- The New York Times claims renowned cryptographer Adam Back is the mysterious Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
- Back joins a long list of cryptographers who might be Satoshi.
- The world might never know who Satoshi Nakamoto actually is.
One of the great mysteries of the 21st century is the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.
Some say Satoshi is a collective of programmers. Others claim the CIA invented Bitcoin. Then there’s the deluge of cryptographers and activists who have been repeatedly tagged as the person behind the $1.4 trillion crypto network.
Yesterday, a name that has already been put in the hat was once again brought into the limelight: British cryptographer Adam Back.
A New York Times exposé based their revelation on linguistic analysis, writing tics, and the fact that Back outlined Bitcoin’s entire architecture a decade before the cryptocurrency launched.
But he’s just the latest name on a long-list that includes dead cypherpunks, self-proclaimed inventors, and one spectacular fraud.
Here’s everyone who’s been accused of being Satoshi over the years.
Adam Back
Back is no stranger to this list — although the latest bout of evidence is.
The NYT highlighted that Back shared 67 of Satoshi’s exact hyphenation errors, while using some of the same obscure phrases like “burning the money.”
Back also outlined many of Bitcoin’s components — distributed networks, proof-of-work mining, Byzantine fault tolerance — in cypherpunk mailing list posts between 1997 and 1999, a full decade before Bitcoin launched.
One of the most damning pieces of evidence brought forward by the NYT is that Back disappeared from the cryptography mailing list exactly when Satoshi appeared, then reappeared six weeks after Satoshi vanished in 2011.
Back has denied he’s Satoshi repeatedly.
Peter Todd
In 2024, HBO’s documentary “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” claimed Canadian developer Peter Todd is Satoshi based on a 2010 Bitcointalk forum post where Todd appeared to finish Satoshi’s thought.
Director Cullen Hoback argued that Todd accidentally logged in to the forum under his own name to continue a comment he’d started 90 minutes earlier as Satoshi.
Todd called the theory “ludicrous," and told DL News that Hoback's evidence is "incredibly flimsy – conspiracy-thinking-level flimsy." He pointed out that if Satoshi made such a basic operational security mistake, he wouldn’t have stayed hidden for 15 years.
The documentary also noted that Nakamoto posted more frequently during summers “like they were on an academic calendar,” a period of time when Todd was a university student.
Todd would have been 23 when the Bitcoin white paper was published.
Len Sassaman
An American computer scientist and cypherpunk who committed suicide in 2011, Sassaman became a Polymarket favourite ahead of last year’s HBO documentary.
At one point, 44% of bettors thought HBO would name Sassaman as Satoshi.
Their case was that Sassaman was a privacy advocate with deep cryptographic expertise. He used British English, and worked closely with Hal Finney, another top Satoshi suspect. His death in 2011 also aligned with Satoshi’s final disappearance.
But his widow, Meredith Patterson, told DL News: “He’s not Satoshi.”
Hal Finney
A renowned cryptographer and the recipient of the first-ever Bitcoin transaction from the very own Satoshi Nakamoto.
Finney helped test early versions of Bitcoin’s software and during the 1990s developed a concept dubbed Reusable Proof-of-Work, which later on inspired the underlying consensus mechanism that powers Bitcoin mining.
But although Finney is a crowd favourite, he was photographed running a 10-mile race in April 2009 at the same time Satoshi was sending emails and Bitcoin to someone else, according to the NYT.
Also, he died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2014 — one year before Satoshi’s final known appearance in 2015.
Finney repeatedly denied being Satoshi before his death.
Nick Szabo
Szabo is an American-Hungarian computer scientist who created BitGold in 1998, a precursor to Bitcoin.
In 2014, a controversial study by Aston University’s Centre for Forensic Linguistics analysed 13 Satoshi candidates’ writing styles and found Szabo’s closest to the Bitcoin white paper.
Szabo has also repeatedly denied that he’s Satoshi.
Craig Wright
Lest we forget the programmer also known as “Faketoshi.”
Craig Wright is an Australian computer scientist who claimed for eight years that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.
Wright filed lawsuits against Bitcoin developers, exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken, and community members, accusing them of libel, defamation, and copyright infringement.
His proof lied in signed messages with keys from early Bitcoin blocks, blog posts with cryptographic data, and his claim that autism makes it impossible for him to lie.
But in 2024, a UK High Court judge ruled that Craig Wright is definitively not Satoshi Nakamoto.
The judge said at the time that Wright’s claim “is a lie, founded on an elaborate false narrative and backed by forgery of documents on an industrial scale.”
Wright now lives in ignominy as one of crypto’s most spectacular frauds.
Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.
