Unmasking the Creator of Bitcoin

Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals, and I wouldn't even call

my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen, but it's one thing to know and another thing to understand. Alan, murder, me, what the hell was Alan thinking? From serial productions and the New York Times, I'm Em Gesson and this is the idiot. Listen, wherever you get your podcast. From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketrolath.

This is the Daily. It's been one of the world's biggest mysteries and best kept secrets. Who is the inventor of Bitcoin? This is a person who's been known only by an alias, Satoshi Nakamoto. And despite many attempts to unmask him, he's remained anonymous for 17 years.

Even as his creation spawned a whole system of cryptocurrency, revolutionized finance,

and minted a powerful new class of billionaires, including Satoshi himself.

Today, we talk to our colleague, John Kerryru, who says he thinks he found Satoshi. And then we talk directly to that person. It's Thursday, April 9th. Hi, John. Welcome to the studio. Thanks for having me.

John, you've just finished this truly extraordinary investigation and I am obsessed with it. I can't stop thinking about it. It is incredible. Thank you. So, I want to start with a really basic question.

“What percent convinced are you that you have identified Satoshi Nakamoto?”

Somewhere between 99.5% and 100%. Okay, that's pretty good. So, say why that matters? The inventor of Bitcoin, known as Satoshi Nakamoto, has been unmasked after all these years. Well, I think Bitcoin is fair to say is one of the greatest financial innovations of the past few decades.

It's created this new currency. It's made the concept of a decentralized currency on the internet that is available all over the world that can bypass governments and banks possible. It's spawned a $2.4 trillion industry. Well, and I think it's in the public interest to know who is behind this.

“Who is this person who has upended our financial landscape?”

What was motivating him? What caused him to create this decentralized electronic currency? I want to know. And just talk about Satoshi, the alias of the founder of Bitcoin, and the long history of these efforts to identify who he is. Satoshi Nakamoto appeared on the internet in late 2008 when he announced his white paper, which is this nine-page academic

like document that outlines how Bitcoin works. He then stuck around for two and a half years under that pseudonym to improve upon the software and perfect it with a group of early adopters, and then suddenly in April of 2011 he disappeared. He was Satoshi Nakamoto. And shortly thereafter, efforts began to figure out who he was.

The so-called "fatter-stricken" was behind the Bember Nike Bitcoin. No one actually knows who that is, whether it's a man or a woman or even a group of people. People have spent not just journalists but academics. Internet slues have spent the past 17 years trying to unmask this guy. We know that the real Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't want to be found, so if he...

And no one had succeeded.

“What made you decide to pick this up and spend a year plus on this?”

I've been fascinated with this for a long time for probably more than a decade. And then, in early 2022, I decided to try my hand at solving the mystery and I started researching a book about it for several months. Realized pretty quickly that I was out of my depth and gave up. And then two years later, in the fall of 2024, something happened that reunited my interest. Which was, well, I was sitting in the car with my wife in traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

And I always played this jazz funk station in the car and she got annoyed and tired of it.

Well, Casey, this week we are talking about one of the greatest mysteries of the last 20 years on the Internet.

“The chapter is to be in New York Times podcast.”

The popular tech show Hard Fork. We got a new potential Satoshi Nakamoto. There's a new. And I was immediately riveted because the hosts were discussing a new HBO documentary that claimed to have unmasked. Bitcoins creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

We drove home as soon as we got in, I logged into the HBO Max app and pressed play and watched it. With Bitcoin being woven into the fabric of the financial system, affecting everyone. Perhaps the question of Satoshi's identity was more pressing than ever. In the end, I wasn't convinced by the film's conclusion.

They singled out a young Canadian software developer named Peter Todd.

And I felt like their evidence was too thin to justify a, you know, asserting that they had solved the mystery. Still worth watching? Yeah, absolutely. It's an entertaining romp through the world of crypto. But what really caught my attention was a scene in the middle.

It features Adam Beck, this British cryptographer, who was actually a pretty influential person in the Bitcoin community. He's got this mini empire of Bitcoin-related companies. And he's sitting on a bench in Riga, Latvia, next to the filmmaker, whose name is Colin Holbeck. Do you think it'll ever be known, Mr. Toshias? I don't think so.

