Sathoshi Nakamoto Is Not Adam Back
Do you remember an episode from the first season of the TV show The Young Pope in which Jude Law's character spoke about the magic of anonymity? For example, he used the Daft Punk phenomenon — nobody knows who these guys are, and that very fact is key to their success.
Nowadays, governments, social media, and tax authorities seek more and more details about our personalities; privacy has become a new luxury. I don't think Satoshi Nakamoto predicted it when he was developing Bitcoin, though he had already written more about banking structures and other de-anonymization factors. I suppose Satoshi, like any geek-punk, tried to hide your money from authorities as a kind of tech protest. However, the joke has gone on too long, and today, Bitcoin is the most famous and profitable cryptocurrency in the world's financial markets. Oops!
Besides, Satoshi's personality is a subject of mystification and puzzlement. That's interesting because, if you know a little bit more about Bitcoin's architecture, beyond its up-and-down price and memes, you will understand that all of this has been built on puzzles and on your curiosity to solve them.
The main difference is payment; miners get coins for their work, and we mere mortals are happy to settle for small favors — namely, unraveling the crypto world’s ultimate riddle: “Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?”
Recently, John Carreyrou, with Dylan Freedman from The New Your Times, has published an investigation about Nakamoto's personality. They claim Satoshi is a British crypto developer and geek named Mr. Back, but Mr. Back denies it.
John Carreyrou is a famous journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes and broke the Theranos story. It seems to you that arguing with such a well-known journalist with a strong reputation is, at the very least, overly presumptuous. However, his text is literally enormous and contains many controversial arguments. Moreover, many X users were divided: some were disappointed by this investigation, while others were under the impression that.
Let's break down why the global crypto community still seeks the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
Stylometry Is Interesting, but Not Proof
This is the main reason the investigation didn't yield the intended result. The authors use several stylometric analysis methods to persuade us that Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto. However, none of these is proof, because stylometry, as a science, is unreliable and often requires a clean environment to yield reliable results.
For example, researchers say that to obtain truly accurate and reliable stylometric analysis results, you need to ensure that the text is by a single author and longer than 1,000 words, because the shortness of linguistic data in texts of this kind makes it challenging for conventional stylometric authorship methods to assign disputed texts to their real authors.
In addition, the text must also be consistent in genre and form. Just think about it: what kind of results might you get if you compared the poetry and prose of two different authors? And in this article, we have a situation, something like this. But let's see.
First, the author takes an informal approach — manually compiling a list of Satoshi’s characteristic words and phrases and looking for matches among the candidates — while openly acknowledging that “this wasn’t meant to be scientific.” Thank you very much.
He then moves on to forensic linguistics, analyzing individual linguistic “tics” — spelling, hyphens, and the mixing of British and American English — which the expert refers to as “markers of sociolinguistic variation.” This sounds like arguments on LinkedIn: if there is an em dash in your text, it's a fail because it's written by ChatGPT.
Finally, classical stylometry is employed by expert Florian Caffiero: comparing texts based on the frequency of function words and calculating the distance between authors — an approach similar to Burrows’s Delta and other distance-based methods.
However, this single formally rigorous analysis yields an unstable result: Back turns out to be only the closest candidate, not the unique one; moreover, when the metric is changed, other candidates take the lead, and the result is explicitly acknowledged as “inconclusive**.**”
Two experts quoted in the article have already stated that the results are controversial, yet the author keeps looking for something, and we keep reading. Fantastic!
Taken together, this means the article's stylometric component relies primarily on heuristics and qualitative observations rather than on robust quantitative evidence.
Stylometry is a probabilistic tool that is sensitive to data, context, and methodology, and therefore does not provide absolute proof.
Basically, the main author’s thesis goes that Back and Satoshi make the same spelling mistakes and write the same way, which means they are one person.
The author had spent about 18 months investigating various texts from forum messages to tweets, white papers that might have been written by different authors, in order to make sure that his super idea would fail. It seems that if one were to study Epstein’s files with the same zeal, one could produce an even more sensational article.
