On October 31, 2008, someone calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto posted a document nine-page document that proposed a decentralized electronic money system. That was the birth of bitcoin and a phenomenon that has shaken the foundations of the modern economy, but no one has ever been able to know who was really behind that pseudonym. And no matter what they say in The New York Times, we still don’t know.
Adam Back. The journalist John Carreyrou became famous for uncover he Theranos fraudand in a new and in-depth investigation published in The New York Times claims to have discovered the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. According to their data, that person is Adam Back, a well-known 55-year-old British cryptographer who is currently the CEO of the Blockstream company. Back denies all these claims, and we fear that this investigation will once again end up like the rest of the previous attempts.
He is not just any suspect. In 1997, Back invented HashCash, a mathematical puzzle-solving system that Satoshi explicitly cited in his white paper and that in fact became the basis of the bitcoin mining mechanism. He was an active member of groups of anarchist cryptographers who had been trying to create digital money for decades. And between 1997 and 1999 he published messages on Internet forums that accurately described almost all the fundamental elements of the system. That was like an instruction manual for creating bitcoin, but created a decade before Satoshi Nakamoto published it.
Analysis based…on how Satoshi wrote? The methodology followed by Carreyrou is striking. He worked with an AI expert from the NYT to collect messages from crypto mailing lists between 1992 and 2008, merged them into a database with 134,000 messages from 620 different users, and applied three methods of analyzing those messages. In the analysis, it was seen that the British spelling, the same hyphen errors in some terms, the confusion between “it” and “its” or the use of two spaces between sentences pointed to Back writing the same as Satoshi in his document.
All circumstantial. This style analysis led Back to be identified as the clear candidate among a group of 12 “suspects.” However, the experts who carried out the analysis were not entirely sure and, for example, another of the traditional candidates in these investigations, Hal Finney, was almost tied in these style matches. Back himself indicated that anyone who writes about cryptography is going to sound just like the rest of the community.
Back denies the major. Carreyrou ended up traveling to a bitcoin conference in El Salvador to meet with Back and explain his findings. During their two-hour conversation, Back denied being Satoshi on several occasions. The journalist claimed to have caught Back making a mistake when he stated that “I’m better with code than words”, something that Satoshi Nakamoto also said in a late 2008 message on one of the mailing lists analyzed. Back said he was simply making a general observation about programmers, and the truth is that all of Carreyrou’s evidence was inconclusive.
Only Satoshi can prove that he is Satoshi. The bitcoin user community often says that “we are all Satoshi”, in reference to the fact that revealing the real identity of the creator of bitcoin is not relevant. The only way to do this would be for Satoshi himself to reveal himself and prove to be that person by transferring bitcoins from one of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original wallets – where he houses nothing less than 1.1 million bitcoins.
Many have tried to unmask Satoshi. They have all failed. We are facing another attempt to reveal the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. It is neither the first nor probably the last. In recent years we have seen several more:
Neither then nor now has anything really been proven. The mystery continues.
Image | Wikipedia | Michael Fortsch
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