I mean, just because all of the people that have been identified have various reasons,

believable reasons, what is probably not them. And Colin starts enumerating the big Satoshi suspects. Nick Sabas on the list, how funny you're on the list. And when he gets to Adam Beck's name, you see Adam Beck get very tense. His eyes start darting all over the place.

His left hand gets all fidgety. And he denies specifically that he's Satoshi. Well, I thought you might think I'm Satoshi. And I don't want that to be on the record really. I mean, you're on the list of suspects.

Yeah, yeah, but I was interested for you personally to understand that really, really. I'm not, you know. And I've come across a lot of liars in my career. And to me, his behavior was a tell. Just because of the body language?

The body language, yeah, absolutely. So normally, I might be very skeptical of someone just saying, look, I know how to spot a liar. But you, John, have a very good track record on this matter. And I think this is the moment at which we should talk about your reporting resume for the listening public. You famously broke the story about how Elizabeth Holmes start up.

Theranos was faking these blood tests that led to a federal investigation. And then later her trial and imprisonment.

“In any case, I assume that's what you mean.”

When you say you have your fair share of experiences with liars. It is, she's not the only liar I've come across in my career because she was a pretty big one. Okay, so you have this hunch based on body language. What do you do with it? Where does your inquiry begin?

So the thing with Satoshi is that he was really good at hiding his footprints on the internet. The upshot is that there's not really any way to track Satoshi. And that leaves you with just his writings, which are the nine page bit coin white paper. His emails to a couple of internet mailing lists. And which are his emails to early bit coin adopters.

These are the things that we know there is consensus he did right and create. Yes, absolutely. There's no question that the real Satoshi is behind these texts. So that gives you a little something to work with and I started reading it. And it was difficult reading because I didn't know anything about cryptography and I didn't know anything about computer science and coding.

And how many pages are we talking here? Oh, we're talking about many hundreds of pages. Wow.

“And then I got the idea, well, why don't I write down words and expressions that Satoshi uses that jump out to me as unusual?”

And then I thought, well, you know, there's been like a list of about 10 or 12 people that's been talked about for years and comprised of the top Satoshi candidates. Why don't I at least take the names from this list and see if any of these guys use these same phrases or words, a Satoshi? I figured the best way to do that was to do an advanced Twitter search because a lot of these top Satoshi candidates have Twitter accounts.

Sure enough, one of them used almost every single word and expression that I had jotted down on my notebook and I had jotted down more than a hundred.

And that person was? And I'm back. You're guy. Yep.

“I got a shot of adrenaline when I realized this.”

I felt like the hunch that I'd had watching the HBO film was, you know, at the very least partially founded and quickly reminded myself that, this didn't really prove anything, but I felt like it was a lead. And I asked myself if there was something else I could compare Satoshi's writings to. And there was. There are these emails from this group, the Cypher Punks that an and back happens to have belonged to in the 1990s.

And what exactly are Cypher Punks? The Cypher Punks were this group of techno anarchists that was formed in the early 90s who believed in using cryptography to ward off government surveillance and censorship. I would say they were libertarians on steroids. Some of their ideas were really, you know, at the limits of the law. And they sometimes met in person in the Bay Area, but mostly they communicated through something called an internet mailing list, which is essentially big group email and old typewriter font that you receive in your inbox.

If you subscribe to it and you reply all to when you want to participate in the discussion. And it's very likely that one of the members of this community eventually went on to take the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto.

“Now, why was he thought to be a member of this group?”

Well, there are several indications that Satoshi was one of the Cypher Punks. The most obvious one is that he created Bitcoin. And the Cypher Punks greatest obsession arguably was the concept of electronic cash. Another reason is that Satoshi unveiled Bitcoin and his white paper outlining Bitcoin on the cryptography list, which is an offshoot of the Cypher Punks mailing list. And the cryptography list was a place that a lot of Cypher Punks went to after the Cypher Punks list kind of peatered out.

So we know there's good reason to think that Satoshi was in the Cypher Punks community. We also know that Adam Beck, the guy you think is actually Satoshi, is also in this community of the Cypher Punks. But how many other members are there? Like how big is this universe? Well, in their heyday, there were about 2000 subscribers to the Cypher Punks mailing list.

“And you have to somehow narrow that down.”

