See the video:
https://youtu.be/3kGTgRjpcRw
Last week, John Carreyrou and Dylan Freedman of The New York Times reported that Satoshi Nakamoto is Adam Back.
Read the full New York Times article (and to bypass the NYT paywall legally).
Or if you have a NYT subscription, read the original.
Last year, I interviewed Benjamin Wallace about his remarkable book, "The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto."
Watch the interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0KVOcLJe50X post by a pro programmer comparing Adam Back's code with Satoshi Nakamoto's code, circa 2008.
My video mentions:
https://x.com/JohnCarreyrou
https://x.com/BenJWallace
At the start of the NYT Daily podcast, Carreyrou said he is "99.5% and 100%" sure Satoshi is Adam Back.
That surprised me for two reasons:
1. I respect Carreyrou's reporting. He's best known for unmasking Elizabeth Holmes, proving she was a deceptive crook. Carreyrou is a brilliant reporter. He's not into hyperbole. If he says he's 99.75% sure, we must pay attention.
2. I also respect Benjamin Wallace's reporting, especially regarding Nakamoto. Wallace has spent probably ten times more time researching Satoshi than Carreyrou has. And Wallace is unconvinced that Adam Back is Satoshi. Wallace thinks Adam could be Satoshi, but he's confident that Satoshi is someone else. Adam is not one of Wallace's top two candidates. Indeed, on WanderLearn Show, Wallace said there's "more than a 50% chance" that Satoshi is none of the dozens of candidates he evaluated in his book.
Therefore, we have a dilemma. Whom should we believe: Carreyrou or Wallace? Both are outstanding reporters.
Wallace and I exchanged emails after the NYT's declaration. He's busy reporting, so he didn't have time to appear on the podcast again this month, but his book explains why Wallace is unconvinced that Adam Back is Nakamoto.
Although the NYT used stylometry to match Back & Satoshi based on their writing in bitcoin forums, the NYT did not use it to match their programming stylometry, whereas Wallace did. Programmers, like English prose writers, have style tics. Adam Back's programming style does not match Satoshi's. Some observers argue that the code style does not line up cleanly. A few commentators described Back’s code as looking like typical academic Unix-programmer code, while Satoshi’s looked more like the work of a professional software engineer, suggesting stylistic differences rather than a strong match.
Let’s review his points:
Page 27:
Amir Taaki told Wallace, “Adam has a consistent style across his projects. His style does not match Satoshi’s.”
“Amir elaborated that Back followed standard programming conventions, wrote in C, and was a Unix/Linux programmer, while Nakamoto was stylistically erratic, wrote in C++, and was a Windows guy. Back was also known at the time as a privacy absolutist, someone likely to balk at Bitcoin’s anonymity trade-offs.... I also thought it implausibly clumsy for someone trying to elude detection, who’d cited only a handful of precedents, to include his own work among them.”
On the other hand, Carreyrou’s article says:
“And Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the bitcoin software.”
Everyone agrees that Satoshi wrote in C++, but Wallace says Back wrote in C, while Carreyrou says that Back’s PhD thesis focused on C++.
Naturally, both could be correct: Adam Back may be fluent in C and C++. The language he uses may depend on what kind of application he is writing.
C and C++ overlap heavily in low-level systems programming.
Non-programmers like these two journalists may overestimate the importance of these two similar programming languages.
This programmer examined Back’s & Satoshi’s code and concluded that they are quite different coding styles. Adam Back chimed in on the X thread:
Wei Dei doesn’t think Adam Back is Nakamoto.
Page 38:
“I don’t think [Satoshi] is anyone I know,” Wei continued, regarding Nakamoto, “since he apparently invented Bitcoin independently and was not aware of my b-money article until Adam Back pointed it out to him.”
If Adam & Satoshi were the same person, Wei’s statement would be odd.
But maybe Adam Back did that to throw off cybersleuths like Wallace 15 years later.
Wallace addresses this cloak-and-dagger theory on page 99:
“All of this assumed both an elaborate campaign of misdirection at a time when there was no particular reason to assume Bitcoin would succeed, and a ham-handed impersonation by Nick [Szabo] of someone who wasn’t him.”
On page 160, Wallace addresses Barely Sociable’s YouTube Channel, whose 3-part video expose reached the same conclusion as the NYT years before the NYT.
Ex-cypherpunk Jon Callas said, “The primary argument against Adam Back is he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”
In other words, Satoshi was a recluse, whereas Back was an extrovert.
Page 183:
To believe Adam Back was Satoshi, “you needed to swallow the inconvenient fact of Nakamoto, an all-time OPSEC champ, naming his own work among just eight citations in the Bitcoin white paper.”
