Natalie Ketro: From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketro. This is the Daily. It's been one of the world's biggest mysteries and bestkept secrets. Who is the inventor of Bitcoin? This is a person who's been known only by an alias, Satoshi Nakamoto. And despite many attempts to unmask him, he's remained anonymous for 17 years. Even as his creation spawned a whole system of cryptocurrency, revolutionized finance, and minted a powerful new class of billionaires, including Satoshi himself. Today, we talked to our colleague John Keroo, who says he thinks he found Satoshi. And then we talk directly to that person.

Natalie Ketro: Hi, John. Welcome to the studio.

John Carreyrou: Thanks for having me.

Natalie Ketro: John, you've just finished this truly extraordinary investigation and I am obsessed with it. I can't stop thinking about it. It is incredible. So, I want to start with a really basic question. What percent convinced are you that you have identified Satoshi Nakamoto?

John Carreyrou: Somewhere between 99.5% and 100%.

Natalie Ketro: Okay, that's pretty good. So, say why that matters. The inventor of Bitcoin known as Satoshi Nakamoto has been unmasked after all these years.

John Carreyrou: Well, I think Bitcoin, it's fair to say, is one of the greatest financial innovations of the past few decades. It's created this new currency. It's made the concept of a decentralized currency on the internet that is available all over the world that can bypass governments and banks possible. It's spawned a $2.4 trillion industry. And I think it's in the public interest to know who is behind this. Who is this person who has upended our financial landscape? What was motivating him? What caused him to create this decentralized electronic currency? I want to know.

Natalie Ketro: And just talk about Satoshi, the alias of the founder of Bitcoin and the long history of these efforts to identify who he is. Satoshi Nakamoto appeared on the internet in late 2008 when he announced his white paper which is this nine-page academic like document that outlines how Bitcoin works. He then stuck around for 2 and 1/2 years under that pseudonym to improve upon the software and perfect it with a group of early adopters and then suddenly in April of 2011 he disappeared. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? And shortly thereafter, efforts began to figure out who he was.

John Carreyrou: People have spent not just journalists but academics. Internet slleuth have spent the past 17 years trying to unmask this guy. We know that the real Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't want to be found. So if he is and no one had succeeded.

Natalie Ketro: What made you decide to pick this up and spend a year plus on this?

John Carreyrou: I've been fascinated with this for a long time, for probably more than a decade. And then in early 2022, I decided to try my hand at solving the mystery. and I started researching a book about it for several months, realized pretty quickly that I was out of my depth and gave up. And then 2 years later in the fall of 2024, something happened that reignited my interest.

Natalie Ketro: which was

John Carreyrou: well, I was sitting in the car with my wife in traffic on the Long Island Expressway and I always play this jazz funk station in the car and uh she got annoyed and tired of it and she turned on this podcast that we both Like, well, Casey, this week we are talking about one of the greatest mysteries of the last 20 years on the internet, which happens to be a New York Times podcast, the popular tech show Hard for. This week, we got a new potential Satoshi Nakamoto. and I was immediately riveted because the hosts were discussing a new HBO documentary that claimed to have unmasked Bitcoin's uh creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. We drove home. As soon as we got in, I logged into the HBO Max app and pressed play and watched it.

John Carreyrou: In the end, I wasn't convinced by the film's conclusion. They singled out a young Canadian software developer named Peter Todd and I felt like their evidence was too thin to justify, you know, asserting that they had solved a mystery. Still worth watching. Yeah, absolutely. It's an entertaining romp through the world of crypto. But what really caught my attention was a scene in the middle. It features Adam Back, this British cryptographer who is actually a pretty influential person in the Bitcoin community. He's got this mini empire of Bitcoin related companies and uh he's sitting on a benchibility in Ria Latia next to the filmmaker whose name is Cullen Hobbeck. Do you think it'll ever be known who Satoshi is? I don't think so. No. I mean ju just because all of the people that have been identified have various reasons, believable reasons why it's probably not them. And you know, and Cullen starts enumerating the big Satoshi suspects. Naba's on the list. Heleni, you're on the list. And then, and when he gets to Adam Bach's name, you see Adam Back get very tense. His eyes start darting all over the place. His left hand gets all fidgety, and he denies viciferously that he's Satoshi. Well, I thought you might think I'm Soshi, and I don't want that to be on the record, really. I mean, you're on the list of suspects, right? Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, you know, I was interested for you personally to understand that. Really, really, I'm not, you know. Yeah.