In this case, I had what I felt was a pretty good lead, Adam Beck. And it turned out that Adam Beck was among the most prolific and vocal Cypher Punks. So he wrote a lot of posts on the list and made for some interesting reading. And I quickly began to see a lot of parallels between what he wrote about and what Satoshi wrote. There's several posts in '97 where Adam Beck comes out and says on the list, no uncertain terms that he's a libertarian.

And that he sees these crypto anarchists mission as bringing about a more libertarian government. And that reminded me of something Satoshi had said soon after unveiling Bitcoin. He had said something along the lines of, it's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint.

That was the first parallel.

There was the fact that Adam Beck was anti-copyright and that he was very worried by several legal precedents. One of them was the fact that Napster, the file sharing service, had been shut down after it had been sued by the music industry. And after that happened, he sent a post to the list saying that he'd come to the conclusion that basically anyone developing a peer-to-peer software program had to release it anonymously. Otherwise, they'd get in trouble and that struck me as potentially a reason why Satoshi had remained anonymous in releasing Bitcoin.

Another parallel was that they both seem to have this strange preoccupation with spam. spam. Like spam mail. Yeah, exactly. Like junk mail. Sam was something that loomed large in the life of Adam Beck because he in 1997 invented something called hashgash to combat spam.

Okay.

It was a statistical puzzle solving system whereby if your computer was the first to solve the puzzle, this mathematical puzzle, then you would get issued a permission to email.

Okay.

“It only took a few seconds for your computer to solve the problem.”

It presented more of a problem for spammers who were sending hundreds of thousands of emails at once. That tripped up spammers and that was the point of back's invention. And now I noticed that Adam Beck and Satoshi both talked about spam all the time, not only that, they discussed some of the very same spam related ideas. I see there are many parallels, some of them seemingly very significant between Adam Beck and Satoshi. But I gotta say, I'm still not totally convinced because it seems like this was generally the way all the cipherpunks were thinking.

No, I mean, some of these things like the libertarian thing, you can apply generally to a lot of the cipherpunks. There weren't many cipherpunks as obsessed with spam as Adam Beck. Right. But I take your point, these were more clues. They're not enough to prove that Satoshi is Adam Beck.

But I kept looking and reading of the cipherpunks list and soon enough, I came across these posts where Adam Beck, over the course of two years, basically between 1997 and 1999, laid out in detail,

virtually every single aspect of Bitcoin. So it was to create a decentralized currency using peer to peer software, where the payer and the payee would be anonymous, just like they are in Bitcoin. It would have a publicly viewable ledger. It would use hash cash as the way to mint the coins and Satoshi had ended up borrowing hash cash and turning it into the method by which new bitcoins were minted. What you're saying is that basically years before Bitcoin was created, you see Adam Beck laying out the fundamental principles, the elements that are core to it when it's eventually created.

Absolutely. And there was one other really interesting clue as I poured over these archives. I noticed that Adam Beck disappeared from the cryptography mailing list before Satoshi posted his white paper there. And then he stayed away while Satoshi was active. So it was like Batman and Bruce Wayne, whenever Bruce Wayne disappeared, Batman appeared.

The Bitcoin white paper was basically the closest manifestation of the electronic cash vision Adam Beck had laid out on the cipherpunks list the decade before.

“And when it was unveiled, Adam Beck was nowhere to be found. I mean, don't you think that he would have at least said something and commented about it?”

Right. It stretches credulity that this guy who's been talking about exactly the same thing when it gets unveiled is able.

And then, though he reappeared on the list before Satoshi disappeared, he never addressed Bitcoin. He never talked about it until Satoshi vanished.

And I thought that was very significant. But I didn't think I was there yet. I mean, this is a case that's been unsolved for 17 years now. There have been a bunch of attempts to unmask this guy. And I felt like I needed to provide more definitive evidence that I had the right man. And so I decided to keep digging to provide something that was almost forensic. We'll be right back.

Hi, New York Times. I would be very interested in having separate logins for a shared subscription. I'm 35 years old. I still share my parents New York Times subscription.

“I think it's my teenagers board after their own logins. We could share articles.”

But doesn't let us play the same game since each other. I play the stokeu. I do the crossword. I do the spelling bee. I do the word all.

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I want to get the weekly newsletter, but they seem to always go to my husband and then he doesn't afford them to make.