Page 250:
Ray Dillinger destroyed his hard drive and correspondence with Satoshi and “he thought Nakamoto was likely to have done something similar. ‘His OPSEC was flawless. He would not leave evidence.’”
Yet Adam Back kept (and shared) all his Satoshi correspondence for the Craig Wright trial.
Stylometry
Although the NYT used stylometry to match Back & Satoshi based on their writing in bitcoin forums, the NYT did not use it to match their programming stylometry, whereas Wallace did.
Programmers, like English prose writers, have style tics. Adam Back’s programming style does not match Satoshi’s.
Some observers argue that the code style does not line up cleanly. A few commentators described Back’s code as looking like typical academic Unix-programmer code, while Satoshi’s looked more like the work of a professional software engineer, suggesting stylistic differences rather than a strong match.
Carreyrou writes, “In short, Back envisioned nearly every facet of bitcoin — and used the same rationalization as Satoshi to excuse its main flaw — a decade before bitcoin was created.”
So what?
Telephone. Before Bell’s practical telephone, Charles Bourseul had already suggested transmitting sound electrically.
Tesla predicted wireless transmission of voice, documents, music, and video, which reads strikingly like a description of later radio and smartphone-era capabilities.
The pattern is usually this: people first identify a capability that would be valuable, then later inventors find the engineering path to make it real. So a precursor may “list the attributes” an invention needs long before the full machine exists, but that is different from creating the breakthrough itself.
What this means for the Bitcoin argument
That is why “Back anticipated many Bitcoin design features” is interesting but not decisive by itself. Invention history is full of cases where someone saw the direction early, yet the later creator still had to solve the hard implementation problems and combine the pieces into a working system.
Carreyrou makes a big deal that Back pointed out the key features that bitcoin needed to have 10 years before it came out as evidence that he is Satoshi.
However, it could prove the opposite: if Back knew what needed to be done 10 years before it happened, why did he wait 10 years to do it? Maybe another person, Satoshi, needed to come along to make it happen. Charles Bourseul didn’t invent the phone.
Carreyrou asked Back for the metadata of his emails with Satoshi. Adam ghosted him. Carreyrou wondered, “But why? With the precautions Satoshi had taken, what was there to even hide? Unless Satoshi had made some sort of mistake?”
Probably not. The most likely explanation is that Adam Back is sick & tired of detectives annoying him about Satoshi. Why should he spend the hour it would take to dig up the metadata of all those 20-year-old emails when he’s busy trying to take his company public? He’s got better things to do with his time is a far more likely explanation than the metadata being revealing.
The NYT cites Wallace’s book, which observes that “Back was a privacy absolutist and bitcoin’s privacy features were weak.”
Carreyrou countered: “Back had spent the past decade at Blockstream pioneering innovations to strengthen bitcoin’s privacy, which I felt weakened that argument considerably.”
Not exactly. Wallace’s point is that had Adam created BTC, he would have made it robustly private from the start.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s Motivations
In the first two minutes of the Daily podcast, John Carreyrou wonders:
“Who is this person who has upended our financial landscape? What was motivating him? What caused him to create this decentralized electronic currency?”
At minute 48 of the Daily podcast, Carreyrou asks Back, “ Isn’t there a public interest there in knowing what the motivations were for creating this?
Once Bitcoin has accumulated enough users, infrastructure, liquidity, and mindshare, Nakamoto’s motives don’t change Bitcoin’s present behavior in any direct way. In that sense, BTC does have a life of its own, because its value and persistence are now strongly tied to network effects rather than to the creator’s private intentions.
Finally, I’m puzzled why Carreyrou is wondering what Nakamoto’s motivations were. Carreyrou has done an outstanding job answering that question through his investigative reporting: Nakamoto was motivated to create an ecash that could replace our fiat monetary system. Like Back, Nakamoto was a Libertarian or anarcho-capitalist. Nakamoto wrote about his motivations and philosophy on various online forums and emails.
One of Satoshi’s biggest motivations and dreams is in the title of the Bitcoin White Paper:
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Satoshi failed: Nakamoto’s original aim was peer-to-peer electronic cash for everyday payments. Bitcoin’s present role is now shaped by what the network has become, not by what he hoped it would become. The white paper does show that the original design goal was exactly a peer-to-peer electronic cash system for direct online payments.
Carreyrou is suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect: he hasn’t studied it enough.
Carreyrou thinks he knows more than he does. Too confident. He’s at the summit of Mount Stupid.
Wallace is more humble, leaving the Valley of Despair and slowly marching up the long Slope of Enlightenment.
What do you think?
Put your thoughts in the comments.
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