The New York Times has named British cryptographer Adam Back as its strongest candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous figure behind Bitcoin, in a new forensic investigation by journalist John Carreyrou.
The newspaper built its case partly on an unusual linguistic habit: Satoshi's tendency to hyphenate compound nouns while leaving compound adjectives unhyphenated, an inversion of normal English usage.
An AI tool was used to search a database of more than 30,000 writers for the same pattern.
Back came closest to matching the error across the entire dataset.
The technical links between the two men are also notable.
Satoshi's founding white paper, published in October 2008, named hashcash, a cryptographic protocol Back developed in the late 1990s, as the basis for Bitcoin's coin-minting mechanism.
@nytimes Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained hidden for 17 years. A trail of clues — and a year of digging by our reporter, John Carreyrou — led us to a 55-year-old computer scientist in El Salvador named Adam Back. At the link in our bio, read our full exclusive story on the search for Bitcoin’s creator — and how we unraveled the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto. Video by By John Carreyrou, Sutton Raphael, James Surdam, Coleman Lowndes and Joey Sendaydiego #bitcoin #investigation
♬ original sound - The New York Times
Records also show Satoshi contacted Back by email two months before the white paper appeared publicly.
Back, now 55, runs Blockstream, a company building infrastructure for the Bitcoin network, and commands considerable standing among cryptographers and developers.
He has denied any connection to Satoshi on multiple occasions, but the Times said his answers had shifted over time, moving from openness to flat refusal as the questions became more pointed.
More than a hundred people have been put forward as Satoshi since Bitcoin launched in 2009, among them Craig Wright, who pursued the claim through the courts without success, and Elon Musk, who dismissed it outright.
Whoever Satoshi is, they are sitting on roughly one million bitcoins, a holding worth tens of billions of dollars that has never once been touched.
Unmasking them would do more than solve a mystery.
Bitcoin was designed without leaders or central authority, and identifying a founder would effectively install one, cutting against the philosophy the network was built on.
Carreyrou raises the possibility that this is precisely why Back, if he is Satoshi, has chosen silence over recognition.
Protecting the myth of a leaderless currency may matter more to him than any claim to credit or fortune.
Back had made no public comment in response to the piece at the time of its publication.