We are all Satoshi Nakamoto

The media’s obsession with Satoshi Nakamoto: a recurring mistake

Sixteen years ago, an individual or group used the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto to launch Bitcoin. Two years later, Satoshi disappeared, and his identity remains a mystery to this day. He has shown no interest in fame nor in accessing the vast fortune of bitcoin he controls and has never spent (worth over $60 billion).

The New York Times investigation

Recently, The New York Times published an investigation suggesting that Adam Back, a British cryptographer and CEO of Blockstream, could be the most plausible candidate behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym. The piece, written by John Carreyrou, is based on extensive stylometric analysis and archival research. Through a series of filters, the field of potential candidates was progressively narrowed down until it converged on a single name: Adam Back. To support this thesis, the newspaper also highlights technical and behavioral overlaps, noting that as early as the late 1990s, Back had already outlined many of Bitcoin’s core concepts.

However, as with many previous attempts, this reconstruction appears far from solid. The entire argument rests on statistical correlations and retrospective inferences that risk confusing probability with causation. In the context of cypherpunk mailing lists, it is entirely plausible that multiple individuals would exhibit similar writing styles, references, and intellectual trajectories. The fact that Back emerges as the “closest match” does not imply he is the correct one — even the stylometry expert involved described the findings as inconclusive.

Back has also explicitly denied any involvement, attributing the similarities to classic confirmation bias driven by his prolific participation in discussions around electronic cash. In the absence of cryptographic proof — namely, a message signed with the private keys associated with Satoshi’s wallets — such investigations inevitably remain in the realm of speculation. Continuing to single out candidates based on indirect evidence risks turning a technical question into a media narrative, where the desire to unmask a figure outweighs the rigor of the proof.

A long series of failed attempts

The New York Times is not the first to fall into this trap. In 2014, Newsweek cast the spotlight on Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a Californian engineer whose only “fault” was sharing the same name as Bitcoin’s creator. Dorian faced several difficult months before finally dispelling the false claim.

In 2015, it was again The New York Times that suggested Nick Szabo, one of Bitcoin’s conceptual pioneers, could be Nakamoto. Yet Szabo was more of a theorist than a programmer. Similarly, Hal Finney, one of the most renowned cryptographers of recent decades and an early Bitcoin adopter, has often been linked to Nakamoto. Finney repeatedly denied the claim before his death in 2014.

Also worth mentioning is Len Sassaman, a brilliant cypherpunk who dedicated his life to defending personal freedoms through cryptography, working on open-source privacy technologies such as PGP and conducting research on peer-to-peer networks. Sassaman died by suicide on July 3, 2011, after a long struggle with depression and neurological illness — a date that coincides with Satoshi’s disappearance. Just two months earlier, Satoshi had sent his final message: “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.” It remains one of the more compelling theories, albeit unproven, and Sassaman’s wife, Meredith Patterson, has denied that her husband was Bitcoin’s creator.

The worst episode occurred in 2016, when the BBC was misled by Craig Wright, who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. Backed by significant financial resources, Wright launched a years-long campaign to alter Bitcoin’s protocol and gain access to the bitcoins originally controlled by Nakamoto. He also attempted to prevent the publication and distribution of Bitcoin’s original white paper and filed lawsuits against those who opposed him. Fortunately, in June 2024, a UK court ruled that Wright was not the author of the Bitcoin white paper, was not the individual operating under the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym between 2008 and 2011, and was neither the creator of the Bitcoin system nor the author of its original software.

The documentary world has not been immune either. In 2024, the HBO film Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, directed by Cullen Hoback, mistakenly identified Peter Todd, a Canadian cryptographer and Bitcoin developer, as the mysterious creator. The error could easily have been avoided with basic fact-checking: the evidence presented was weak, Todd publicly denied it, and the director appears to have used the identification more as a marketing device than as the result of serious due diligence. Wrongly associating someone with control over $60 billion in bitcoin is not only journalistically irresponsible — it can endanger that person’s physical safety.

Why we are all Satoshi

Ultimately, through his disappearance, Satoshi delivered a clear message: Bitcoin belongs to everyone and must remain free from the influence of any individual. The absence of a central figure is a strength, as it ensures that Bitcoin’s development is not subject to undue top-down pressures. As Bitcoin enthusiasts often say, “We are all Satoshi.”

And indeed, we are — because Satoshi lives on in everyone who understands and adopts his brilliant creation: a digital asset that can be transferred but not duplicated, digitally scarce like nothing before it. A scarcity reminiscent of gold in the physical world: just as gold has shaped the history of civilization, money, and finance, its digital counterpart is poised to play a similarly transformative role in the digital age and in the future of money and finance.

To truly understand Bitcoin’s cypherpunk origins, valuable contributions include The Genesis Book: The Story of the People and Projects That Inspired Bitcoin by Aaron van Wirdum, as well as the documentary The Digital Rush, produced by Bapu Film (Paolo Aralla) in collaboration with the Digital Gold Institute — in which Adam Back is also interviewed.