A lengthy New York Times investigation published this week suggested that British computer scientist Adam Back is bitcoin’s alleged creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Back, who immediately denied the claims (and has done so before), explained to Yahoo Finance on Thursday why the theory doesn’t make sense.
“I think the most probable situation is that Satoshi is somebody who’s not talking to documentary film crews, to investigative journalists, who is not participating in the forums or at conferences with his real name,” Back, the CEO of blockchain technology company Blockstream, said in an interview on Yahoo Finance.
The story suggesting that Back invented bitcoin (BTC-USD) came from 18 months of digging by investigative journalist John Carreyrou, who is famous for exposing the fraud scandal around Elizabeth Holmes’s blood-testing startup, Theranos. Along with his New York Times colleague, journalist and AI expert Dylan Freedman, Carreyrou compiled all correspondence from three important internet mailing lists that span decades.
They compared the material to all of Nakamoto’s known trail of correspondence using artificial intelligence. Back proved the closest match in each of the three writing analyses performed in the investigation. Finnish programmer Martti Malmi, who worked with Nakamoto in bitcoin’s early days, had released hundreds of email exchanges as part of a court case.
Carreyrou said on Thursday on the New York Times’ Daily podcast that he is “somewhere between 99.5% and 100%” certain he has found bitcoin’s creator.
Notable quirks that Nakamoto and Back shared included writing two spaces between sentences, using British spellings, and misusing hyphens in the same way, according to the NYT analysis.
“There’s an element of confirmation bias in it,” Back said of the investigation’s method.
“You are inherently selecting people who are interested in similar things,” he added. “They’re programmers. They’re interested in privacy, in cryptography, and so they’re going to have similar language backgrounds and things like that. So of course, they’re going to sound similar.”
Other connections from the investigation include Back’s silence from online mailing lists during the period when Nakamoto was actively posting and his reappearance around the time Nakamoto finally disappeared. Back was also the first person Nakamoto emailed with directly, months before releasing the bitcoin white paper.
There’s a real argument to be made — whether or not he is Nakamoto — about the importance of Back’s contributions to the field of digital currency. Without it, the $2.4 trillion crypto market where Nakamoto holds near-mythic status may never have formed.