John Carreyrou: And I've come across a lot of liars in my career. And to me, his behavior was a tell.

Natalie Ketro: Just because of the body language.

John Carreyrou: The body language. Yeah. Absolutely. So, normally I might be very skeptical of someone just saying, "Look, I know how to spot a liar." But you, John, have a very good track record on this matter, and I think this is the moment at which we should talk about your reporting resume for the listening public. You famously broke the story about how Elizabeth Holmes startup, Theronos, was faking these blood tests that led to a federal investigation and then later her trial and imprisonment. In any case, I assume that's what you mean when you say you have your fair share of experiences with liars.

John Carreyrou: It is. Uh she's not the only liar I've come across in my career, but she she was a pretty big one.

Natalie Ketro: Okay. So, you have this hunch based on body language. What do you do with it? Where does your inquiry begin?

John Carreyrou: So, the thing with Satoshi is that he was really good at hiding his footprints on the internet. The upshot is that there's not really any way to track Satoshi. And that leaves you with just his writings, which are the nine-page Bitcoin white paper, his emails to a couple of internet mailing lists, and which are his emails to early Bitcoin adopters.

Natalie Ketro: These are the things that we know there is consensus he did write and create.

John Carreyrou: Yes, absolutely. He there's no question that the real Satoshi is behind these texts. So that gives you a little something to work with and I started reading it and it was difficult reading because I didn't know anything about cryptography and I didn't know anything about computer science and coding. And how many pages are we talking here? Oh, we're talking about many hundreds of pages. Wow. And then I got the idea, well, why don't I write down words and expressions that Satoshi uses that jump out to me as unusual. And then I thought, well, you know, there's been like a list of about 10 or 12 people that's been talked about for years and comprised of the top Satoshi candidates. Why don't I at least take the names from this list and see if any of these guys use these same phrases or words as Satoshi? I figured that the best way to do that was to do an advanced Twitter search because a lot of these top Satoshi candidates have Twitter accounts.

Natalie Ketro: Okay.

John Carreyrou: Sure enough, one of them used almost every single word and expression that I had jotted down in my notebook. And I jotted down more than 100.

Natalie Ketro: And that person was

John Carreyrou: Adam Beck,

John Carreyrou: your guy. Yep. I got a shot of adrenaline when I realized this. I felt like the hunch that I'd had watching the HBO film was, you know, at the very least partially founded and quickly reminded myself that this didn't really prove anything, but I felt like it was a lead. And I asked myself if there was something else I could compare Satoshi's writings to. And there was. There are these uh emails from this group, the cipher punks, that Adam Bach happens to have belonged to in the 1990s.

Natalie Ketro: And what exactly are cipher punks?

John Carreyrou: The cipher punks were this group of techno anarchists that was formed in the early '90s who believed in using cryptography to ward off government surveillance and censorship. I would say they were libertarians on steroids. Some of their ideas were really, you know, at the limits of the law and they sometimes met in person in the Bay Area, but mostly they communicated through something called an internet mailing list, which is essentially big group email and old typewriter font that you receive in your inbox if you subscribe to it and you reply all to when you want to participate in the discussion. And it's very likely that one of the members of this community eventually went on to take the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Natalie Ketro: Now, why was he thought to be a member of this group?

John Carreyrou: Well, there are several indications that Satoshi was one of the cipher punks. The most obvious one is that he created Bitcoin. And the cipher punk's greatest obsession arguably was the concept of electronic cash. Another reason is that Satoshi unveiled Bitcoin and his white paper outlining Bitcoin on the cryptography list, which is an offshoot of the cipher punks mailing list. And the cryptography list was a place that a lot of cipher punks went to after the cipher punks list kind of uh petered out.

John Carreyrou: I quickly began to see a lot of parallels between what he wrote about and what Satoshi wrote. There's several posts in 97 where Adam Bach comes out and says on the list in no uncertain terms that he's a libertarian and that he sees these crypto anarchist mission as bringing about a more libertarian government. And that reminded me of something Satoshi had said soon after unveiling Bitcoin. He had said something along the lines of it's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint. That was the first parallel. There was the fact that Adam back was anti-copyright and that he was very worried by several legal precedents. One of them was the fact that Napster, the file sharing service, had been shut down after it had been sued by the music industry. And after that happened, he sent a post to the list saying that he'd come to the conclusion that basically anyone developing a peer-to-peer software program had to release it anonymously, otherwise they'd get in trouble. And that struck me as potentially a reason why Satoshi had remained anonymous in releasing Bitcoin.

