Skip to main content

Was Bitcoins creator unmasked by the New York Times? Dont bet on it.

Bitcoin cryptocurrency logo is shown on a coin

Who is the real human behind Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym for the still-anonymous creator of Bitcoin?

The question is more than just academic, and it's not about who controls the currency. If Satoshi (as he is universally known) is still alive, he's spent years sitting on about $68 billion worth of Bitcoin. It was worth about twice that at its peak in October 2025; crypto has had a bad six months. There may be worse to come, according to Google, now that quantum computers could unlock every Bitcoin. Spend it while you can, Satoshi!

The "Who is Satoshi?" parlor game has been going for more than a decade. We've seen more than a few con artists claim to be the Banksy of Bitcoin. We've even seen a Satoshi memoir announced (likely fake — whomever Satoshi is, he hasn't written anything under that name since 2011). A recent HBO documentary made its own case for Satoshi's secret identity.

So it was a big deal when a New York Times investigation pointed the finger at British cryptography expert Adam Back, a veteran bitcoin miner active in the crypto community around the time Satoshi was posting. This investigation is especially notable, as the reporter behind the story, John Carreyrou, is known for uncovering a lot of Elizabeth Holmes's infamous fraud at Theranos.

And it was a poke in the eye for the Times when Back calmly and clearly denied the claim in multiple social media posts.

The TL;DR of Back's denial: Damn, I wish.

"[Of course I'm] kicking myself for not [bitcoin] mining in anger in 2009," Back told one user on X. "Hindsight is always 20:20 in trading, so I'm relaxed about that could-have should-have."

This isn't the first time Back's name has been mentioned as the real identity of Satoshi. Carreyrou says he grew suspicious of Back after seeing his body language in the HBO documentary on this subject, which listed Back as a possible Satoshi.

The Times claim relies in part on an AI examination of early cryptography listservs where Satoshi was active; the AI noted that both Back and Satoshi mixed up their "its" and "it's" and shared a common vocabulary. Back said he told Carreyrou there was a form of "cognitive bias" at work in the fact that he simply posted on a lot of the same topics at Satoshi.

And of course, as Back didn't need to mention, AI is inherently and increasingly prone to hallucination.

"I also don't know who Satoshi is," Back wrote, "and I think it is good for bitcoin that this is the case, as it helps bitcoin be viewed a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity."

Back also tweeted an image he'd sent years earlier, one that emphasized the decentralized nature of Bitcoin: "we are all Satoshi."



from Mashable https://ift.tt/pBhnoCb
https://ift.tt/t37XzRl
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When the clocks change for Daylight Saving Time, and why we do it at all

The clocks on our smartphones do something bizarre twice a year: One day in the spring, they jump ahead an hour, and our alarms go off an hour sooner. We wake up bleary-eyed and confused until we remember what just happened. Afterward, "Daylight Saving Time" becomes the norm for about eight months (And yes, it's called "Daylight Saving" not "Daylight Savings." I don't make the rules). Then, in the fall, the opposite happens. Our clocks set themselves back an hour, and we wake up refreshed, if a little uneasy.  Mild chaos ensues at both annual clock changes. What feels like an abrupt and drastic lengthening or shortening of the day causes time itself to seem fictional. Babies and dogs demand that their old sleep and feeding habits remain unchanged. And more consequential effects — for better or worse — may be involved as well (more on which in a minute). Changing our clocks is an all-out attack on our perception of time as an immutable law of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Shortcut AI Excel agent could one-shot spreadsheet jobs. Heres how to try it.

There's a new AI agent on the block for people who spend their waking hours inside spreadsheets. Navigate to Shortcut AI's website , and you'll find a page that looks almost exactly like an empty Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The main difference is a sidebar chatbot that can be tasked with taking on the tedious legwork of building, say, complex financial models or competitive analyses. Because Shortcut is agentic , meaning it can handle multi-step tasks on the user's behalf, the tool can do more than just generate Excel formulas or analyze spreadsheet data. In a demo on X, Nico Christie, founder and CEO of the Shortcut AI agent, showed how the tool swapped out the data from a Microsoft distributed cash flow analysis (DCF) for Google data by looking up Google's SEC filings and populating the data in the same template. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Shortcut launched on Monday with a rather ominous tagline: "Try...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mystery Pixel smartphones detailed in code references

The devices also pack 12GB of RAM apiece. Shiba is said to feature a screen with a resolution of 2,268 x 1,080 pixels while Husky could be a bit larger at 2,822 x 1,344 pixels. Given the amount of RAM, however, both would likely qualify as premium devices. from TechSpot https://ift.tt/cefMDJW via
Post a Comment
Read more