A British cryptographer and prominent figure in the bitcoin world has been identified as the possible creator of the cryptocurrency, long known under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
According to the report, Adam Back, 55, a computer programmer and founder of the company Blockstream, may be behind bitcoin, which was introduced in 2008 by Nakamoto, whose identity has remained unknown.
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Adam Back and a statue of Satoshi Nakamoto in Budapest
(Photo: Blockstream, Bitocin Magazine)
Back is the creator of Hashcash, a system for solving mathematical puzzles that Nakamoto cited in the development of bitcoin. He is also associated with the “cypherpunks,” a group active since the 1990s that promoted ideas of electronic money and online privacy.
The Times said its investigation reviewed thousands of Back’s posts in cypherpunk forums from the 1990s and early 2000s, identifying similarities in writing style between Back and Nakamoto. These included identical hyphenation patterns and shared use of specific technical terms. A computational analysis of 620 potential candidates ranked Back as the most likely match, citing shared vocabulary and writing traits.
The report also noted that between mid-2008 and April 2011 — the period when Nakamoto was active online — Back largely disappeared from public cryptography discussions. He reappeared weeks after Nakamoto’s final known communication.
The Times said Back denied being Nakamoto when presented with the findings at a bitcoin conference in El Salvador. He did not provide an explanation for his absence from online forums during the relevant period and declined to share metadata from emails reportedly exchanged with Nakamoto in 2008.
A linguistic analysis commissioned by the newspaper did not conclusively confirm the claim. The only definitive way to verify Nakamoto’s identity would be through use of the private keys linked to the earliest bitcoin holdings, estimated at about 1.1 million coins.
Back also denied the claim in comments to the BBC, saying: “I am not Satoshi,” and describing the evidence as a combination of coincidences and similarities among people with shared interests.
He is not the first person to be identified as Nakamoto. In 2014, Newsweek reported that Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese American man living in California, was the creator of bitcoin. He denied the claim, saying he had never heard of bitcoin before being contacted.