John Carreyrou: Another parallel was that they both seem to have this strange preoccupation with spam. Spam like spam mail. Yeah, exactly. Like junk mail. Spam was something that loomed large in the life of Adam Back because he in 1997 invented something called hash cache to combat spam. Okay, it was a statistical puzzle solving system whereby if your computer was the first to solve the puzzle, this mathematical puzzle, then you would get issued a permission to email. In other words, it was like paying for a postage stamp. Okay, it only took a few seconds for your computer to solve the problem. It presented more of a problem for spammers who were sending hundreds of thousands of emails at once. That tripped up spammers and that was the point of Bax's invention. And now I noticed that Adam Back and Satoshi both talked about spam all the time. Not only that, they discussed some of the very same spam related ideas.

John Carreyrou: And there was one other really interesting clue. As I poured over these archives, I noticed that Adam Back disappeared from the cryptography mailing list before Satoshi posted his white paper there. And then he stayed away while Satoshi was active. So it was like Batman and Bruce Wayne. Whenever Bruce Wayne disappeared, Batman appeared.

Natalie Ketro: Okay, John, this is sounding more and more like a detective novel. What did it mean to get more forensic evidence in this case? How do you even do that?

John Carreyrou: It meant looking much more closely at the way these two people wrote, the way Satoshi wrote and the way Adam back wrote. And as I did that, I began to notice similarities in words and expressions and phrases that they used. Hm. For instance, so there was this cryptographic term that I noticed in Satoshi's writings, partial pre-image, which he wrote putting a hyphen between pre and image. Uhhuh. And I went back to the cipher punks and the cryptography mailing list and determined that over all the years that those lists were live, only two people had ever used that term. Adam back and Hal Finny who was another really important member of the cipher punk community and actually many people have thought over the years that he is Satoshi Nakamoto but there was one difference in the way they use that term how Finny did not hyphenate pre-image whereas Adam Bach did

Natalie Ketro: but John how much should we really read into this like who among us hasn't screwed up a hyphen here and there you know

John Carreyrou: except this is a term no one else used amid this community of thousands of cryptographers who were active bantering on these lists for more than a decade. No one else but these two guys used that term. And one of them spelled it exactly the same way Satoshi did. And by the way, that hyphen in partial pre-image, it wasn't the only weird hyphen in Satoshi's uh corpus. I actually found that Satoshi was very bad at using hyphens. who's pathologically incapable of using hyphens correctly. You know who else was pathologically incapable of using hyphens correctly? Adam Back H. And it wasn't just hyphens. Satoshi had a habit of confusing its IT apostrophe s and its its I mean who among us but yes and he sometimes put also at the end of sentences. Adam back did the exact same thing. There turned out to be a lot of similarities.

John Carreyrou: I also talked to an expert in this thing called styometry. What's that? That relies on basically the distance between function words in someone's pros. Function words are small words like to and from and but to basically establish a stylistic fingerprint. And there was a guy in Paris, a French expert named Floyon Cafier. And I asked him to analyze the Satoshi corpus and compare it with some of the top suspects. Took about 6 weeks for him to get back to me. So the suspense was kind of mounting. And when he got back to me finally, he texted me to say that the person who was the closest match to Satoshi's white paper was Adam Back.

John Carreyrou: And Dylan and I as a team began collecting the archives of these cryptography mailing lists. We merged them into one big database and made it searchable so that we could then compare Satoshi's corpus of writings with it. So you're basically taking the kinds of analyses that you'd been doing by hand and trying to feed them all into one machine at once to see if the associations that you'd been noticing and picking up on actually did add up to one conclusive result. That's right. I establishment that no one else but Adam Bach was doing these same things in his writing that Satoshi was doing. The first one was we looked for the people who sometimes put two spaces between sentences like Satoshi did and that eliminated 58 people and left us with 562 suspects. Then we screened for posters who use British spellings. That narrowed our pool to 434. Then we screened for posters who sometimes confused its and its or vice versa. That narrowed our pool to 114. Then we screened for those who sometimes finished sentences with also. That further shrank the field to 56. Then we used another series of Satoshi ticks that brought us down to eight suspects. And then we did one last round of filtering, which was that Satoshi alternated between email without a hyphen and email with a hyphen, between electronic cash spelled out and ecash abbreviated and hyphenated, between the American check ceue. And Satoshi also alternated between the British and American forms of the word optimize. He used a Z sometimes and an S other times. When we screened our remaining eight for those who did the same things that Satoshi did, we were down to just one person and I'm back.