My boyfriend is very elaborate.

“I think him having his own profile would be great.”

We love the New York Times, and we would love to love it individually. Listeners, we heard you. Introducing the New York Times family subscription. One subscription up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more at nytimes.com/family. Okay, John. This is sounding more and more like a detective novel.

What did it mean to get more forensic evidence in this case? How do you even do that?

It meant looking much more closely at the way these two people wrote.

The way Satoshi wrote in the way Adam back wrote. And as I did that, I began to notice similarities in words and expressions and phrases that they used. For instance. So there was this cryptographic term that I noticed in Satoshi's writing. Partial pre-image, which he wrote, putting a hyphen between pre and image.

And I went back to the Cypherpunks and the cryptography mailing list and determined that over all the years that those lists were live, only two people had ever used that term. Adam back and Hal Finney, who was another really important member of the Cypherpunk community. And actually many people have thought over the years that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. But there was one difference in the way they used that term.

Hal Finney did not hyphenate pre-image whereas Adam back did.

“But John, how much should we really read into this?”

Like, who among us hasn't screwed up a hyphen here and there? You know? Except this is a term no one else used. I met this community of thousands of cryptographers who were active, bantering on these lists for more than a decade. No one else but these two guys used that term and one of them spelled it exactly the same way Satoshi did.

And by the way that hyphen in partial pre-image, it wasn't the only weird hyphen in Satoshi's corpus. I actually found that Satoshi was very bad at using hyphens. He was pathologically incapable of using hyphens correctly. You know who else was pathologically incapable of using hyphens correctly, Adam back. And it wasn't just hyphens, Satoshi had a habit of confusing its IT, apostrophe S and its ITS. And who among us, but yes. And he sometimes put also at the end of sentences, Adam back to the exact same thing.

They're turned out to be a lot of similarities. And how significant are those similarities? Did you ask someone? Did you try to get a sense of how likely it is that any of that could just be coincidence? So if you find one instance of similarities, it's not necessarily something you can hang your hat on. It's not enough on its own, but if you find a bunch, then it becomes more significant.

And I talked to a forensic expert at Hofstra who ended up telling me that what I had done, the way at Homedin on certain words and phrases that Satoshi uses is exactly what he does when he's working on cases where he's trying to identify a writer.

“You have to be a real grammar expert to correct this case it turns out.”

Yeah, it turned out that grammar was a key part of this investigation. I also talked to an expert in this thing called "stylometry."

What's that? That relies on basically the distance between function words and someone's prose function words or small words like two and from.

And but to basically establish a stylistic fingerprint. And there was a guy in Paris, a French expert named Florion Cafiero, and I asked him to analyze the Satoshi corpus and compare it with some of the top suspects. It took about six weeks for him to get back to me, so the suspense was kind of mounting. And when he got back to me, finally he texted me to say that the person who was the closest match to Satoshi's white paper was at him back. But he immediately added back was barely ahead of another person in the pool of candidates and that was how funny.

According to Florion, they were barely distinguishable. And as a result, he felt that his analysis was inconclusive. Yeah, how did that feel for you?

I'd spent, you know, many months researching reporting this story.

Right.

“And I had felt so close and now it's all going to mystery seemed out of reach again.”

But I also felt by then like, I had a pretty good idea of what the problem was. I knew for a fact that Adam back knew about Stellometry and knew how to defeat it because he'd been writing back in the 90s about how to defeat writing analysis. So Adam back knew how to cover his tracks, you're saying. Right. So that Stellometry wouldn't catch him. Interesting.

And so with that in mind, I pivoted to a new approach.

What I did is I wanted to find a more systematic way of analyzing Satoshi's writing and comparing it to the Cypher punks writing. So I brought in a New York Times colleague named Dylan Friedman, who's a journalist and an engineer. And who had experience with the sort of thing. He knows how to use AI programs and machine learning.

“Dylan and I as a team began collecting the archives of these cryptography mailing lists.”

We merged them into one big database and made it searchable so that we could then compare Satoshi's corpus of writings with it. So you're basically taking the kinds of analyses that you'd been doing by hand and trying to feed them all into one machine at once to see if the associations that you'd been noticing and picking up on actually did add up to one conclusive result. That's right. I wanted to establish that no one else but Adam back was doing these same things and his writing that Satoshi was doing.

