Adam Back returns to the center of the Satoshi Nakamoto mystery after New York Times reporter John Carreiro published a very long investigation that he says the clues point more to him than to anyone else.
John says he was first brought into this investigation as he saw Adam visibly nervous when his name came up as a suspect while watching this disappointing film. HBO documentary Which promised to reveal Satoshi’s true identity.
Carreyrou finds old previous posts that seem very close to Bitcoin
John explains that the strongest new material came from old cypherpunk archives, where he found that Adam Back had written about a digital cash system years before Bitcoin was launched, and the ideas were not vague.
John says Adam described sender-receiver privacy, a network spread across many computers, built on scarcity, and a universal way to verify everything without trusting one bank or one person.
“Mr. Buck invented Hashcash, a statistical system for solving puzzles that Satoshi borrowed for Bitcoin mining. Satoshi cited Mr. Buck and Hashcash in his white paper.”
John also said: “I remembered that Satoshi mentioned an obscure Russian online currency called WebMoney in one of the emails he sent to Mr. Malmi. I have now compared those four names with the eight that were hyphenated with “Proof of Work.” Only one overlaps: Mr. Buck.
Adam Buck denies everything and says the Carrero case is based on coincidence
John said he gave Adam Back plenty of opportunities to talk to him, meeting him first in Las Vegas and later trying to email him and also confront him in El Salvador, but according to John, “Mr. Back insisted he was not Satoshi and put it all down to a series of coincidences. But sometimes, his body language told a different story.”
“When I emailed my request to Mr. Pak, he didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure if he was stalking me or just busy, and I didn’t want to scare him off by immediately following up, so I waited eight days to send him another email. Once again, radio silence. I clearly touched a nerve. But why? With the precautions Satoshi had taken, what was there to hide? Unless Satoshi had done something wrong?” John said.
In El Salvador, John says Adam denied being Satoshi more than six times. Tell him the evidence still doesn’t prove anything. He said it was difficult to prove the denial. He also said one of the reasons he couldn’t do it Satoshi is that he misunderstood Bitcoin’s basic point when he first appeared in the developer chat. John says he checked the logs and couldn’t find that error there.
After the story surfaced, Adam quickly posted a long denial of X, reiterating that he was not Satoshi. He admitted that yes, he had been heavily focused on cryptography, privacy, and electronic cash since the early 1990s, so it was only natural that people would find early ideas in his work very similar to Bitcoin.
Adam said: “John, like Aaron van Weerdom before him, found many interesting Bitcoin analogues in early attempts to create decentralized cash, in fact initial ideas trying to figure out something similar to Bitcoin, including p2p, BGP and proof-of-work.”
He added that his line about doing too much talking in lists was misread, since the point is that heavy posting can create confirmation bias because “given the size of my business, I’m more likely to comment than others with similar interests but posting 20 times less. I offered this to John as an explanation for why this could be considered model confirmation bias, which should be statistically corrected for.”
“I also don’t know who Satoshi is, and I think it’s good for Bitcoin that this is the case, because it helps see Bitcoin as a new asset class, the mathematically rare digital commodity.” He said Adam.
