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I found this article about as compelling as all the other attempts at identifying him. Half of the cypherpunks (I was pretty active) had the same set of interests in public key cryptography, libertarianism, anonymity, criticism of copyright, and predecessor systems like Chaum's ecash; we talked about those in virtually every meeting.

The most compelling evidence is Adam Back's body language, as subjectively observed by a reporter who is clearly in love with his own story. The stylometry also struck me as a form of p-hacking—keep re-rolling the methodology until you get the answer you want.

It's entirely possible Adam is Satoshi, but in my opinion this article moves us no closer to knowing whether that's true or not. He's been on everybody's top 5 list for years, and this article provides no actual evidence that hasn't been seen before.

5 comments

What struck me in particular was the fact the reporter noticed that Back had theorized how to evade stylometry. Obviously, if one of the people in question had specifically come up with ways to evade methods, you’d want to re-roll those methods to account for that.

That, alongside a number of other tidbits (Back’s activity and inactivity patterns lining up with Satoshi’s appearance and disappearance, his refusal to provide email metadata, his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law) makes the case a lot more meaningful than just “likely p-hacking.”

>his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law

I don't think you can attribute this to financial incentive. The actual Satoshi could forfeit 90% of their BTC and still have more than they could know what to do with.

At those kinds of levels I can see personal security being a higher consideration.

Either way it would give no indication who might be Satoshi because all candidates would have a similar incentive if they were Satoshi, and you are measuring the absence of information.

why does everybody assume that whoever is Satoshi still has access to their wallet? It's absolutely possible whoever is Satoshi has simply lost the key.

We're talking new technology where you're running fast and loose. It's absolutely possible, and I'd say a big reason why someone would not want to admit to being Satoshi.

I'm Satoshi, but I also lost billions because I messed up a Debian upgrade.

Further, no one would believe them, and they'd still endlessly be a target for criminals. No benefit to revealing any information beyond mild dismissals, IMO.

> I'm Satoshi, but I also lost billions because I messed up a Debian upgrade.

That would be very funny. I used to own a whole bitcoin when it was worth nothing.Didn't think it would be ever worth anything and formatted my hard drive to change distro.

I did this with 15 btc :]

I commented elsewhere in this thread theorising that Satoshi could be the work of both Finney and Back. If that has any basis in reality, then it stands to reason that perhaps the wallet is locked away in a trust or at least legally unobtainable until certain conditions are met (e.g. Adam Back's passing). I can imagine a scenario in the future where a law firm makes a press release confirming they're in possession of Satoshi's wallet and have been instructed to liquidate and donate its proceeds.

I think this is plausible as well. One of the emails used by Satoshi was tracked to CA (where Finney lived), the original paper talks in plural "we" (fwiw), and the Dorian Satoshi person lived in CA and could have been an inspiration for the name (if Finney had come across him somehow) since he was a very private, anti gov person (not saying he had anything to do with BTC)

Or what if Satoshi deliberately destroyed their key?

The motivations behind Bitcoin were clear.

All the wealthy people I know don’t really do it for the money. The money is the gauge or the metric they use to judge how well they are playing the game but what motivates them is the love of the game and their sense of purpose.

If someone was to truly believe that Bitcoin was going to be a gold/USD/Eurodollar/swift etc. replacement then their metric of success isn’t money if they got in early.

100% and just based on the cypherpunk origins of this whole thing, this the most likely scenario.

Also I think that people discuss this stuff in a very narrow minded way. “Is it one person or multiple people?” Maybe it was one person to begin with then others joined in to contribute under the pseudonym.

Given all the available information (including the DHS worker revealing that Satoshi was identified by the USA government and he was multiple people)[0] this is the most likely case.

[0] - https://youtu.be/MAOrjlub4Qc?t=2612

It's entirely possible that Satoshi has deliberately destroyed the keys, but lost them? I doubt it. All these early cryptography guys were very conscious about keeping their keys secure, they discussed it endlessly.

For that wealth to mean anything he has to withdraw from it, and wouldn't that produce a paper trail?

Apologies if its mentioned in TFA, I only got halfway through it... the author's self-indulgence was getting to be a bit much

> The actual Satoshi could forfeit 90% of their BTC and still have more than they could know what to do with.

Ha, that may be technically true but when did you ever find a billionaire who would be OK with it?

Bill Gates is doing just that; to name one of many throughout recent history.

Bill is donating his money for 2 reasons; taxes and an attempt to make himself look good similar to Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. Microsoft didn't get where it was by playing nice but it is amazing to see how quickly that was forgotten. I think it was working too except that his friendship with Jeffery was exposed, we shall see.

> What struck me in particular was the fact the reporter noticed that Back had theorized how to evade stylometry.

there are automated tools for this now that students use routinely so that their papers don't get flagged as AI whether they wrote it or not

there would be lots of people that looked this up as it has been discussed a lot on those same mailing lists before being so commonplace

One other factoid that the reporter did not mention: if you read through all of the cited papers in Satoshi's original BTC paper, only one of them is similar in layout, language formality levels, citation setup, and length: Adam Back's Hashcash

Also Back’s response on X was very telling

The body language thing really bothers me.

Personally, if someone accuses me of lying, but I am actually telling the truth, I immediately start acting like a liar. It's really embarrassing and hard to explain. I can't believe such a seasoned reporter is leaning so hard on "his face went red."

What's also worth noting is that they were not alone in the room, talking privately. Everything being said could presumably be heard by Back's business associates as well. Some of the questions could well be enough to cause embarrassment or unease on that account.

Yea pretty similar idea to a polygraph test which for years was called a "lie detector."

In reality, they measure a bunch of things that may indicate lying, but they are just as likely to indicate that a person is nervous or reacting to the fact they're being tested at all.

They're typically inadmissible in court these days, however, there is still a pretty solid amount of blind trust in their results.

That part of the article gives a similar "lie detecting" hypothesis, just without the machine.

It did make me think - if he seems nervous under this questioning, it could be because he's actually Satoshi. Or it could also be because he's thinking something like, oh god, if this jerkoff convinces a bunch of people I'm actually Satoshi, all of the businesses I've worked so hard to found will collapse, I might be convicted of crimes around lying about it while founding these businesses, I might get targeted by any number of criminal gangs or even nation-states who will do all kinds of torture to me and my loved ones and will never believe that I'm not actually Satoshi and don't really have a secret stash of a bazillion Bitcoins.

Naturally, this journalist doesn't seem to care much about any of that, or that it wouldn't really change anything at this point besides making the life of whoever it actually is hell.

In fact, we are incredibly bad at telling lies from the body language of people we don't know well. Pretty much all the "well known" tells are sheer and utter bullshit that at best tells you if a person is stressed. That may or may not mean they are lying, but unless you know that person well enough to know if they have specific tells that correlates with lying for them, your odds are poor.

Just a shot in the dark but any chance you grew up in an intensely religious household?

I grew up evangelical and I've noticed this tendency in myself, and saw the connection to how the authorities at my school or church basically demanded dishonest performances or apologies under threat of physical punishment. Several friends over the years have said roughly the same, so I have an armchair theory this is pretty prevalent for that sort of childhood.

If you were around those circles, a lot of the "signals" in the article just look like the shared baseline culture rather than anything uniquely identifying

I actually think the most compelling evidence is the fact that he was one of the first people to get rich from it, which also explains why he never had to touch his vault of coins.

Same set of interests? Clearly Raph is Satoshi.

(Sorry, this was a joke, not a snipe.)