So we conducted three analyses and one of the analyses. We compiled all the words that don't have synonyms that Satoshi uses and synonymless words tend to be technical words. So that would weed out common words that people use. And then we ran those words against our database and found that Adam back among these thousands of other cryptographers was the one who used those Satoshi words the most. So that was one.

“Then we drilled down on hi-fination and with the aid of an AI program we determined that Satoshi had made more than 300 grammatical hi-fination errors.”

And we found that Adam back had the most matches for these hi-fination errors. He matched 67 of those separate hi-fination errors he was by far an outlier. Okay, so the evidence is mounting. Yeah, and then we ran an analysis of these writing ticks that I picked up on in Satoshi's prose.

And basically we applied a filter for each of these Satoshi writing ticks to see how many cyberpunks displayed that writing ticks, so to speak.

The first one was we looked for the people who sometimes put two spaces between senses like Satoshi did. And that eliminated 58 people and left us with 562 suspects. Then we screened for posters who used British spellings that narrowed our pool to 434. Then we screened for posters who sometimes confused it and it's revised verse. Mm-hmm.

That narrowed our pool to 114. Okay, getting closer. Yep. Then we screened for those who sometimes finished senses with also that further shrank the field to 56. Then we used another series of Satoshi ticks that brought us down to eight suspects.

Wow. And then we did one last round of filtering which was that Satoshi alternated between email without a hyphen and email with a hyphen between electronic cash spelled out and e-cash abbreviated and hyphenated. Between the American check, CH, E-C-K, and the British check, CH, E-Q-U-E. And Satoshi also alternated between the British and American forms of the word optimites. He used a Z sometimes in an S other times.

Mm-hmm. When we screened our remaining eight for those who did the same things that Satoshi did, we were down to just one person. And I'm back. Okay. Wow.

I feel much more sold at this point. How are you feeling at this moment when you see that?

I mean, that felt like pretty strong evidence to me.

“Not necessarily just on its own, but combined with everything else that I'd found all the other clues and pieces of evidence that I'd accumulated over.”

But I'd accumulated over the course of a year. I felt like, you know, this was kind of the icing on the cake. Okay, so you have your body of evidence. You feel pretty good about it. What's the move?

So at that point, I felt like I was ready to confront Adam back. The problem was he wouldn't respond to me. I sent him several emails and it was radio silence.

And so I figured the better way to go about this was to try and intercept him at one of these Bitcoin conferences that he's always attending throughout the year.

“And I noticed that the next one that was coming up was going to be in late January and El Salvador.”

So I packed my bags and I flew to San Salvador at the end of January. And I mean, what did you do when you got there? You just went around looking for a bag to tell him, hey, by the way, I've compiled the whole body of evidence that suggests that you are in fact Satoshi Nakamoto. Yeah, that's basically what I did. I mean, I figured, well, maybe I can find him in the speakers lounge.

So I went over to the speakers lounge, couldn't get in. And I posted myself not far away and just watched the door like a hawk. Hoping that Adam back would come out of there and that I could cost him.

This is a stake out, basically.

Yes, so my stake out lasted about 30 minutes and then sure enough Adam back came out with two colleagues. And I went up to him to have him on the back. He turned around and he was a little flustered. He knew who I was. But he was cordial and to my surprise, he agreed to meet me for an interview. Let me just, I want to call up something to use to show you my research. And I began laying out piece by piece, my evidence.

At one point, I pressed him hard on the fact that there was no trace of him for three years on the cryptography list and that that coincided exactly with when Satoshi was active.

“And so that's what seems so fishy to me, someone like you who outlined most aspects of Bitcoin ten years before Bitcoin was created.”

Almost systematically chimed in when there were e-cash discussions on both lists.

When this white paper, which basically makes your vision happen, gets announced on the list, you're able.

But it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't prove anything and it's really, really, really, really. And as I started unspooling my evidence, his face began to redden and he got pretty agitated and defensive. And he said something like, well, that doesn't prove anything. We did a hyphenation analysis and you came out as the top match. You had 67 exact matches to Satoshi hyphenation errors and you were a huge outlier the next guy had 38. It's not me, but you know, I take what you're saying that this is what the AI said with the data.