The Crypto Community Life: Vocabulary and Habits
The next interesting point is the author's familiarity with the cryptocurrency world. Look, if you have never played in D&D, you haven't absolutely known what “Rocket Tag” is. The crypto is the same. I completely understand the author, because I was like him on this topic a few years ago.
The author reports it to us, and thank you for that — he said that he had visited the Cypherpunks crypto forum, where, as he said, “I found myself staring at thousands of emails dense with crypto speak I barely grasped.”
Maybe this is exactly why the authors chose stylography to investigate the topic. It's a classic point of view: preferring a perspective that makes sense to you. In the end, the author is a professional journalist, not a developer or crypto enthusiast. Don't get me wrong, this optics is not a problem. The problem is that it doesn't work in this case.
“Mr. Back’s use of many of the same terms as Satoshi might not prove anything to a community that had been consumed with this topic for many years, but I doubted it was just a chance”.
Exactly, because we use many similar words every day, and sometimes people from crypto might make up new phrases — we're working on, literally, new technologies. Finally, language is a moving substance, and it changes every day. So, thank you very much again.
Thus, the authors chose a method for identifying Satoshi that, while interesting, was understandable given their professional background. Maybe they should have invited a crypto experts or dived deeper into the “crypto rabbit hole.”
There’s no point in even discussing assumptions about body language, a critical attitude toward spam, and other irrelevant factors from the article. Leave it to the YouTube crypto scammers.
Ethics and Privacy: Why People Still Want to Reveal Nakamoto's Personality
The author says, “It’s hard to picture in the age of Venmo and Apple Pay, but one of the Cypherpunks’ biggest concerns was the digitization of financial transactions.” Yes, man, this is a problem. First, a government tracks your bank transactions, and then it takes away your right to spend money freely.
It's enough to look at the key speakers at the Bitcoin conference:
And the Bitcoin creator's team understood earlier than everyone else. And we in the crypto industry try to solve it every day.
Blockchain technology was originally created to reduce taxes and achieve the financial freedom that fiat money couldn't provide. That's why the core of crypto is decentralization, because privacy is the same human right as the right to a decent life.
Unfortunately, the first idea was not popular in 2008 because users had to learn how to use crypto and wallets. Moreover, people didn't understand how they could use “unbacked digital money.” But backing is privacy.
Therefore, attempts to de-anonymize Satoshi contradict the fundamental principles of blockchain and cryptocurrency, which were created to protect the owner’s privacy. Not to mention how the author of the article literally painted a target on Mr.Back's elegant jacket in an attempt to make the public believe that he is Satoshi.
That's obvious: people in general don't care about the real Nakamoto's personality because they focus only on market movements. Imagine how much the market will change if Satoshi spends his coins.
It wonders how this fits into the broader narrative of de-anonymizing crypto holders worldwide, from the SEC in the U.S. to MiCA in the European Union. The blockchain is already public, and transaction records cannot be altered, but there is still no system for tracking transaction patterns at scale that is as simple and well-established as the one used in banking systems. This is likely why governments and regulators are turning to citizens and crypto holders, seeking to compel them to de-anonymize through legislative measures.
Final Thoughts
The only possible proof is a cryptographic signature by a private key. Anyone can verify it — the signature is valid, and it matches a known address.
In attempting to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto, the public once again confirms that it is not ready to take responsibility for its own finances, is not ready to take care of its own security, and is willing to sacrifice its right to privacy simply to satisfy idle curiosity — only to then adopt this same approach itself.
In conclusion, I’d like to thank the authors for their work — it’s truly ambitious, hyped, very cinematic, and will likely result in another book. Especially in the context of the general trend toward encroachment on privacy and de-anonymization. If you know what I mean.
And when you want to unmask the creator of Bitcoin, think about whether you would want the balance of your wallet to be on public display as well.
