings of roughly 1,100,000 BTC still keep the market’s nerves on edge.