Is Adam Back Really Satoshi?

The New York Times dropped a 12,000-word investigation recently claiming British cryptographer Adam Back, the inventor of Hashcash and CEO of Blockstream, is Satoshi Nakamoto. Reporter John Carreyrou (the same journalist who blew the lid off the Theranos fraud) spent a year combing through decades of cypherpunk mailing lists (which have been available to everyone for decades). Working with AI researcher Dylan Freedman, he compiled every post from three major lists between 1992 and 2008, ran three separate writing analyses, and all three returned the same name: Adam Back. The evidence is circumstantial but well organized. Satoshi and Back both used double spaces between sentences, favoured British spellings, hyphenated ‘double-spending’ the same way, and toggled between ‘e-mail’ and ‘email.’ Carreyrou catalogued 67 shared hyphenation errors, almost double the next closest match across hundreds of subscribers. If only I was on that mailing list too, maybe I’d be accused of being Satoshi. What I mean is, those aren’t uncommon grammatical nuances. But they also leaned on the technical correlations. Back invented Hashcash, the proof-of-work system that became a core building block of Bitcoin’s mining protocol. Satoshi cited it, and Back, in the whitepaper. Back was one of the first people Satoshi contacted. The timelines, interests, and language all overlap. One of America’s fastest-growing software companies might surprise you 🚨Heads up! It’s not the publicly traded tech giant you might expect… Meet M 0.00%↑ ODE, the disruptor turning phones into potential income generators. Retail investors are buzzing about the company’s pre-IPO offering. 📲Mode saw 32,481% revenue growth over a three year period, ranking them the #1 overall software company on Deloitte’s 2023 fastest-growing companies list. They aim to pioneer “Privatized Universal Basic Income“ powered by technology—not government. Their flagship product, EarnPhone, turns phones from an expense into an income stream, and they’ve already helped consumers earn & save $1B+. Uber did it to taxis, Airbnb to hotels and now Mode Mobile is doing it to the $500 billion smartphone industry. The difference? Early investors like you can invest in their pre-IPO offering at just $0.50/share and earn up to 20% bonus. 59,000+ shareholders already invested $71M+ and they may soon reach a point where they no longer accept outside investment. 🔒 With their Nasdaq ticker $MODE secured, investors now have a limited time to invest before they potentially go public. Back denied it, both in the article and on X, saying shared phrasing reflects people with similar experience and interests, not hidden authorship. I agree with him. Blockstream called the piece ‘circumstantial interpretation of select details and speculation, not definitive cryptographic proof.’ I agree with them too. And I think that’s an important point, there is no cryptographic proof. No signed message from an early-mined wallet. No movement of Satoshi’s estimated 1.1 million BTC. Without a private key signature, this remains fun journalism, not verification. And as this is the NYT, it’s served its purpose and provided a lot of eyeballs and interest. I think it’s worth pointing out that Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and Wei Dai all fit parts of the profile too. Bitcoin was designed to exist without a leader. If someone wanted adulation and admiration, then Satoshi would have put a real name to it all, been there, emerged from the shadows as one of the wealthiest people on the planet. But he/she/it didn’t. Satoshi disappeared on purpose. The whole point was to build something that did not need its creator to survive. For 17 years, that design has remained as relevant today as it did when the genesis block launched on 3 January 2009. When Satoshi embedded that Times headline into the genesis block, ‘Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,’ it was a message that Bitcoin’s origin story is about a broken financial system, and a disruption to the legacy system that is fundamentally flawed. The myth of Satoshi is arguably as important to Bitcoin as its entire codebase. If Back is Satoshi, he’s spent 17 years keeping the secret. He hasn’t touched the coins. He hasn’t cashed in. And maybe that discipline would make the myth even more powerful. And if he’s not, which let’s be honest… he’s not, then the NYT just published the most expensive waste of time in history. Either way, Bitcoin doesn’t care, nor should it. The code runs whether Satoshi is Adam Back, Hal Finney, a team, or a time traveller from the future. The real takeaway from Carreyrou’s investigation isn’t who Satoshi is. It’s that after all these years, it doesn’t matter. Trust in crypto, Adam Atlantic. Disclaimers: Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur. The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.