Has the true creator of Bitcoin been revealed?

The identity of Bitcoin's creator remains the biggest mystery in the cryptocurrency world. Photo: CCN .

Seventeen years after the nine-page report describing Bitcoin appeared on the internet, the identity of its creator remains a mystery in the history of digital finance. The pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto has never been confirmed.

But according to a New York Times investigation spanning over a year, based on thousands of posts from decades ago, cryptographer Adam Back appears to share many similarities with the creator of Bitcoin.

Despite denying being Satoshi, Adam Back has contributed significantly to the development of Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency field.

The Foundation Builder

Adam Back is a member of Cypherpunk, an anarchist group founded in the early 1990s that uses cryptography to liberate individuals from control. Satoshi is also a member of this group.

In emails exchanged with colleagues in the Cypherpunk group in the late 1990s, Back proposed creating a cryptocurrency that would allow users to avoid government interference in financial transactions. He outlined a decentralized network of computer "nodes" capable of remaining operational even if some parties conspired to seize control. This is precisely the architecture that Satoshi later used to design Bitcoin.

Adam Back could be Satoshi Nakamoto. Photo: New York Times .

Back also invented Hashcash, a statistical puzzle-solving system. He proposed combining Hashcash with b-money, another cryptocurrency idea that also emerged from members of the Cypherpunk group. That combination is the blueprint Satoshi followed when creating Bitcoin.

Mr. Back holds a PhD in distributed computing systems, the same field as Bitcoin's underlying engineering. He is also an expert in public-key cryptography, the technology Satoshi directly integrated into Bitcoin.

Beyond the technical aspects, there are many small details that are difficult to explain by coincidence. Mr. Back and Satoshi used the same programming language. Both operated anonymously on the internet and both had a habit of using pseudonyms.

The same result

For over a decade, Back was almost always present at any discussion about cryptocurrency within the cryptography community. But when Bitcoin was announced in late 2008, Back remained completely silent. This was unusual for someone who had always been so closely involved in the field.

Adam Back suddenly went silent around the time Bitcoin launched. Photo: Bloomberg .

The investigative team collected the entire archive from three email lists where members of the Cypherpunk group communicated throughout the 1990s and 2000s. All the data was merged into a large database and compared to Satoshi's work. All three lists indicated that Back's writing style was the closest to Satoshi's among the hundreds of participants.

The probability of a random person possessing all of those traits simultaneously is very low. This is the strongest linguistic evidence the investigative team has found.

Notably, after the BTC boom, he founded Blockstream, one of the world's largest Bitcoin infrastructure development companies, and became one of the most influential figures in the ecosystem. Few besides Satoshi possessed the same deep understanding and central position as him, which Adam Back himself explained was due to his early observation of the field.