Original Title: My Quest to Solve Bitcoin's Great Mystery
Original Author: John Carreyrou with Dylan Freedman, The New York Times
Translation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: Recently, The New York Times published a lengthy investigative report that revisits a question that has puzzled the cryptocurrency industry for 17 years: who exactly is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Unlike previous speculations based on scattered leaks or single clues, this report follows the historical archives of Cypherpunks, systematically narrowing down clues through multiple comparisons of technical paths, writing styles, and behavioral trajectories to a key figure: Adam Back.

From the technological stitching of Hashcash and b-money to early concepts of decentralized architecture, and details of spelling habits and expressions, the report attempts to construct a more systematic chain of reasoning.

The article does not provide “the final answer.” As pointed out in the text, only Satoshi Nakamoto himself could complete a true identity verification through a private key signature. However, in the absence of direct evidence, the report offers a new approach—by drawing near to a once barely touchable puzzle through long-ignored historical materials and microscopic details.

As Bitcoin gradually becomes an important variable in the global financial system, the significance of this question may have long surpassed “who wrote the code” itself. It pertains more to the starting point of a technical ideology: what personal experiences, thought processes, and historical contexts gave rise to decentralization.

The following is the original text:

On an autumn evening in 2024, my wife and I were stuck on the Long Island Expressway. She had grown tired of the jazz funk station I often played during drives, so she switched to a podcast.

It was Hard Fork, a technology program under The New York Times, where the host was discussing a new documentary from HBO that claimed to have uncovered the true identity of Bitcoin's anonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.

I was immediately drawn in. I have always believed that “who is Satoshi Nakamoto” is one of the most captivating puzzles of our time, and I had attempted to explore it, but to no avail. Two years ago, I even spent several months researching for a related book, but quickly realized my limitations and reluctantly gave up.

Now hearing that someone might have finally found this mysterious figure—someone who reshaped the financial system with astonishing genius, spawned an industry worth $2.4 trillion, and in an instant created one of the largest fortunes in the world—I felt a mix of admiration and jealousy. I couldn't wait to watch the documentary. That night, upon returning home, I logged into HBO Max and hit the play button.

Ultimately, I found the conclusion of Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery unconvincing: HBO identified a Canadian software developer as Satoshi based on what seemed to be rather thin evidence. But in this otherwise light-hearted and enjoyable documentary that whisked viewers through the world of crypto quickly, one segment particularly caught my attention.

British cryptographer and a key figure in the Bitcoin movement, Adam Back, sat on a park bench in Riga, Latvia, his shirt casually unbuttoned beneath a brown jacket. The director casually mentioned the names of several “Satoshi candidates.” When it came to him, Back visibly tensed, vehemently denied being Satoshi, and requested that the conversation not be recorded.

I had encountered many liars and had picked up on some subtle signs of identification. Back’s demeanor at that moment—shifting gaze, awkward laughter, slightly stiff movements of his left hand—struck me as quite suspicious. As the closing credits rolled, I watched that segment several more times on television.

In February 2024, British cryptographer Adam Back in Miami. (Image source: The New York Times, Photo: Amir Hamja)

As I mulled over Back's reaction repeatedly, it suddenly struck me: an Australian imposter had been sued for falsely claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto. What if the evidence disclosed in the case, which was tried in London a few months earlier, might help me unravel this mystery?

Anyone familiar with the “legend” of Bitcoin will tell you that Satoshi Nakamoto has nearly perfected anonymity on the network—leaving almost no digital trace.

However, he did leave behind a complete set of textual materials: including a nine-page white paper that systematically articulated his invention; as well as a multitude of posts he made on the Bitcointalk forum—an online community for users to discuss Bitcoin software, economic models, and ideas. During the civil lawsuit involving the imposter, this textual database was unexpectedly expanded: Finnish programmer Martti Malmi—an important early associate of Satoshi—publicly disclosed hundreds of emails exchanged between him and Satoshi. Previously, there had been leaked emails between Satoshi and other early Bitcoin participants, but their numbers were nowhere near the volume of Malmi's disclosure. If Satoshi were to be identified one day, I believe the answer must be hidden within these texts.

But on second thought, this pathway had likely already been traversed. Over the past 16 years, journalists, scholars, and countless online sleuths had attempted to unveil Satoshi’s identity. More than a hundred names have surfaced: from an Irish cryptography student to an unemployed Japanese-American engineer, to a South African crime lord, and even the mathematician portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind.

