British cryptographer Adam Back has denied a New York Times report that he is Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto

The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of Bitcoin’s creator, remains a long-standing mystery. But according to a new investigation published in the New York Times, Satoshi may be Adam Back, the British cryptologist who conducted influential early research on digital assets. Pak denies that he is Satoshi.

People have tried to track down the father of Bitcoin for decades, without much success. Based on Pack’s denials, it’s not clear whether Times tech journalist John Carreyrou, known for his reporting that brought down Theranos, got further than anyone else.

Back fits the profile of the type of person you might suspect would create the first cryptocurrency. He created Hashcash, the proof-of-work system that Satoshi used to mine Bitcoin, and is now the co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, a company that builds the infrastructure for blockchain-based payment systems. Buck even agreed with Carrero that he was a plausible suspect, and that Satoshi – like him – was likely a Briton in his 50s. (In this case, yes, using a Japanese surname is weird.)

But Carrero doesn’t have any undeniable evidence to close the case.

To prove his claim, he collected archives of emails sent on three crypto lists between 1992 and 2008, during the period when the pseudonym Satoshi was active on these forums. Carrero fed the archive with artificial intelligence to identify commonalities between the way Satoshi and other active posters wrote. For example, Satoshi did not hyphenate compound nouns, and sometimes mixed up “its” and “it’s.”

Back was the best match, but he wrote on X that the evidence is “a combination of coincidence and similar statements from people with similar experience and interests.”

The Satoshi case is not closed, but we have to admit that Carrero’s use of AI was very clever.