The identity of Bitcoin's creator, known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, is one of the greatest mysteries of the digital age. Behind the concept of cryptocurrencies—today valued at US$2.5 trillion—he gave rise to a technology that redesigned the foundations of the financial system. His creation, Bitcoin, accounts for approximately 60% of this market.
According to community estimates, Satoshi accumulated around 1.1 million bitcoins in the network's early years. At current prices, his fortune would reach US$118 billion, placing the cryptocurrency's creator among the world's richest people.
Since the publication of the "White Paper" that gave rise to Bitcoin in 2008, there have been countless guesses about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Now, a lengthy investigation by The New York Times has gathered clues and evidence pointing to the British cryptographer Adam Back.
The investigation was led by reporters Dylan Freedman and John Carreyrou – the latter having won the Pulitzer Prize for his work exposing the fraud at the diagnostics company Theranos.
In search of language patterns, technical references, and historical connections, the reporters spent nearly a year scouring thousands of old internet records, including technical forums, cypherpunk community archives, and emails attributed to Satoshi. The work combined detailed textual analysis with context reconstruction, cross-referencing ideas discussed in the 1990s with the fundamentals of Bitcoin.
Based on this material, the investigation identified a series of parallels between Satoshi's writings and those of the British cryptographer Adam Back, ranging from expressions and technical concepts to proposals for a decentralized digital money system formulated years before the launch of Bitcoin.
Among the names that have emerged over the years, Adam Back has a history that places him at the center of discussions. A British cryptographer and active figure in the cypherpunk community in the 1990s, he created Hashcash, a system that used computational proofs to limit spam and which later served as the basis for the Bitcoin mining mechanism.
The NYT thesis
One of the clues analyzed by the report is in the Bitcoin code itself. In the first block of transactions on the network, Satoshi inserted the phrase: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” — a headline from the British newspaper The Times .
According to the authors, the choice of reference reinforces the hypothesis that the creator of Bitcoin had ties to the United Kingdom. Adam Back's own background reinforces this connection.
In an interview with The New York Times , he explained that his doctoral studies focused on distributed systems — networks of independent computers, or "nodes," that operate in a coordinated manner, exactly like the architecture of Bitcoin.
Furthermore, his academic project was developed in C++, the same language used by Satoshi in the first version of the cryptocurrency software.
Part of the investigation delves into the origins of the cypherpunk movement, a decentralized community of cryptographers and privacy enthusiasts who, back in the 1990s, discussed ways to create digital money beyond the reach of governments.
Unlike today's social networks, these interactions took place through email lists, where ideas considered subversive circulated freely.
It was in this environment that Adam Back began to gain prominence. He joined the list in 1995, while still pursuing his doctorate, and quickly became an active participant, debating topics such as cryptography, privacy, and digital monetary systems.
In one of his first interactions, he solved a cryptographic challenge proposed by Hal Finney, one of the pioneers of Bitcoin and the first recipient of a transaction using the currency. The episode marked the beginning of a relationship between two names that, years later, would be at the center of the creation of the cryptocurrency.
The connection between these characters also appears in the early years of Bitcoin. In December 2010, Hal Finney posted a message praising the network's code on a technical forum. Two hours later, Satoshi replied: "That means a lot coming from you, Hal."
Another aspect of the investigation focused on the writing style. Reporters meticulously compared the texts attributed to Satoshi with those of Adam Back and found a number of unusual patterns in common. Among them were the inconsistent use of hyphens, the alternation between British and American spellings, and certain linguistic quirks—such as confusing "its" and "it's" or varying between terms like "e-mail" and "email".
According to forensic linguistics experts interviewed for this report, these traits function as a kind of "fingerprint" of the author, helping to identify their origin and background. In the case analyzed, the repetition of these patterns in both sets of texts reinforces the hypothesis that they may have been written by the same person—even though the analysis, in isolation, is not conclusive.
Adam Back today
Despite all the clues, Back had no visible involvement in the early stages of Bitcoin. Only years after the network's launch, and after Satoshi's disappearance, did he become more directly involved with the ecosystem—becoming one of the leading figures in the community and founder of Blockstream, a company focused on developing Bitcoin's infrastructure.
Today, Adam Back is one of the most influential figures in the Bitcoin ecosystem. He is the CEO of Blockstream, a company that develops infrastructure and solutions for the network, including technologies focused on scalability and privacy.
Over the past decade, Back has gained prominence in the technical debate about the future of Bitcoin, actively participating in discussions about protocol updates and advocating for a more conservative view of the network's evolution.
Despite frequently being cited as one of the leading candidates to be Satoshi, he denies being the creator of Bitcoin and claims that the coincidences raised are natural within a community that shares similar references and technical history.
