Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

One evening in the fall of 2024, my wife and I were sitting in traffic on the Long Island Expressway when, tired of listening to the jazz-funk station I often played on our drives, she switched to a podcast.

It was “Hard Fork,” the New York Times tech show, and the hosts were discussing a new HBO documentary claiming to have unmasked Bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.

I was instantly riveted. I had long considered the question of Satoshi’s true identity one of our age’s great enigmas and had poked at it before without success. Two years earlier, I had even spent several months researching a book on the subject. But I soon realized I was out of my depth and reluctantly gave up.

Hearing that someone else might have finally identified the shadowy figure who had revolutionized finance, spawned a $2.4 trillion industry and amassed one of the world’s biggest fortunes in one stroke of staggering genius aroused in me a mixture of admiration and envy. I couldn’t wait to watch the film. As soon as we got home that night, I logged in to the HBO Max app and pressed play.

In the end, I found the conclusion of “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” unconvincing: HBO singled out a Canadian software developer based on what seemed like very thin evidence. But as I watched what was an otherwise entertaining romp through the world of crypto, one scene caught my attention.

Adam Back, a British cryptographer and leading figure in the Bitcoin movement, sat on a park bench in Riga, Latvia, his shirt untucked under a brown coat. The filmmaker casually rattled off the names of several Satoshi suspects. At the mention of his own name, Mr. Back tensed up, strenuously denied he was Satoshi and asked that the conversation be kept off the record.

Having encountered my share of liars and developed something of an expertise in their tells, Mr. Back’s demeanor — his shifty eyes, his awkward chuckle, the jerky movement of his left hand — struck me as fishy. When the credits rolled up, I replayed the sequence several times on my TV.

While I pondered Mr. Back’s reaction, another thought occurred to me. An Australian impostor had been sued for falsely claiming he was Satoshi. What if the evidence disclosed in that court case, which had been tried in London a few months earlier, could help me unravel the mystery?

As anyone steeped in Bitcoin lore will tell you, Satoshi was a master at the art of maintaining anonymity on the internet, leaving few, if any, digital footprints behind.

But Satoshi did leave behind a corpus of texts, including a nine-page white paper outlining his invention and his many posts on the Bitcointalk forum, an online message board where users gathered to discuss the digital currency’s software, economics and philosophy. And that corpus, it turned out, had expanded significantly during the impostor’s civil trial when Martti Malmi, a Finnish programmer who collaborated with Satoshi in Bitcoin’s early days, released a trove of hundreds of emails he had exchanged with him. Emails Satoshi sent to other early Bitcoin adopters had surfaced before, but none came close in volume to the Malmi dump. If Satoshi was ever going to be found, I was convinced the key lay somewhere in these texts.

Then again, others must have gone down this road before me. Journalists, academics and internet sleuths had been trying to identify Satoshi for 16 years. During that span, more than 100 names had been put forward, including those of an Irish cryptography student, an unemployed Japanese American engineer, a South African criminal mastermind and the mathematician portrayed in the movie “A Beautiful Mind.”

The most alluring theories had focused on coincidences that aligned with what little was known about Satoshi: a particular code-writing style, a mysterious work history, an expertise in Bitcoin’s key technical concepts, an anti-government worldview. But they had run aground under the weight of an alibi or some other piece of inconsistent or contrary evidence. Each failure had been met with glee by many members of the Bitcoin community. As they liked to point out, only Satoshi could definitively prove his identity by moving some of his coins. Any evidence short of that would be circumstantial.

It seemed foolish to think that I could somehow crack a case that had confounded so many others. But I craved the thrill of a big, challenging story. So I decided to try once more to unmask Bitcoin’s mysterious creator.

I. A Series of Clues

Two Thin Leads

I started by looking for ways to narrow the field.

One thing that jumped out in Satoshi’s emails to Mr. Malmi and in his other writings was that he mixed British spelling and idioms with American expressions. Since many Satoshi suspects are American, some have speculated that he disguised his prose with Britishisms. But I never bought that theory because of a clue Satoshi left us.

In Bitcoin’s first block of transactions, Satoshi embedded text from a newspaper headline: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” The headline in question appeared in The Times of London’s British print edition. This felt like a sign that Satoshi really was British.

Satoshi was also very likely 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. The Cypherpunks interacted mostly through something called an internet mailing list. Ancestors of today’s message boards, mailing lists were large group emails in old typewriter font that subscribers received in their inbox. To communicate, respondents replied-all.

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. When you hand someone a 20-dollar bill, no one knows where it came from. But when you pay for something with a check or a credit card, banks keep computer records. Cypherpunks worried that governments would use those records to track people’s lives. On their mailing list, they brainstormed about how to create “electronic cash”: digital money that would preserve the anonymity of physical currency. Some even came up with their own electronic cash systems, but none caught on — until Bitcoin.

Besides their shared interest in digital cash, there were other indications Satoshi belonged to the group. He announced his white paper on an offshoot of the Cypherpunks mailing list called the Cryptography list, and he seemed familiar with two of the group’s members.

At its peak in the late 1990s, the Cypherpunks counted some 2,000 followers, so that still left a wide pool of candidates.

Armed with these admittedly thin leads, I pored over Satoshi’s body of writing, especially the emails released by Mr. Malmi, and made a list of words and phrases that stood out to me. It felt like trying to decipher a foreign dialect. More than once, I wondered whether I was engaging in a useless exercise.

My list eventually grew to more than a hundred words and phrases, taking up several pages in my notebook. Among those that caught my eye: “dang”; “backup,” used as a verb in one word; “human friendly”; “on principle”;“burning the money”; “abandonware”; “hand tuned”; and “partial pre-image.”

One phrase — “a menace to the network” — sounded like a line from a science fiction movie. The rest hinted at a weird combination of upper-class Brit, American redneck, computer geek and cryptographer.

Using the advanced search function on the social media platform X, I did a cursory search to see if any of the dozen or so people most often suspected of being Satoshi used the terms I had highlighted. Not all Satoshi suspects have X accounts, so this wasn’t meant to be scientific. But, just as I had hoped, one person was a match for nearly all of my words and phrases: Mr. Back.