The question of the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto — the anonymous creator of Bitcoin — has come back into the spotlight following a publication in the New York Times. Investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize laureate Nathaniel Popper claims that the pseudonym conceals the identity of Adam Back, a British cryptographer and one of the pioneers of the cryptocurrency industry and CEO of Blockstream.

What exactly Popper found

According to Popper, he conducted a multi-month investigation, comparing the writing style of Nakamoto's texts with Back's public messages on forums from the 1990s and 2000s. Linguistic analysis revealed characteristic similarities in the use of technical terms, punctuation, and argumentation structure. Popper also points to a chronological coincidence: Nakamoto's activity on the network dropped significantly precisely when Back began openly positioning himself as an influential figure in the Bitcoin community.

A separate argument is that Nakamoto referred in his correspondence to Back's work — the Hashcash system — as one of the key previous developments. Critics of this version have long noted: why would a person cite their own previous work in the third person? Popper offers an answer: precisely to conceal authorship.

Back's reaction

Adam Back publicly denied any involvement in creating Bitcoin. In a series of social media posts, he called Popper's conclusions "speculative" and stated that he first read the Bitcoin whitepaper only after its publication in 2008 — like thousands of other people in the crypto community. Back provided no documentary evidence to refute or confirm this statement.

It is notable that this is not the first time someone has been "appointed" as Satoshi. Previously, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and Australian Craig Wright came under suspicion — the latter even attempted to legally establish himself as the author, which ended in court defeats and scandals.

Why this matters beyond a detective story

The question is not merely academic. According to analysts' estimates, wallets attributed to Nakamoto hold approximately 1 million bitcoins — a sum that at the current exchange rate exceeds 60 billion dollars. If Satoshi's identity is established and confirmed, the movement of these funds could significantly affect the market. Additionally, Bitcoin's ideological image as a "no-owner" asset is largely maintained by its creator's anonymity.

Popper does not claim to have conclusive evidence. His material is built on a combination of circumstantial evidence — and this is precisely what makes the situation more complex: disproving an indirect theory is as difficult as proving it.

If Back is indeed Nakamoto and has consciously distracted attention from himself for years — this would mean that the person who created a tool of "radical transparency" chose absolute opacity for themselves. Can a cryptocurrency whose legitimacy is partly based on trust in the protocol survive the ultimate revelation of its anonymous founder's identity without this changing the very nature of that trust?