Natalie Ketro: Okay. So, you have your body of evidence. You feel pretty good about it. What's the move? So, at that point, I felt like I was ready to confront Adam back. The problem was he wouldn't respond to me. I sent him several emails and it was radio silence.

John Carreyrou: And so, I figured the better way to go about this was to try and intercept him at one of these Bitcoin conferences that he's always attending throughout the year. And I noticed that the next one that was coming up was going to be in late January in El Salvador. So I packed my bags and I flew to San Salvador at the end of January. Yes. So, my stakeout lasted about 30 minutes and then sure enough, Adam Back came out with two colleagues and I went up to him, tapped him on the back, he turned around and he was a little flustered. He knew who I was, but he was cordial and to my surprise, he agreed to meet me for an interview. Um and I began laying out piece by piece my evidence.

John Carreyrou: At one point I pressed him hard on the fact that there was no trace of him for three years on the cryptography list and that that coincided exactly with when Satoshi was active. but it doesn't ultimately it doesn't it doesn't prove anything. And I would reassure you like it's really not me. But and as I started unspooling my evidence, his face began to reen and he got pretty agitated and defensive and he said something like, "Well, that doesn't prove anything." Um, we did a hyphenation analysis and you came out as the top match. You had 67 exact matches to Satoshi hyphenation errors and you were a huge outlier. The next guy had 38. I don't know. It's not me, but you know, I I take what you're saying that this is what the AI said with the data, but it's still not me. So So he denied being Satoshi something like uh a half dozen times or more during the interview, but one of the denials was phrased in what I thought was a very interesting way. Well, I have to say, I mean, cuz clearly I'm not stushy. Like that's my position and it's true as well. I mean, for what it's worth, but he said, I'm not Satoshi. That's my position. That's my position. Yes. What interesting phrasing. And I thought to myself, yeah, well, that doesn't sound like a statement grounded in fact. It sounds like a rhetorical argument, right? But then he quickly caught himself and said something like, and it happens to be true, by the way.

John Carreyrou: And as I watched him walk away, there was something that nagged at me because toward the end of the interview, we had spent two hours together in his hotel room conversing. And toward the end of that two hours, he had said something that I felt certain had implied that he was Satoshi. And in the moment, I remember feeling a little jolt and looking up at him, but I couldn't remember when it was in the interview. It wasn't until a few days later when I was back in New York listening to the interview again that I found that moment So, I I was bringing up things that Satoshi had written that were similar to things that Bach had written. And I bring up this Satoshi quote. There's a quote that I mentioned earlier where Satoshi says, "I'm better with code than with words." I do a lot of talking though for somebody I mean I mean I'm not I'm not saying I'm good with words, but I sure did a lot of yaking on these lists actually. you you said, but before I had a chance to explain why I was bringing it up, he interrupted me and he said, "Well, for someone who's bad with words, I sure did a lot of yakking on these mailing lists." And to me, it sounded like he was saying, "I wrote that quote." Exactly. I had made crystal clear that I was quoting Satoshi. I said, "This is a Satoshi quote." And then I read the Satoshi quote and before I could explain why I was bringing it up, he interjects. So, I felt like he had slipped. I felt like the mask had fallen for a few seconds and he had become Satoshi.

Natalie Ketro: Okay. In all this, what seems crystal clear is that Bach is committed to denying that he's Satoshi. He's committing to pushing back on your story. So, if he is in fact Satoshi, why, John, is he so bent on keeping that a secret?

