The hunt for the mysterious creator of Bitcoin goes on, and while an in-depth investigation from The New York Times suggested that it had finally unmasked Satoshi Nakamoto, it looks like we're back to square one. In some alternate reality, imagine that 2026 is the year that we finally unmask Banksy AND Satoshi Nakamoto.
When it comes to the MIA Bitcoin founder, it seems his wallet remains untouched, and he lives another day under a cloud of anonymity – that's even if he (or she) is still alive.
The story of Satoshi Nakamoto is one that continues to astound, and even though the price of Bitcoin carries on fluctuating, his apparent cryptocurrency wallet of one million BTC would be worth upwards of $75 billion in 2026.
Various Satoshi Nakamoto suspects have been debunked, and hackers have given warnings, although the search goes on. Just when you think things couldn't get any wilder, there were recent rumors that Jeffrey Epstein was Nakamoto himself. According to The New York Times, we were just off the mark, with British cryptographer Adam Back again being pulled into the conversation.
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Known as the creator of a Bitcoin predecessor called Hashcash, Back had already been named as a potential Nakamoto and appeared in the footnotes of the Bitcoin white paper. A YouTube channel called Barely Sociable mentioned Back in 2020, while the NYT's John Carreyrou points to his cryptographic background, time with Hashcash, and even his style of writing as apparent indicators he's the illustrious Mr. Nakamoto.
There are perceived connections between Back and Epstein, with the former being named in emails about the bitcoin-focused Blockstream. It appears that both Back and Blockstream co-founder Austin Hill were invited to St. Thomas, as well as there being a $500,000 early-stage investment from Epstein.
Diving even deeper, Carreyrou's impressive investigation claimed that activity on cryptography mailing lists and apparently inconsistencies when it came to Back's recollection of early Bitcoin conversations make him the missing billionaire.
Calling out the work of HBO's Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, which was supposed to unmask Nakamoto, Carreyou says he honed in on Back.
Notably, Back was connected to the 'Cypherpunks' group of anarchists that were formed in the early '90s and wanted to secure their communications from the prying eyes of the government through code. The NYT article culminates in a meeting in El Salvador, with Carreyrou saying a slip of the tongue confirmed to him that Back was Nakamoto.
Back has since taken to X to claim that while he's not Satoshi, he was early in "laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash."
While seeming to commend Carreyrou's research, he called out the quote as a mere observation, then added: "The rest is a combination of coincidence and similar phrases from people with similar experience and interests - inference satoshi needed specific skills and experience to discover bitcoin, where myself and others got 'so close yet so far' in design discussions the decade before."
Ultimately, Back concluded that he doesn't know who Satoshi is and that he thinks it's good for Bitcoin because it "helps bitcoin be viewed [as] a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity."
We're reminded of a quote from Carreyrou where he says he ended his interview with Back as they "shook hands like two chess players after a hard-fought match.” With the journalist adamant that Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto and the infamous Cypherpunk standing by the fact he isn't, it's not quite checkmate just yet.