After 17 years of dead ends, a NYT reporter may have finally unmasked Bitcoin’s secret founder, and the clue was hiding in plain sight all along

A New York Times reporter named John Carreyrou has reportedly identified British cryptographer Adam Back as the person behind the name Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. After 17 years of speculation and dead ends, the answer may have been hiding in plain sight all along, buried in a pattern of tiny, consistent punctuation mistakes.

Satoshi Nakamoto is not just a mystery; they are also among the richest people in the world. Nakamoto is believed to own around 1.1 million bitcoins, worth approximately $71 billion today, which would place them at number 26 on the Forbes rich list. That holding represents about 5% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist, since the creator capped the total supply at 21 million coins.

Adam Back, 55, is the CEO of Blockstream, a major Bitcoin development company, and the inventor of Hashcash, a proof-of-work system that Satoshi actually cited in the original Bitcoin white paper. He has long been considered a possible candidate, but never faced this level of detailed investigation before.

The linguistic evidence against Adam Back is surprisingly hard to ignore

Back was an active member of the Cypherpunks cryptography mailing list in the 1990s and had proposed concepts very similar to Bitcoin nearly a decade before it launched, including distributed electronic cash systems built on scarcity, privacy, and trustless verification.

Carreyrou’s year-long investigation found that Back and Satoshi share a striking number of writing habits. Both consistently use two spaces between sentences, mix up “it’s” and “its,” place “also” at the end of sentences, and alternate between British and American spellings. 

These small quirks alone raised eyebrows, but the hyphenation patterns were the most telling. This kind of forensic journalism is reminiscent of how the NYT has faced pushback for its investigative reporting in other high-profile stories.

Both Back and Satoshi added hyphens where they did not belong and left them out where they should have been. For example, both wrote “double-spending” with a hyphen but left “file sharing” and “hand tuned” unhyphenated. The Times fed an AI model specific style rules and compared Satoshi’s hyphenation errors against hundreds of contributors on the Cypherpunk mailing list.

Adam Back shared 67 of Satoshi’s exact hyphenation mistakes, the next closest candidate had only 38. The investigation also filtered around 600 active forum participants based on traits linked to Satoshi, including two spaces between sentences, British spellings, inconsistent hyphenation of “e-mail” versus “email,” and the “it’s” versus “its” confusion.

After applying all these filters, only one name remained: Adam Back. Computational linguist Florian Cafiero, who had previously tried and failed to identify Satoshi using stylometry, reviewed the findings and said the hyphenation and grammatical quirks were much harder to dismiss than his own inconclusive results. Beyond writing, behavioral patterns also matched up.

Back largely disappeared from the Cryptography mailing list during the period when Satoshi was most active, and then returned shortly after Satoshi vanished in 2011. When a researcher publicly estimated the size of Satoshi’s bitcoin holdings in 2013, Back joined the Bitcoin forum on that exact same day. Within two years, he had founded Blockstream and brought together some of the top Bitcoin Core developers.

Despite all of this, Adam Back firmly denies being Satoshi Nakamoto. During an interview in El Salvador, he told The New York Times: “Clearly I’m not Satoshi, that’s my position. And it’s true as well, for what it’s worth.” He also posted on X: “I also don’t know who satoshi is, and i think it is good for bitcoin that this is the case, as it helps bitcoin be viewed a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity.”

This story is part of a broader pattern of media outlets clashing with figures over major investigations, where those named push back hard against the reporting. When directly confronted with the linguistic findings, he told the Times: “I don’t know. It’s not me, but I take what you’re saying that this is what the AI said with the data. But it’s still not me.” He even joked on social media: “Kicking myself for not mining in anger in 2009.”

This is not the first time someone has been publicly named as Satoshi. In 2024, an HBO documentary pointed to Canadian crypto expert Peter Todd, who called it “ludicrous.” That same year, a British man named Stephen Mollah claimed to be Satoshi at a London press conference, but was largely ignored, reports BBC.

In 2014, Dorian Nakamoto was identified by a major publication, but denied it and the claim was debunked. Australian computer scientist Craig Wright declared himself Satoshi in 2015, but a UK High Court judge later ruled he was not, and Adam Back himself was one of the witnesses who gave evidence against Wright’s claims.