Bitcoin’s Greatest Mystery

My mum, a privacy-minded German in her 80s, hates using her credit card. She still carries around wads of cash to pay for everything: a coffee, her weekly supermarket shopping — even a plane ticket to visit me in Wales.

She would get along with Satoshi Nakamoto, the legendary inventor of Bitcoin who operates under a pseudonym and created the first cryptocurrency — a form of electronic cash that leaves no digital trace for banks and governments to follow.

Nakamoto is a godlike figure in the crypto community. But who is he really? Countless people have tried to unmask him. My colleague John Carreyrou, an investigative reporter who uncovered the Theranos scandal, thinks he figured it out. I spoke to him about his investigation.

Unmasking Bitcoin’s creator

So John, I want to talk about your fascinating Bitcoin investigation. But before we start, can you just give me the 101 version of the Bitcoin origin story?

Bitcoin was a revolution in the world of finance. It was the first cryptocurrency and it has given rise to many others. And it was first laid out in a paper that appeared out of nowhere in an obscure corner of the internet in 2008.

The author, who identified himself as Satoshi Nakamoto, described his idea of a decentralized electronic currency that people can use to send one another money from all over the world with no fees, no banks and no government overseeing it.

OK, let’s talk about Satoshi Nakamoto. How did people become so obsessed with him?

People began suspecting pretty quickly that this was a pseudonym. And as the interest in Bitcoin grew — several hundred million people use it today — so did the interest in solving this mystery of his identity. I’ve personally been captivated by this mystery for a dozen years and I spent a year and a half on my story.

Why?

I think it’s in the public’s interest to know who created this technology that has upended our financial landscape. It’s being used for good — like giving people in countries with unstable currencies a reliable store of value — but it’s also used for many bad purposes because there is no oversight: Criminals use it for money laundering. Iran is using it to circumvent sanctions.

Is that why he didn’t want his identity known?

Well, there’s something very subversive about crypto. Currencies historically are controlled by governments. Bitcoin is under no one’s control. And so one likely reason Satoshi used a pseudonym was because he feared legal retaliation from the U.S. and other governments.

I think Satoshi also didn’t want people to treat Bitcoin as just another company with a product and a C.E.O. He wants Bitcoin to feel like a discovery, like digital gold — a digital commodity that was discovered and is mined from the ground of the internet. Not having a named founder with a human face helps with that story.

So how did you find him?

There is a British computer scientist called Adam Back who is a pretty influential and prominent person in the Bitcoin community. He’s been on the list of the top suspects for many years, but no one ever got close to proving it — and he’s always denied it.

But when I analyzed his and Nakamoto’s writings side by side, I made a number of discoveries. One of them was that both were pathologically incapable of using hyphens correctly. They use hyphens when they’re not needed and don’t use them when correct grammar calls for them to be used.

And I figured this was a writing tic that we could perhaps track by doing a broader analysis with the help of A.I., so that’s what we did.

How sure are you that it’s him? In your story, Back insisted he wasn’t Satoshi and chalked up the linguistic similarities to a series of coincidences.

He continues to deny it. But I’m between 99.5 percent and 100 percent sure. His denials felt pro forma to me, like he’s denying on the record so as to maintain plausible deniability.

I should say that the Bitcoin community has cultish undertones, and they have their god, Satoshi Nakamoto, and they don’t want anyone to put a human face and name on their god. They want to continue to think of this as a collective, non-hierarchical project, a decentralized electronic currency where no one is in charge. One of their favorite slogans is “We are all Satoshi.”

So who is Adam Back?

He was a member of this group of privacy-minded anarchists in the ’90s who wanted to escape the control, the surveillance and the censorship of the government. They wanted a currency that was outside of governments’ control because they feared that as modern financial transactions got increasingly digitized there would be a computer record of every transaction you made, and that governments would use that to track you. They wanted to get around that by creating what they called “electronic cash,” a digital version of physical cash that you can’t trace.

Apropos cash, how much is he worth by now?

We know that Satoshi mined 1.1 million bitcoins in the first 16 months of the project. At current prices, that means he’s sitting on a fortune of about $82 billion, which would make him one of the richest people in the world.

You’ve met Back several times. What’s he like?

He’s the opposite of your typical crypto bro. He’s this mild-mannered, nerdy guy. He’s got slightly disheveled, thinning gray hair, a goatee and wire-rimmed glasses. He basically looks like a middle-aged computer scientist. He’s very pleasant to talk to.

Back in the ’90s, he would often write posts about the need to operate under an alter ego so as not to raise the suspicion of the government. This is someone who has been plotting this for a very long time.

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BEFORE YOU GO …

I heard from a lot of you last week. The question of how we should reconcile multiple identities clearly resonated!

Some of you agreed with me that identity is additive. Harald, a German who lives in Switzerland with his Bolivian wife, told me about talking to their son when he was six. “He asked me what he was: half Bolivian, half German and born in St. Gallen. I suggested he was three halves, which made sense to him, and we didn’t worry about ending up with 150 percent!”

But I had some thoughtful pushback, too.

Mikael, who was born in Korea and adopted by a family in Denmark, pointed out that identity is also shaped by how your country perceives you. He grew up feeling “120 percent Danish” with “zero connection to Korea,” but moving to America as a teen flipped that: “Suddenly most people had no reference for ‘Danish’ but plenty of assumptions about ‘East Asian.’”

“I can explain the adoptee story in detail and still get hit with ‘I love BTS!’” he said.

Olga, from Chile, suggested a different way of understanding complex identities. In Latin America, she wrote, “most of us are a mixture — of the First Nations, Spanish (or Portuguese) colonialists, Afro descendants and a succession of migrations of the 19th and 20th century.

“Rather than adding percentages,” she said, “we view ourselves like onions with lots of different layers.”

Thanks so much to those of you who took the time to write. I read everything and learned a lot.

Now that was pretty earnest. For some multicultural comic relief, try this laugh-out-loud clip from the Finnish comedian Ismo on the perils of American abbreviations.

To play us off, courtesy of my Iranian American colleague Parin Behrooz, here’s “Very Few Friends” by Saint Levant, a Palestinian with Algerian, French and Serbian roots.

Have the best weekend, wherever you are! — Katrin