The most enticing theories often build on certain coincidences—aligning perfectly with people’s limited understanding of Satoshi: a specific programming style, an opaque work history, a deep understanding of Bitcoin’s key technologies, and a somewhat anti-government worldview. But these hypotheses ultimately collapse in the face of lack of presence proof or other mutually contradictory evidence. With each failure, many Bitcoin community members seem to find amusement. As they often say, only Satoshi himself can prove identity by transferring his holdings of Bitcoin; until then, all evidence counts as indirect inferences.

Rationally speaking, thinking I could crack a puzzle that has confounded many for years might be somewhat overconfident. Yet I yearn for the thrill of chasing a significant, complex story. So, I decided to try once more to lift the veil on this Bitcoin founder’s identity.

Clues

Two Weak Entry Points

I began by trying to find a way to narrow down the scope.

In Satoshi’s emails to Martti Malmi and other texts, one particularly notable point stood out: his language mixed British spelling and expressions with American usages. Given that many “Satoshi candidates” are Americans, some speculate he might be deliberately using British expressions to disguise his style. But I have never subscribed to this theory because Satoshi left a crucial clue.

In Bitcoin's first block (the Genesis Block), he embedded a newspaper headline: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” This headline is from the British version of The Times London newspaper. This makes me more inclined to believe Satoshi most likely comes from Britain.

Furthermore, Satoshi is very likely to be a member of the “Cypherpunks.” This loose group formed in the early 90s, with an anarchist flavor, sought to use cryptography—the technology for securely protecting communication through codes—to liberate individuals from government surveillance and censorship.

The Cypherpunks primarily communicated through a format called “mailing lists.” Essentially a group emailing system that works like early forums, where subscribers receive long texts in a typewriter font and continue discussions by using “reply all.”

In our ubiquitous age of Venmo and Apple Pay, it’s hard to picture that one of the core concerns of the Cypherpunks back then was the digitization of financial transactions. When you hand someone a $20 bill, no one knows where the money came from; but once you pay by check or credit card, the bank leaves an electronic record. The Cypherpunks worried the government could use these records to track personal lives. Thus, in their mailing lists, people continually discussed how to create “electronic cash”—a digital currency that retained cash anonymity. Some even proposed their own electronic cash schemes, but none gained traction—until Bitcoin emerged.

In addition to the consistency in views on “electronic cash,” there are other signs that Satoshi belongs to this group: he published his white paper on a branch of the Cypherpunks mailing list—the “Cryptography” list—and he seemed to be quite familiar with two members of that group.

However, even at its peak in the late 90s, the follower count of the Cypherpunks was about 2,000, which still means a quite large pool of candidates.

With these not-so-strong clues, I began to reread all texts left by Satoshi, especially those emails made public by Martti Malmi, and compiled a list of terms and expressions that I found notably “aberrant.” It felt like decoding a strange dialect. Several times, I even wondered if I was merely engaged in a futile endeavor.

My list ultimately expanded to over a hundred terms and phrases, taking up several pages of my notebook. Some that particularly concerned me included: “dang,” “backup” (used as a verb and combined), “human friendly,” “on principle,” “burning the money,” “abandonware,” “hand-tuned,” and “partial pre-image.”

One phrase—“a menace to the network”—sounded like dialogue from a sci-fi movie; while the rest of the expressions subtly revealed a peculiar mixed quality: they resembled British upper-class speech, carried a touch of American rural colloquialism, and were infused with computer geek and cryptographer language habits.

I used X’s advanced search features to conduct a rough screening to see whether those often suspected of being Satoshi had used any of the terms I had marked. Not all “candidates” had X accounts, so this was not a rigorous method. But just as I expected, one person’s vocabulary aligned impressively with my list—Adam Back.

As I stared at the long list of checked records beneath his name in my notebook, a rush of adrenaline surged through me. My intuition seemed to have at least some basis. The high degree of consistency in word choice between Back and Satoshi may not convince a community that has studied the issue for years, but it seems too coincidental for my liking.

Upon further examination of Back, I found he did indeed possess several characteristics that aligned with Satoshi. First, he is British and also part of the Cypherpunks. More importantly, he invented Hashcash—a system based on computational challenges—of which Satoshi borrowed this mechanism to implement Bitcoin “mining.” Satoshi explicitly referenced Back's work on Hashcash in the Bitcoin white paper.

However, during the trial of that Australian imposter, Adam Back submitted a series of emails showing Satoshi had contacted him in August 2008, prior to the release of the Bitcoin white paper, to verify claims in the white paper citing his Hashcash paper. These emails seem almost to prove that Back cannot be Satoshi.

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