Yes, it still not me. So he denied being Satoshi something like half dozen times or more during the interview. But one of the denials was phrased in what I thought was a very interesting way. Well, I have to say, I mean, because clearly I'm not Satoshi, like that's my position. And it's true as well. I mean, for what it's worth, but he said, I'm not Satoshi, that's my position. Yes, what interesting phrasing. And I thought to myself, yeah, well, that doesn't sound like a statement grounded in fact.

It sounds like a rhetorical argument. Right. But then he quickly caught himself and said something like, and it happens to be true, by the way. Wow. If there's anything that I haven't brought up, I will definitely send it to you by email.

So the meeting ended on a cordial note and we shook hands like two chess players who had just had a hard fought match. And as I watched him walk away, there was something that nagged at me because toward the end of the interview, we had spent two hours together in his hotel room, conversing. And toward the end of that two hours, he had said something that I felt certain had implied that he was Satoshi. And in the moment, I remember feeling a little jolt and looking up at him, but I couldn't remember when it was in the interview.

Then what was it? So I was bringing up things that Satoshi had written that were similar to things that back had written.

“And I bring up this Satoshi quote, there's a quote that I mentioned earlier, where Satoshi says, "I'm better with code than with words."”

But before I had a chance to explain why I was bringing it up, he interrupted me. And he said, "Well, for someone who's bad with words, I sure did a lot of yacking on these mailing lists." And to me, it sounded like he was saying, "I wrote that quote." Right, he just follows up on the Satoshi quote and talks about himself. Exactly, I'd made crystal clear that I was quoting Satoshi.

I said, "This is a Satoshi quote, and then I read the Satoshi quote."

And before I could explain why I was bringing it up, he interjects. So I felt like he had slipped. I felt like the mask had fallen for a few seconds, and he had become Satoshi. I mean, that sounds like a slip-up, right? It's hard to imagine feeling any other way about it. Well, not according to him because, of course, I emailed him about it, and he emailed me back saying,

"No, it wasn't a slip. I was just responding to the general observation that people often make that technical people are sometimes better with code than with words." And my reaction to that explanation was, "What?" I wasn't talking about a general observation. I was talking about a Satoshi quote, and I suspect that back knew that, and that he was BSing me. Okay, in all this, what seems crystal clear is that back is committed to denying that he's Satoshi.

He's committing to pushing back on your story.

“So if he is, in fact, Satoshi, why John is he so bent on keeping that a secret?”

Well, that's a great question.

I'd say the biggest reason by far is the fact that Satoshi, mine 1.1 million bitcoins and bitcoins early days.

That's a fortune that at today's prices is worth somewhere between 70 and 80 billion dollars. Well, it would make him one of the richest people in the world. If I'm right, that Adam back is Satoshi, and if people know he's that rich and know that he holds that fortune in crypto, as opposed to in a bank account, then that could easily make him a target of what's known in the industry as a wrench attack. These attacks are when people kidnap people who have a lot of crypto and extort them.

And there have been many in the past two years in Europe and the US. And so there's real reason for him to fear that. And the reason that people who have their wealth in crypto are targeted for these kinds of attacks is because they alone hold the keys to these accounts. Unlike someone who has their wealth in all sorts of traditional vehicles. Right.

If you're Satoshi Nakamoto, you just have a bunch of cryptographic keys that hold the keys to your fortune. And anyone who kidnaps you can try to extort those keys out of you. And there's another reason he wouldn't want to be unmasked, which is that right now he's in the process of taking one of his Bitcoin companies public on the NASDAQ stock market.

“Now under US security law, when you are the CEO of a public company, you must disclose all material information to your investors.”

If Adam back is Satoshi and he's sitting on 1.1 million bitcoins, then that could be considered material information because it means that he's sitting on a huge trove of bitcoins that if it were suddenly sold. It could crash the Bitcoin market. Right. It's a lot of undisclosed wealth. Absolutely.

There's also one more very fundamental reason why back wouldn't want to be unmasked as Satoshi, which is the ethos of Bitcoin. It's this decentralized currency outside the control of governments. This collective software project that hundreds of developers have been working on for more than a decade. Bitcoin belongs to every member of the community. The community doesn't want a leader. It doesn't want an authority figure.

