Adam Back has denied claims that he is Satoshi Nakamoto after a New York Times story argued the British cryptographer is the strongest candidate for Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator.
Back's Denial
In a post on X, Back wrote: "I'm not satoshi." He said his long track record in cryptography, privacy tools, and electronic cash research explains why journalists keep finding links between his work and Bitcoin's design. His work from 1992 onward, including discussions on the cypherpunks mailing list, led to Hashcash and other ideas later echoed in Bitcoin.
He disputed one line in the story that treated a comment he made in an interview as a possible slip. Back's remark — "I'm not saying I'm good with words, but I sure did a lot of yakking on these lists actually" — referred to confirmation bias. Because he wrote so often about electronic cash, his old comments are easier to match with Satoshi's than those who posted far less. "The rest is a combination of coincidence and similar phrases from people with similar experience and interests," Back wrote.
The Report's Claims
NYT reporter John Carreyrou argued Back had found "many interesting bitcoin analogs in early attempts to create a decentralized ecash," including peer-to-peer systems, proof-of-work, and routing models that looked like prototypes for Bitcoin.
Back said he does not know who Satoshi is and thinks the mystery may help frame Bitcoin as "a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity."
Questions from Others
Bloomberg columnist Joe Weisenthal said he was "not 100% convinced by the evidence or the conclusion." He noted that all cypherpunks had similar thoughts on politics, privacy, and internet architecture. He also questioned why Back would speak openly about early work like Hashcash under his real name but use strict anonymity for Bitcoin.