My Quest to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery

For 17 years, the person who created Bitcoin has hidden their identity behind the name Satoshi Nakamoto. But no one would expect that today, in 2026, the most credible lead would point to a man we actually already know: Adam Back, a 55-year-old British computer scientist who attends crypto conferences with his shirt untucked. We are used to thinking of Satoshi Nakamoto as an invisible, untraceable specter, so brilliant that he leaves no trace. But this story proves the opposite: perhaps Satoshi has always been right in front of us, but we just didn't want to see him. Adam Back was one of the spiritual fathers of the cypherpunk movement, the movement that in the 1990s dreamed of using cryptography to limit the power of governments and defend individual freedom. In an email from 1996, he wrote: “Crypto-anarchy is a tool for more libertarian government: fewer taxes, fewer oppressive laws, more freedom.” Doesn't that ring a bell? When Satoshi introduced Bitcoin in 2008, he said: “It's very attractive to those with a libertarian outlook, if we can explain it well. But I'm better with code than with words.” Adam Back had used the exact same sentence, almost word for word, years earlier: “Personally, I’m better at programming than at constructing convincing arguments.” And it's not just a matter of ideas: there are linguistic clues that link the two in an almost unsettling way. Both Satoshi and Back make the same grammatical mistakes: they confuse “it's” and “its,” end sentences with “also,” alternate between British and American English, and exhibit the same quirks in spelling words like “email,” “e-mail,” “cheque,” and “check.” When journalists combed through hundreds of thousands of cypherpunk messages, they started with 562 suspects and, by applying increasingly specific filters – such as those who write “bug fix” as two words, or those who don't put a hyphen in “noun-based” – they were left with just one name: Adam Back. In the HBO documentary on Bitcoin, there is a scene that says it all. Sitting on a bench in Riga, the director lists the suspects. When he gets to Back, the man tenses up, vehemently denies being Satoshi, and asks for the conversation to be kept off the record. This is not your typical conspiracy theory. As a young man, Adam Back had already invented Hashcash, the “proof-of-work” system that underpins Bitcoin. In 2000, he wrote: “Gnutella works because it's not centralized; it can't be shut down. Napster, on the other hand, can.” Satoshi would use the exact same analogy eight years later to explain why Bitcoin cannot be shut down like Napster. And even when it comes to criticism of Bitcoin for its energy consumption, both say: It is better to waste electricity than to rely on the traditional banking system, which is much more expensive and inefficient. It almost seems as if they share a common script. We are so accustomed to thinking that great inventions require a singular, otherworldly figure that we forget that often the true genius is the person who works obsessively on a problem for decades, leaving a trail of clues that no one notices until they put them together. And the real question becomes: Did we really want to find out who Satoshi is, or did we prefer the idea of the mystery? Because if the answer is Adam Back, it's a less romantic but much more real story. Those who bring about a revolution often prefer to remain in the shadows, but they always leave traces, even if unintentionally. Perhaps Satoshi’s identity was never a secret: it was simply hidden between the lines of thousands of emails and posts, in the small details that reveal a personality, not just a project. Satoshi Nakamoto is not a ghost. He has a name, a story, and you've probably already passed him at least once. If this story has made you see Bitcoin from a new perspective, on Lara Notes you can tap I'm In: it's not just an interest; it's a way of saying that this question now belongs to you. And if you happen to have a discussion with someone about who Satoshi really is, on Lara Notes you can use Shared Offline to mark that conversation: it will serve as proof that the mystery of Bitcoin continues to be a topic of conversation around the world. This Note is based on an investigation by The New York Times — you have just saved 16 minutes of reading time.