John Carreyrou: Well, that's a great question. I I'd say the biggest reason by far is the fact that Satoshi mined 1.1 million bitcoins in Bitcoin's early days. That's a fortune that at today's prices is worth somewhere between 70 and 80 billion. Whoa. It would make him one of the richest people in the world. If I'm right, that Adam Back is Satoshi. And if people know he's that rich and know that he holds that fortune in crypto as opposed to in a bank account, then that could easily make him a target of what's known in the industry as a wrench attack. These attacks are when people kidnap people who who have a lot of crypto and extort them. And the reason that people who have their wealth in crypto are targeted for these kinds of attacks is because they alone hold the keys to these accounts. And there's another reason he wouldn't want to be unmasked, which is that right now he's in the process of taking one of his Bitcoin companies public on the NASDAQ stock market. Now, under US security law, when you are the CEO of a public company, you must disclose all material information to your investors. If Adam back is Satoshi and he's sitting on 1.1 million bitcoins, then that could be considered material information because it means that he's sitting on a huge trove of bitcoins that if it were suddenly sold could crash the Bitcoin market, right? It's a lot of undisclosed wealth. There's also one more very fundamental reason why back wouldn't want to be unmasked as Satoshi, which is the ethos of Bitcoin. The community doesn't want a leader. In fact, one of the favorite slogans of the community is we are all Satoshi.

Natalie Ketro: Once John's story published, Adam Bach's team reached out and asked if he could come on the daily to respond. Adam back. Welcome to the daily. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So, I'm just going to ask you point blank, are you Satoshi Nakamoto?

Adam Back: No, I'm not. I think of course it's a fascinating topic as to who this person would be and all of the circumstantial evidence has been analyzed extensively by you know many researchers. So effectively I think what we're left with is sort of speculative analysis and of course looking at the historic writings which John does an interesting job of in the article. I mean I think there is some sort of inherent selection bias if you like in the sense that in looking at who might be Satoshi they're going to look for people with overlapping interest and I'm probably as reasonable a candidate as any of the other top 20 that let's say people have looked at but we don't have a reason to suppose that Satoshi would be participating sitting at conferences, participating in documentary films, taking interviews and that kind of thing. And from that point of view, it seems more plausible that she is one of the many clever people who've worked on internet technology, but don't have really a public profile, for example.

Natalie Ketro: So, I just want to get to some of the specific pieces of evidence in John's story that I found most convincing. One of the things that really struck me was this very systematic analysis that John and our colleague Dylan Freriedman who works with AI and machine learning did. All three methods of analysis came to the same conclusion, which is that you were the number one match. And by far the closest match to these hyphenation error patterns was you.

Adam Back: I guess it's coincidence unless there is some kind of link in the sense that he did read my paper. Some of the things we're talking about hyphenating are sort of niche technical terms like proof of work. And so there there are probably likely to be similarities because for somebody to be you know fluent in cryptography and the technology they would have read certain things learned certain programming languages or ideas and so have some common technical language let's say. I can only tell you that it it's not me. People who know me are pretty convinced that's the case.

Natalie Ketro: Adam, can I get you to address something that you said today on X in response to John's article coming out, which is that, and I'm quoting you here, I also don't know who Satoshi is, and I think it's good for Bitcoin that this is the case. In the broadest sense, why do you think it's good that the founder of Bitcoin remain anonymous?

Adam Back: Yeah. So, I think it's more about the perception of Bitcoin. Well, there's Bitcoin as a digital commodity, as a discovery rather than invention and systems that have a vocal founder, then it gets viewed as more a company's product or a project. Whereas Bitcoin is actually very chaotic and decentralized. So from the point of view of both Bitcoin being seen as a neutral digital commodity and it being viewed as a discovery rather than a company with a CEO, that's a virtue in your mind. Yeah, I think that is actually beneficial. And of course, the myth and the backstory that there was this founder and he left in 2011 or 2012 is also a fascinating mythology behind Bitcoin and that's why we're having this conversation, right?

Natalie Ketro: Adam, what about the public's interest in knowing who Satoshi is so that they know what his motivations were? Isn't that a legitimate public interest given how big a deal Bitcoin has become, how many things it's altered in our modern world?

Adam Back: I mean I think not necessarily in the sense that once the technology exists it takes on an inertia of its own. So she had one thing in mind but you know ultimately if humanity is using Bitcoin the people who use it the economic actors decide why it's valuable to them. So you know I think at this point the ideas of the person who put it together and implemented it are sort of secondary right it's now a market phenomena and you know you could say that about the internet too.

Natalie Ketro: can I ask Adam, do you think the public will believe you when you say that you are not Satoshi?

Adam Back: Uh it's of people sometimes I mean there's a lot of memes on the internet and the Bitcoiners love their memes and one of the memes is a MontiPython sketch where the crowd decides this fellow is uh a religious figurehead and he denies it and every denial they just say oh you know that person would deny it and there's no shaking their conviction. So, at some point, you know, you can say the truth, you can explain why you're not, but people are going to draw their own conclusions.