Adam Back denies Satoshi Nakamoto claims from New York Times investigation

Adam Back is back at the center of the Satoshi Nakamoto mystery after New York Times reporter John Carreyrou published a very long investigation that says the clues point to him more than anyone else.

John says he first got pulled into this investigation spotting Adam get visibly tense when his name came up as a suspect while watching that disappointing HBO documentary that promised to uncover Satoshi’s real identity.

Carreyrou finds old Back posts that sound too close to Bitcoin

John explains that the strongest new material came from old cypherpunk archives, where he found that Adam Back had written about a digital cash system years before Bitcoin launched, and the ideas were not vague.

John says Adam described privacy for sender and receiver, a network spread across many computers, built in scarcity, and a public way to verify everything without trusting one bank or one person.

“Mr. Back had invented Hashcash, a statistical puzzle-solving system that Satoshi borrowed for the mining of bitcoins. Satoshi had cited Mr. Back and Hashcash in his white paper.”

John also said: “I  remembered that Satoshi had mentioned an obscure Russian online currency called WebMoney in one of his emails to Mr. Malmi. I now compared those four names with the eight who had hyphenated ‘proof-of-work.’ Only one overlapped: Mr. Back.”

Adam Back denies everything and says Carreyrou’s case is built on coincidence

John said he gave Adam Back plenty of chances to talk to him, as he met him in Las Vegas first, then later tried emailing and also confronting him in El Salvador, but according to John, “Mr. Back insisted he wasn’t Satoshi and chalked it all up to a series of coincidences. But at times, his body language told a different story.”

“When I emailed Mr. Back my request, he hadn’t replied. I wasn’t sure if he was ghosting me or just busy and I didn’t want to spook him by immediately following up, so I waited eight days to send him another email. Again, radio silence. I had clearly touched a nerve. But why? With the precautions Satoshi had taken, what was there to even hide? Unless Satoshi had made some sort of mistake?” said John.

In El Salvador, John says Adam denied being Satoshi more than half a dozen times. He told him the evidence still did not prove anything. He said it was hard to prove a negative. He also said one reason he could not be Satoshi was that he had misunderstood a basic Bitcoin point when he first showed up in developer chat. John says he checked the logs and could not find that mistake there.

After the story came out, Adam quickly posted a long denial on X, reiterating that he is not Satoshi. He admitted that yes, he had been deeply focused on cryptography, privacy, and electronic cash since the early 1990s, so it was normal for people to find early ideas in his work that looked a lot like Bitcoin.

Adam said, “John, like Aaron van Wirdum before him, was finding many interesting bitcoin analogs in early attempts to create a decentralized ecash, in effect prototype ideas trying to figure out a bitcoin-like thing, including p2p, BGP, proof of work.”

He added that his line about doing a lot of talking on the lists was being read the wrong way, as the point was that heavy posting can create confirmation bias because “due to my volume I’d more likely have commented than others with similar interests but posting 20x less. I offered this to John as an explanation of why this can be seen as a form confirmation bias, that should be statistically corrected for.”

“I also don’t know who satoshi is, and i think it is good for Bitcoin that this is the case, as it helps bitcoin be viewed a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity,” said Adam.

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