So just thinking about that ethos, that idea that the community has a vested interest in understanding themselves as the collective creators of this cryptocurrency.

Do you think that community is going to believe you?

“I think there's going to be a faction of the community that will not believe me and that will say the only thing will believe the only proof that will believe is when someone moves one or several or many of Satoshi's coins.”

Or when someone signs with a cryptographic key associated with one of the walls that holds these coins. As long as they don't have that cryptographic proof, they're going to say it's not good enough. There was an interesting moment in our interview in El Salvador where he said that what he thought would happen is that the coins wouldn't move until Satoshi died and left him to his heirs.

And that then the coins would be sold and that that would be one the mystery it would be solved.

And when he said that it made me think so that's what you're planning. Once John Story published, Adam Beck's team reached out and asked if he could come on the daily to respond. So after the break, Adam Beck. Adam Beck, welcome to the daily. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Cool. Thanks. So should I call you Adam or Mr. Beck or Adam is following Mr. Nakamoto. It is what everybody's wondering. You are here, of course, because my colleague at the Times John Kerry Rue, just published an investigation in which he presents a giant body of evidence gathered over more than a year that points to you being the inventor of Bitcoin. Someone who has operated under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto for 17 years.

“So I'm just going to ask you point blank. Are you Satoshi Nakamoto?”

No, I'm not. I think of course it's fascinating topic as to who this person would be and all of the circumstantial evidence has been analysed extensively by many researchers. So effectively I think what we're left with is sort of speculative analysis and of course, looking at the historic writings, which John does the interesting job of in the article. I mean, I think there is some sort of inherent selection bias, if you like, in the sense that in looking at who might be Satoshi. They're going to look for people with overlapping interest. And I'm probably as reasonable candidate as any of the other top 20 that let's say people have looked at.

But we don't have a reason to suppose that Satoshi would be participating in conferences, participating in documentary films, taking interviews and that kind of thing. And from that point of view, it seems more plausible that Satoshi has one of the many clever people who've worked on internet technology, but don't have really a public profile for example.

“So I think I want to bring John into the conversation.”

Hi, John. Hi. Can you hear me, Adam? Yeah.

Adam, Adam, I just want to set aside for a second the question of whether you're Satoshi and ask you, if Satoshi, we're calling in to this show today.

And I asked him, are you Satoshi, do you think he would say yes? It's kind of hypothetical to me, right? Because I'm not, but I have seen a number of people in interviews that are being asked that question and saying, they wouldn't say or something like that, right? Yeah, I think that's the common also and it sounds logical to me. In other words, the common answer would be that Satoshi calling into the show wouldn't admit that he's Satoshi. Well, I mean, I think my assumption is Satoshi simply would decline to participate or, you know, be hard to identify even as a candidate to try to contact or bring into an interview.

One of the things that really struck me was this very systematic analysis that John and our colleague Dylan Friedman, who works with AI and machine learning, did they comb through thousands of pages of these form posts and look at specific kinds of grammatical errors, specific writing ticks, not just one, but a bunch of things. And they used three separate methods of analysis and all three came to the same conclusion, which is that you were the number one match out of all of these people in this community to the writings of Satoshi.

Right, and we've gotten actually feedback, Dylan and I have gotten feedback today for readers.

Some readers find the hyphenation analysis, the most compelling, and by far the closest match to these hyphenation error patterns was you. What do you make of that Adam? I mean, I guess it's coincidence, unless there is some kind of link in the sense that he did read my paper. Some of the things we're talking about hyphenating are sort of niche technical terms like proof of work, and so there there are probably likely to be similarities because for somebody to be, you know, fluent in cryptography and the technology, they would have read certain things, learn certain programming languages or ideas and so have some common technical language, let's say.

I mean, you're basically saying that this is coincidence, but I have to say it does feel as though what John has done goes much further than that.

I mean, it is really robust, the level of, again, multiple analyses that he presents in the story. Yeah, I mean, I can only tell you that it's not me, people who know me are pretty convinced that's the case. Okay, I just want to kind of finish this part of the conversation by just saying, John, I'm gathering that nothing he has said has changed your mind. No. Okay. Well, it seems like we're going to just have to agree to disagree.

