tl;dr for those who don't want to read the whole NYT article:
- John Carreyrou, the journalist who exposed the Theranos fraud, spent a year building the case that Adam Back is Satoshi
- Back essentially blueprinted every core Bitcoin concept on Cypherpunk mailing lists a decade before Bitcoin launched
- Back went silent on those lists exactly when Satoshi appeared, then resurfaced right after Satoshi vanished
- Text analysis scanned 34,000 users across three cryptography mailing lists and 134,000 posts, filtered to 620 who discussed digital cash. From there, layering in Satoshi's writing quirks (British spellings, hyphenation errors, obscure crypto terms) narrowed it to one person: Back
- When confronted in person, Back denied it but allegedly slipped into first person when responding to a Satoshi quote
- Satoshi's email exchanges with everyone, including other candidates like Hal Finney, are pretty straightforward. The 2008 emails with Back are the anomaly, containing contradictions that even Back himself has publicly acknowledged don't add up. When asked to provide the metadata for those emails, Back refused.
I personally still think there's a convincing case for Hal Finney, or that it's a consortium of people, but this is the most methodical, evidence-dense case I've seen for a single Satoshi candidate. Certainly more convincing than the documentary "Money Electric" that settled on Peter Todd.
Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained hidden for 17 years. A trail of clues — and a year of digging by our reporter, John Carreyrou — led us to a 55-year-old computer scientist in El Salvador named Adam Back.
nyti.ms/4bXWC3V