NYT, 아담 백이 비트코인 창시자 사토시 나카모토라고 주장
Source: Slashdot
A New York Times investigation by John Carreyrou claims a British cryptographer named Adam Back is the strongest circumstantial candidate yet for being Satoshi Nakamoto. The report cites overlaps in writing style, ideology, technical background, and old posts that outlined key parts of Bitcoin years before its launch. Carreyrou is a renowned investigative journalist and author, best known for exposing the massive fraud at Theranos while at the Wall Street Journal.
Investigation Overview
As anyone steeped in Bitcoin lore will tell you, Satoshi was a master at the art of maintaining anonymity on the internet, leaving few, if any, digital footprints behind.
But Satoshi did leave behind a corpus of texts, including a nine‑page white paper (PDF) outlining his invention and his many posts on the Bitcointalk forum, an online message board where users gathered to discuss the digital currency’s software, economics and philosophy.
And that corpus, it turned out, had expanded significantly during the impostor’s civil trial when Martti Malmi, a Finnish programmer who collaborated with Satoshi in Bitcoin’s early days, released a trove of hundreds of emails he had exchanged with him. Emails Satoshi sent to other early Bitcoin adopters had surfaced before, but none came close in volume to the Malmi dump. If Satoshi was ever going to be found, I was convinced the key lay somewhere in these texts.
Previous Attempts to Identify Satoshi
Journalists, academics, and internet sleuths have been trying to identify Satoshi for 16 years. Over that span, more than 100 names have been proposed, including an Irish cryptography student, an unemployed Japanese‑American engineer, a South African criminal mastermind, and the mathematician portrayed in the movie A Beautiful Mind. The most alluring theories focused on coincidences that aligned with what little was known about Satoshi: a particular code‑writing style, a mysterious work history, expertise in Bitcoin’s key technical concepts, and an anti‑government worldview. Each candidate eventually ran aground under the weight of an alibi or contradictory evidence. As many members of the Bitcoin community point out, only Satoshi could definitively prove his identity by moving some of his coins; any other evidence remains circumstantial.
Adam Back’s Response
Back denies being Satoshi. In a post on X he wrote:
“i’m not satoshi, but i was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash, privacy tech on cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas.”