The New York Times published a 12,000-word Satoshi investigation targeting Adam Back. He denied it six times. The crypto community says the evidence doesn’t hold up — and worries about what comes next.

The New York Times published a 12,000-word investigation Wednesday identifying Adam Back, the Blockstream CEO and inventor of the Hashcash proof-of-work system, as the most likely person behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym. Reporter John Carreyrou — the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who broke the Theranos fraud — spent more than a year analyzing a database of 134,308 posts from three Cypherpunk mailing lists active between 1992 and 2008. Three separate writing analyses each returned Back as the closest linguistic match to Satoshi’s corpus. Among the specific findings: Back shared 67 of 325 distinct hyphenation errors found in Satoshi’s writing, nearly double the next closest suspect. Back also used the same obscure phrases as Satoshi — including “partial pre-image” and “burning the money” — that appeared in no other candidates’ posts.

Back denied the claim before the article ran, inside it, and again publicly on X after publication. “I’m not satoshi,” he wrote, adding that his prolific posting history on Cypherpunk lists created a statistical bias in any stylometric search. He argued the overlaps reflect shared cypherpunk intellectual environments, not shared identity. Blockstream issued a statement calling the story “built on circumstantial interpretation.” During a two-hour filmed interview with Carreyrou in El Salvador, Back denied being Satoshi at least six times.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

The crypto community’s reaction ranged from skeptical to openly hostile — with people especially focusing on how different their code is. “The open-source code I can find written by Adam Back and Satoshi Nakamoto don’t look remotely similar,” tweeted cybersecurity researcher Robert Graham. 

Others focused on the risks of the exercise itself. Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Casa, wrote that Satoshi “can’t be caught with stylometric analysis,” and accused the Times of painting a kidnapping-sized target on Back’s back with thin evidence. Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital, called the Times report “garbage.” Michael Saylor noted that the contemporaneous emails between Satoshi and Back on the record suggest they were distinct individuals, adding: “Until someone signs with Satoshi’s keys, every theory is just narrative.” The concern about physical safety is not abstract: in 2024, after an HBO documentary fingered developer Peter Todd as Satoshi — he denied it immediately — Todd was forced into hiding due to credible threats linked to the $78 billion in dormant BTC associated with the pseudonym.

The investigation’s own linguist, Florian Cafiero, who previously helped the Times identify the authors behind the QAnon movement, described his stylometric results as inconclusive, with Hal Finney nearly tying for the top spot. The report does not present cryptographic proof — no private key signature, no movement of Satoshi’s wallets — and without it, the question is no closer to resolution than it was before Wednesday. Satoshi’s 1.1 million BTC, over 5% of the total supply, have not moved since Bitcoin’s earliest days.