The New York Times claims to have found the creator of bitcoin. Who is he and what is known about him?

The mysterious creator of bitcoin, whose identity has been undisclosed for 17 years, may be 55-year-old British cryptographer Adam Back, claims an investigation by The New York Times. Its author claims to have found many details in Back's story that match known facts about Satoshi Nakamoto. Oninvest recounts the main point of the NYT investigation.

Beck was born in London in 1970. His father was an entrepreneur, his Ma a paralegal. By his own account, Back learned to program on his own at the age of 11. His childhood hobby turned into a bigger one: he defended his doctoral thesis in computer science at the University of Exeter.

Beck has long been called one of the potential candidates for the role of Satoshi, which he himself denied. But unlike other candidates, so far the Briton has not become the subject of a thorough journalistic investigation, according to the NYT.

During his investigation, the newspaper reporter discovered that Back had co-founded a new bitcoin reserve management company. These companies buy bitcoins with borrowed money, giving their investors a way to invest aggressively in the cryptocurrency. At the time of the NYT story, the company was in the process of going public through a merger with a structure of U.S. investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald - its former CEO Howard Lutnick now serves as U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

As the CEO of a public company, Beck is required by securities laws to disclose all information material to investors, the NYT notes. Such information could be the fact that he is Satoshi Nakamoto and that he has accumulated 1.1 million bitcoins, the newspaper states. For investors, this is important because a sudden sale of such a volume of coins could crash the market.

The NYT investigation was conducted by journalist John Carreiro. He previously worked at The Wall Street Journal and became known for exposing biotech startup Theranos, after which its founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors. Beck came to his attention after the release of the HBO documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery in 2024. The movie identified cryptocurrency expert, Canadian Peter Todd, as the creator of bitcoin (he himself denied it). Beck also appeared in the movie as one of the candidates, but categorically rejected the version that he could be Satoshi Nakamoto. But his behavior in front of the camera - running eyes, nervous hand movements, awkward laughter - caught Carreira's attention and prompted him to start checking.

The journalist spent more than a year investigating and claims to have found many coincidences indicating that Beck is Satoshi. Here are some of them:

- Adam Back earned his PhD in distributed computer systems, which is what bitcoin is. His dissertation project focused on the C++ programming language, the same language in which Satoshi wrote the first version of the bitcoin code. Back is also an expert in public-key cryptography, which Satoshi implemented into bitcoin.

- Both Baek and Satoshi were allegedly associated with the anarchist movement Cypherpunks, which formed in the early 1990s. Its members communicated through organized mailing lists and sought to use cryptography - a way of securing communications through code - to protect people from government control and censorship.

Beck, in correspondence with other Cypherpunks members in the late '90s, proposed creating "electronic money" that would protect transactions from government control, according to the NYT investigation. In his messages, the Briton described a decentralized network of computers, or "nodes," that would continue to function even if some tried to seize control of the network. This is exactly how Satoshi later designed bitcoin, the NYT writes.

Back also came up with Hashcash, a statistical problem-solving system borrowed by Satoshi for bitcoin mining, the NYT writes.

- Based on their texts, Satoshi and Beck were both obsessed with the problem of e-mail spam, according to Carreiro. Satoshi mentioned spam and ways to combat it many times in his texts. Back suggested using Hashcash to fight spam to increase the computational burden on spammers.

- Satoshi and Beck preferred to act anonymously on the Internet and use pseudonyms. They also both liked to point out that they were better at writing code than text.

- The NYT journalist also pointed out that Satoshi's periods of activity and silence contrast with those of Beck. Satoshi, having introduced bitcoin in late 2008, worked on perfecting his invention for another two and a half years before disappearing without a trace in 2011. Beck had been actively discussing digital money with Cypherpunks members for over a decade, but fell silent after the creation of bitcoin, the closest realization of his ideas. He did not reappear until six weeks after Satoshi's disappearance, mentioning bitcoin for the first time in his texts.

- Carreiro also examined Satoshi's texts, including a white paper published in 2008 describing bitcoin, as well as his postings on the Bitcointalk forum and correspondence with Finnish programmer Martti Malmi, with whom he collaborated in the early days of bitcoin. The correspondence was made public during a lawsuit against Australian Craig Wright, who impersonated Satoshi.

According to Carreiro, Satoshi had a certain style of writing: for example, he put two spaces between sentences instead of one, he confused compound words, alternated between "e-mail" and "email," and so on. The journalist compiled a list of notable words and phrases from Satoshi's texts and found that almost all of these expressions Beck used in the social network X. To continue the investigation, the NYT author engaged a specialist in artificial intelligence - together they collected archives of correspondence of Cypherpunks members for the 1990s and 2000s and compared them with Satoshi's texts using three methods of analysis. During its heyday in the late 1990s, the Cypherpunks movement had about 2,000 followers. However, all three analyses indicated that it was Beck who was closest to Satoshi in writing style.

The author of the investigation, having gathered evidence, met with Adam Back at a conference in El Salvador in January. According to the journalist, he presented his arguments for two hours, but Beck rejected them, citing coincidences. At the same time, he was unable to provide a convincing explanation for his disappearance during the period of Satoshi's activity. The NYT journalist also believes that Back gave himself away by his behavior: when answering the reporter's difficult questions, he "blushed and fidgeted restlessly." According to Carreiro, he had no doubts that Back was Satoshi.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor