A New York Times investigation claims that British developer Adam Beck was behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The man is already denying the journalists' findings.
A New York Times investigation claims that British developer Adam Beck was behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The man is already denying the journalists' findings.
The true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, is one of the Internet’s most enduring mysteries. The title has been claimed by many developers, including Adam Beck, who is not the first to claim it.
In a New York Times investigation, journalists compare Beck’s emails and online posts with those belonging to Satoshi and find striking similarities.
«We collected archives of three Internet mailing lists where ‘cryptopunks’ gathered in the 1990s and 2000s. We combined them into one large database and compared them with a corpus of Satoshi’s texts. We conducted three different analyses of the writing style. All three pointed to Mr. Beck as the person whose style most closely matches Satoshi’s,» the investigation says.
Journalists point out that Satoshi and Beck often:
The study indicates that only one of the hundreds of subscribers to these three mailing lists met all of these writing characteristics—Adam Beck.
Furthermore, analysis of Beck’s online activity also coincides with the fact that Satoshi disappeared shortly after the Bitcoin white paper, a manifesto outlining his philosophy, was published online.
Adam Beck denied claims by the New York Times that he was absent from the forums during Satoshi’s most active period and then returned when Satoshi disappeared, saying he was «chatting a lot» on the forums during that time.
«I’m not Satoshi, but I’ve been particularly focused on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy, and electronic money from the very beginning,» Beck told the BBC about the NYT investigation.
He said the rest of the New York Times evidence was «a combination of coincidences and similar phrases from people with similar experiences and interests.»
The intrigue surrounding Satoshi is not only due to the mystery of his identity, but also to the vast wealth he amassed. If he still controls the wallet from which the first bitcoins were mined, his worth would be around $70 billion today.
Adam Beck jokes that he actually misses BTC and regrets not mining it in 2009.
Recall that the HBO documentary «Electric Money: The Secret of Bitcoin», released in early October 2024, identified Canadian developer Peter Todd as Satoshi Nakamoto, the semi-mythical creator of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
According to Todd, if he really owned Nakamoto’s cryptocurrency fortune, he would help Ukraine get more drones.
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