The British computer scientist Adam Back said on Wednesday that he is not the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin known as Satoshi Nakamoto, after a New York Times investigation presented evidence that he is.
“i’m not satoshi,” Mr. Back said on the social media platform X on Wednesday. He added that he is merely one of a number of developers who came “so close yet so far” to building something like Bitcoin.
The true identity of the creator of the world’s first cryptocurrency has remained hidden for 17 years. The Times’s investigation, led by reporter John Carreyrou, showed that Mr. Back had, in a series of obscure emails, outlined almost every feature of Bitcoin a decade before Satoshi did. It showed that during Satoshi’s two-and-a-half years posting frequently online, Mr. Back largely disappeared from forums discussing Bitcoin, only to reappear soon after Satoshi famously vanished in 2011. And it found striking similarities between Mr. Back’s and Satoshi’s online posts and emails.
Contacted for the investigation, Mr. Back denied that he is Satoshi and chalked up its findings to a series of coincidences. He reiterated that on X on Wednesday, saying that much of the article featured “a combination of coincidence and similar phrases from people with similar experience and interests.”
Mr. Back was a member of the Cypherpunks, a group of anarchists formed in the early 1990s who wanted to use cryptography — the art of securing communications through code — to free individuals from government surveillance and censorship. Satoshi is believed to have been a Cypherpunk because of the group’s interest in digital money that could not be traced by the government, and because he announced his white paper on a forum where many Cypherpunks congregated.
For the article, the Times reporters compiled all of Satoshi’s known writings and assembled a list of his writing quirks, and collected the archives of three internet mailing lists where Cypherpunks gathered in the 1990s and 2000s. They then conducted several analyses, assisted by artificial intelligence, which found that Satoshi’s quirks matched Mr. Back’s own writing more closely than any other Cypherpunk. Asked about this for the article, Mr. Back replied, “It’s not me, but I take what you’re saying that this is what the A.I. said with the data. But it’s still not me.”
Mr. Back’s tweets on Wednesday did not mention the A.I. analysis. But he said that his frequent Cypherpunks posts in the 1990s made his views more prominent than others. He said that because he posted so prolifically, he might appear to have more in common with Satoshi than “others with similar interests but posting 20x less.”
Mr. Back runs Blockstream, a Bitcoin-focused company that has been valued as high as $3.2 billion. “Today’s New York Times story is built on circumstantial interpretation of select details and speculation, not definitive cryptographic proof,” a Blockstream spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday. “Dr. Adam Back has consistently stated that he is not Satoshi Nakamoto. What is not speculative is Adam’s foundational contribution to Bitcoin.”
Kailyn Rhone is a Times business reporter and the 2025 David Carr fellow.
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