He fucking wishes
Adam Back is not Satoshi
Inside this article:
This isn’t a new theory
Adam Back has never been successful in crypto
The evidence presented in the NYTimes article is weak af
It is wildly irresponsible to accuse someone of being Satoshi.
I am resurfacing briefly because I had several friends reach out to ask about John Carreyrou’s NYTimes article accusing Adam Back of being Satoshi. The article is embarrassing, irresponsible, and wrong. Adam isn’t Satoshi he is a mildly more sophisticated version of Craig Wright.
He fucking wishes
The New York Times just published an "investigative" report claiming to have unmasked Satoshi. They claim that Satoshi is Adam Back. I’m honestly embarrassed on their behalf. The idea that Adam Back might be Satoshi is not new, not true, not backed by interesting evidence and quite frankly is irresponsible.
This isn’t a new or novel theory
Adam Back is not a new candidate for Satoshi. I wrote about how the evidence for Back-as-Satoshi wasn’t convincing back in 2021. Back was one of the academics active on the same (very small) mailing list as Satoshi during the development and initial launch of Bitcoin. He was there when Satoshi was active and not many people were. Most of the other people who were active at that time have either stepped away or stayed away from the cryptocurrency scene and stayed focused on pure cryptography. That’s the best and most convincing evidence there is. No reasonable person should find it convincing.
Satoshi has a history of accomplishment. Adam Back does not.
Satoshi built the largest network in cryptocurrency with nothing but a whitepaper. Adam Back spent hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and has nothing to show for it but conference keynotes and podcast interviews. He has neither the intellectual capacity nor the personal integrity to be Satoshi. His understanding of cryptocurrency is rooted exclusively in cryptography, he does not understand economics at all. That’s why the Liquid Network remains a tiny backwater even within the world of crypto networks. Back doesn’t understand economics, he only understands cryptography. Nothing Adam has worked on under his own name is particularly interesting or successful. If he didn’t carefully cultivate the impression that he might be Satoshi no one would know who he is.
The correct way to understand Back is not as a peer to or candidate for Satoshi but instead as an affinity scammer who is defrauding investors by quietly allowing them to assume he is Satoshi and then redirecting their money to Bitcoin development with no attempt at or interest in forming a profitable business. The best thing that can be said about him is that he is sincere in his love for Bitcoin and has meaningfully supported Bitcoin developers. The second best thing that can be said is that he is primarily defrauding the rich and foolish. By the standards of crypto that probably puts him above average. It does not make him a credible candidate for Satoshi.
The evidence presented in the NYTimes article is not compelling
The New York Times does not present any interesting or new evidence. Saying that Back’s work on public key cryptography implies that he might be Satoshi is like saying that Linus Torvalds might secretly be Bill Gates because they both worked on operating systems. It would only sound credible to someone who didn’t understand anything about technology. It only gets worse from there. Stylometric analysis might as well be a horoscope, especially when the author gave himself as many opportunities as he wanted to adjust and redo the analysis until it gave him an exciting answer. This is just p-hacking for Twitter clicks. It’s embarrassing.
It is wildly irresponsible to accuse someone of being Satoshi
Satoshi, whoever he is, holds (or held at one point) the private key for more than a million bitcoin. He created the most economically subversive technology ever invented. He is a world-class target for governments, criminals and dangerous ideologues. Credibly accusing someone of being Satoshi is quite literally risking their life. Satoshi is at the nexus of so much money and so much power that even speculating about dead people is putting their family and heirs at risk. I am astonished the New York Times even felt it was ethical to publish this piece, let alone credible or newsworthy.
Back has made his entire career about letting people wink-wink-nudge-nudge assume he is Satoshi, so we don’t need to feel bad for him. He’s probably overjoyed about this article. To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if the 'slip-of-the-tongue' in the interview was a deliberate attempt to juice his candidacy, although he’s also inarticulate enough that it could just be an honest mistake. It isn’t certainly isn’t evidence for anything interesting.
Satoshi was an absolute master at disguising his identity but we’re supposed to believe he accidentally blurted it out to a New York Times reporter? I can only assume Carreyrou’s next published article will be a hard hitting investigation into how Santa is real and how chemtrails are making the Easter Bunny gay.
Adam Back is not Satoshi
This pile of recycled slop should downgrade your opinion of everyone involved. If Satoshi is still alive he is probably rolled his eyes so hard he briefly saw his own brain. Adam Back is not Satoshi. No one knows who Satoshi is and barring some extraordinary new information surfacing, no one ever will.
That’s a good thing.