The Inventor of Bitcoin Has Possibly Been Unmasked. It’s the Same Person John McAfee Said It Was. If True, He’s Sitting on $78.5 Billion in Bitcoin.

The man they’re pointing to is Adam Back, a 55-year-old British cryptographer and CEO of Blockstream.

The Times spent over a year digging through decades of emails, forum posts, and mailing list archives from the Cypherpunk communities where Bitcoin’s earliest ideas were debated. They ran Satoshi Nakamoto’s known writings through stylometric analysis, a technique that matches word choice, punctuation habits, spelling quirks, and sentence structure. Three separate analyses all pointed to the same person. Back matched more closely than anyone else in the database.

Back invented Hashcash in 1997, the proof-of-work system Satoshi cited by name in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Satoshi’s first known email, sent in August 2008, went directly to Adam Back.

Before Bitcoin, Back was one of the most active voices on those Cypherpunk lists. He went completely quiet the entire time Satoshi was active online. Six weeks after Satoshi vanished in 2011, Back resurfaced.

Back has denied it repeatedly. “I’m not Satoshi… it’s really not me.” He calls the evidence coincidences and confirmation bias.

The roughly 1.1 million BTC tied to Satoshi’s early mining wallets is worth about $78.5 billion at today’s prices. None of the Bitcoin from those early wallets has ever been moved in more than 17 years.

The keys may be lost or destroyed. Early Bitcoin wallets were basic and backups weren’t common. Satoshi may be dead. The creator disappeared in 2011 and was never heard from again. Without the keys or a will, nothing moves. It could also be a deliberate choice. Moving even one coin could trace the owner’s identity, IP address, or location on the public blockchain. Privacy may have been worth more than $78.5 billion. There’s also the philosophical read. By never touching the coins, Satoshi proved Bitcoin is bigger than any one person and that the creator never intended to cash out.

There is no cryptographic proof linking Back or anyone else to those wallets. No one has ever signed a message with Satoshi’s keys. The case is entirely circumstantial.

This is at least the third major public attempt to identify Satoshi. Craig Wright claimed it for years before being disproven in court. An HBO documentary called Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery aired in October 2024 and pointed to Peter Todd, a Canadian programmer and early Bitcoin Core developer. Todd called the claim “ludicrous” and denied it on camera. John McAfee promoted the Adam Back theory as far back as 2018.

Bitcoin has a $1.4 trillion market cap. It’s in millions of Americans’ 401(k)s and IRAs through spot ETFs like BlackRock’s IBIT, which alone holds over $50 billion. The U.S. government itself holds hundreds of thousands of BTC in a proposed Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Congress is actively debating new crypto regulations. Who created it, and why, could shape how Washington treats it going forward.

The investigation was led by John Carreyrou, the Pulitzer-winning reporter who exposed the Theranos scandal at the Wall Street Journal.

Adam Back is alive and he’s still denying it.