The New York Times newspaper says it has discovered the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious “father” of Bitcoin. But the case continues to look more like an internet detective wall than irrefutable proof, says Vice.
We know for sure that the creator of Bitcoin used the name, although practically everyone is convinced that it was a pseudonym.
It has been some time since the last big “revelation” about the real person behind the B symbol with two vertical strokes, which is why an exhaustive investigation has been carried out, which concludes that the creator of bitcoin is… a certain Adam Back.
It will be? A has doubts.
The latest attempt to solve the mystery comes not only from The New York Times, but also from John Carreyrouauthor of Bad Blood, a work of journalistic investigation that reported the rise and fall of , the popular company that promised to revolutionize blood tests, but whose proposal was based on fraud.
Carreyrou and the paper’s co-author, Dylan Freedmanargue that Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin and probably one of the richest people on the planet, is in reality a British cryptographer named Adam Back.
Carreyrou’s thesis does not appear to be a bunch of hastily concocted nonsense. On the contrary, apparently based on years of researchlinguistic analysis and following a trail of tracks left on the internet that led directly to Back.
Carreyrou points to early work developed on a technology called Hashcash, a precursor cited in white paper originall of Bitcoin. It also analyzes the writing style, including spelling particularities and formatting habits, which seem to coincide with Back’s.
With the help of data analysts, narrowed down tens of thousands of potential applicantsm single name: Back.
Has Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, finally been identified?
So there’s all this almost CSI-style forensic analysis, says Vice. also various circumstantial elements that seem to fit together too perfectsuch as the fact that Back actively participated in crypto circles that, in the late 90s, regularly discussed the idea of digital money.
These circles will have became quieter when bitcoin started to gain traction, then returning to public space when the enigmatic Satoshi seemingly disappeared without a trace.
It’s a convincing hypothesisbut it is not certain that much will change, beyond satisfying our instinctive curiosity to lift the veil on mysterious identities and give us that feeling of a Scooby-Doo ending that, deep down, we are all looking for.
Adam Back, for his part, disagrees with the conclusions of the investigation. And of course he disagrees, regardless of what those conclusions were. Since then, repeatedly denied the accusationclassifying the evidence as a combination of coincidences and confirmation bias.
Some critics pointed to the fact that the investigation gathered a lot of circumstantial evidence, but no decisive proof. Others even suspect that Satoshi wasn’t a single personbut rather a small collective acting under the appearance of a single identity.
This theory continues to admit the possibility of Back being involvedalthough perhaps it was just one name among many.
One of the big problems with this type of research is that the mystery may have been designed, from the beginning, to have no solution.
Satoshi disappeared after publishing the founding ideas of Bitcoin, without leaving any trace of a verifiable identityalthough he may have maintained control over a wallet with more than a million bitcoins at the time, today valued at many tens of billions.
It’s obvious that a lot of people want to know if someone continues to control this treasure or if it has been abandoned. This is all part of Bitcoin’s somewhat sordid mythology: a digital currency shrouded in mystery, with a creator as anonymous as the people who use it for drug and human trafficking.