“Can I get you to address something that you said today on X in response to John's article coming out, which is that I'm quoting you here. I also don't know who Satoshi is, and I think it's good for Bitcoin that this is the case.”

In the broadest sense, why do you think it's good that the founder of Bitcoin remain anonymous? Yeah, so I think it's more about the perception of Bitcoin. What do you mean by that? Well, there's Bitcoin as a digital commodity, as a discovery rather than invention. And systems that have a vocal founder, then it gets viewed as more a company's product or a project, whereas Bitcoin is actually very chaotic and decentralized. You know, there are hundreds of individual developers, thousands of companies, different service providers, any one of which or dozens of which could leave and rejoin.

And it wouldn't have much bearing on Bitcoin. So from the point of view of both Bitcoin being seen as a neutral digital commodity. And it being viewed as a discovery rather than a company with a CEO. That's a virtue in your mind. Yeah, I think that is actually beneficial. And of course, the myth and the backstory that there was this founder and he left in 2011 or 2012 is also a fascinating mythology behind Bitcoin.

“And that's why we're having this conversation right, so I do understand.”

And what about the public's interest in knowing who Satoshi is so that they know what his motivations were? Isn't that a legitimate public interest given how big a deal Bitcoin has become, how many things it's altered in our modern world? You know, this person invented something that we have to reckon with every day, whether we like it or not. Isn't there a public interest there and knowing what the motivations were for creating this? I mean, I think not necessarily in the sense that once the technology exists, it takes on an inertia of its own.

Satoshi had one thing in mind, but you know, ultimately, if humanity is using Bitcoin, the people who use it, the economic actors decide why it's valuable to them.

“So, you know, I think at this point, the ideas of the person who put it together and implemented it are soft secondary, right? It's now a market phenomena.”

And you know, you could say that about the internet too, right? You know, there were some early pioneers behind email protocols and TCP/P and that came out of a particular use case in probably military applications initially, but that's not what the internet's about today.

You're saying it's okay for Satoshi to wipe his hands of the consequences of his invention.

And the consequences have not all been positive.

“I mean, I think that I rather like the consequences of Bitcoin, but you know, I have a kind of surferpaint mindset, a kind of anarcho-capitalist, very free market.”

Viewpoint. You know, we should say now that if you are Satoshi, it is in your personal interest also to conceal that. You're about to take a company public and that requires you to do all of these disclosures to the SEC.

If the SEC were to find out that you had hit the fact that you have 70 plus billion dollars in Bitcoin, which Satoshi has, I mean, that would be a big problem for you, right?

I haven't really thought about that, but I mean, that could be another piece of evidence looking at the findings and seeing that there's no such disclosures that

“Well, I mean, you have to make the disclosure in order for it to be in there.”

Right, but I mean, hiding a disclosure is not good, right? The SEC findings are legal documents that are carefully reviewed by security lawyers and so on.

Can I ask Adam, do you think the public will believe you when you say that you were not Satoshi?

It's sort of, people sometimes, I mean, there's a lot of memes on the internet and a Bitcoin has loved their memes and one of the memes is a multi-python sketch where the crowd decides this follow is a religious figure heads and he denies it and every denial, they just say, "Oh, you know, that person would deny it." And there's no shaking their convictions, so as some point, you know, you can say the truth, you can explain why or not, but people are going to draw their own conclusions. Well, Adam, John, thank you both so much for being here.

Thank you, having me, and thank you, Adam, for coming on the show and speaking to us at such length. Yeah, thank you both.

“Here's what else you need to know today.”

A new wave of attacks tested the US and Iran's day old ceasefire, which was strained by confusion over the deals terms and over the status of the straight-of-war moves. One of the biggest points of contention was whether the truth applied to Lebanon. The Israeli military said it carried out some of its largest strikes in Lebanon yet, killing more than 180 people there. President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the ceasefire did not include Lebanon, but Iran and Pakistan, which helped mediate the truth, said it did.

On Wednesday afternoon, Iran said the straight-of-war moves, which Trump demanded be kept open as part of the ceasefire deal, had been fully closed and that some tankers had been turned away. Today's episode was produced by Stella Tan, Jack Disadoro and Nina Feldman. It was edited by Paige Cowett and Rob Zipko, and contains music by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, and Rowan Nemisto. Our theme music is by Wonderley. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitro, see you tomorrow.