The New York Times published an investigation suggesting Adam Back may be Satoshi Nakamoto but without direct evidence.

The New York Times published an investigative article stating that, by analyzing Satoshi Nakamoto’s text, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and historical records, it suggests that Adam Back may be Satoshi Nakamoto. The conclusion is based on an indirect chain of evidence, including that he invented Hashcash and it was cited in the Bitcoin white paper, that he proposed—already in 1997–1999—electronic cash concepts covering privacy, decentralization, scarcity, and no need for trust, and that there is a high degree of consistency with Satoshi Nakamoto in language habits, spelling, terminology use, and technical expression. The analysis also shows that during Satoshi Nakamoto’s active period (2008–2011), he appears to go through a “silent period” in public discussions and then becomes active again after 2011. In addition, based on filtering and text matching using data from approximately 34k users on the Cypherpunks mailing list, he ranks near the top across multiple language-feature matches. However, the stylometry results overall are considered “non-determinative,” and there is currently no direct evidence to prove his identity. Adam Back has repeatedly denied the related allegations, saying the overlap is a “coincidence,” and he has refused to provide key email metadata.