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Journalists from The New York Times conducted an investigation that concluded with a high likelihood that the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is British cryptographer and co-founder of Blockstream, Adam Back.
NYT journalist John Carreyrou spent approximately a year examining archives from the 1990s Cypherpunks cryptographic mailing list and comparing them with Nakamoto’s correspondence.
Carreyrou performed a linguistic analysis on 620 recipients of three cryptographic newsletters, ultimately narrowing the list of suspects down to one individual—Adam Back. The journalistic inquiry revealed that long before Bitcoin’s inception, Back had thoroughly described a system that Nakamoto later implemented. Additionally, both Back’s and Nakamoto’s writings feature the same rare technical terms, along with similar punctuation patterns and spelling errors.
Both the Bitcoin creator and Back frequently confused the terms “it’s” and “its,” employed “British spelling,” placed two spaces between sentences, and wrote “half way” and “down side” as separate words, despite linguists considering the correct forms to be combined.
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The NYT editorial team commissioned an additional review by an unnamed French linguist. The expert utilized a different method—analyzing the frequency of function words. The outcome was inconclusive: Back ranked first among the suspects, but only narrowly ahead of Hal Finney, who is regarded as the first recipient of bitcoins aside from Nakamoto. Finney passed away in 2014.
At the end of 2025, Back took the helm of an investment firm focused on Bitcoin. The organization plans to go public through a merger with the American investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald. Under U.S. securities law, if Back indeed possesses a wallet containing 1.1 million bitcoins, he is required to disclose this information to investors.
Satoshi Nakamoto may have vanished from the public eye in 2011, leaving approximately 1.1 million coins in wallets. At the current exchange rate, their value exceeds $100 billion.
For the crypto community, the NYT’s assertion was not a revelation: Back has long been among the primary suspects. He has repeatedly indicated that the principles of Bitcoin resonate with the ideas of 1990s cypherpunks and has encouraged others to set aside skepticism regarding the first cryptocurrency, advocating for investment in it.
