Are we done Finding Satoshi?
Even after more than a decade and a half, the identity of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, is still an active mystery that provokes discourse and disagreement.
In the last couple weeks, a New York Times piece authored by investigative journalist John Carreyrou suggested that Satoshi is in fact Adam Back, while the recent documentary Finding Satoshi pegged a two-person team, namely Hal Finney and Len Sassaman.
Protos has reviewed the evidence pointing to several of the internet’s favored candidates for this illustrious role and laid out our findings below.
Adam Back
Adam Back, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Blockstream, has often been labeled as a likely candidate for Satoshi.
Among the reasons for this is his identity as a cypherpunk, an online community which believed in the beneficial effects of freedom technology tools developed using cryptography.
Satoshi generally appears to be a cypherpunk, or at the very least to be sympathetic to cypherpunk ideas, regularly citing and conversing with others in the community.
Back was also behind HashCash, another cryptographically based digital cash technology that was cited by Satoshi.
Notably, there exist emails that Back has shared in court cases which seem to show Satoshi reaching out to Back to make sure that he appropriately cites the HashCash paper. This has led Carreyrou to ask us to consider if “Mr. Back…sent those emails to himself as a cover story.”
🔍 Reading Satoshi’s entrails
Carreyrou’s reporting also emphasized the fact that Back shared certain stylistic markers with Satoshi.
Among these similarities were certain phrases like “backup” and “human friendly” as well as inconsistent hyphenation in words like e-mail/email.
Despite these stylistic similarities, there are still differences, with Carreyrou noting, “Mr. Back made a lot of typos and had a rambling style when he posted to mailing lists, while Satoshi’s writing was crisp and mostly typo-free.”
Others, like YouTuber BarelySociable, have also suggested that Back is the most likely Satoshi candidate.
Back strongly denies being Satoshi.
He was also briefly considered as a candidate by Finding Satoshi; however, it concluded he didn’t post at the appropriate times to be Satoshi.
Hal Finney
Hal Finney was a cryptographer who was the first person to receive bitcoin ($BTC) from Satoshi.
Like Back, he seems to have many of the necessary skills, even working on a previous digital cash, Reusable Proofs of Work.
Finney was the first person to participate in a $BTC transaction with Satoshi.
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Multiple previous analyses have pointed to Finney as one of the more likely Satoshi candidates.
Even the stylistic analysis commissioned by Carreyrou initially concluded, “After comparing papers from the 12 suspects to the Bitcoin white paper, Mr. Cafiero’s stylometry program showed Mr. Back as the closest match. But he said it wasn’t a snug fit and that Mr. Finney was a very close second. In fact, the difference between them was barely distinguishable, he said, and he considered the overall result inconclusive.”
In response to this inconclusive result, Carreyrou suggested that Cafiero change the methodology, and “Mr. Cafiero changed the way he computed the distance between the 12 suspects’ texts and Satoshi’s white paper. The result was the opposite of what I’d hoped: Other candidates pulled ahead of Mr. Back. Mr. Cafiero said he considered these results inconclusive too.”
However, there are key stylistic differences between Finney and Satoshi, especially the use of British spellings for many of the words.
Interestingly, Finney at one point proposed creating a protocol called P2Poker that would use his digital cash, RPOW, for poker. Similarly, the original Bitcoin client contained code for a poker client.
Finney was one of the two candidates that Finding Satoshi flags as the likely Satoshi. This was supported by the times of day at which Finney posted.
Additionally, the failure of Satoshi to cite Finney is used as evidence that Finney might be trying to misdirect.
Finney also was apparently quite unproductive in the two months before Bitcoin launched and was coding at that time in C++, the language that the original client used.
Jameson Lopp, a developer in the Bitcoin ecosystem, was interviewed for the documentary due to his post insisting that Finney wasn’t Satoshi.
Lopp focuses on various emails and transactions that were sent by Satoshi while Finney was running a race.
Finney and his wife have both denied that he was Satoshi.
Paul Le Roux
Paul Le Roux created Encryption for the Masses and may be behind TrueCrypt (although denies involvement in the project).
Additionally, Le Roux was behind an international drug cartel, got involved with arms dealing, and was involved in a variety of murders and assassinations.
Besides that illustrious career, some speculate that he may be behind Bitcoin.
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Le Roux has been included as a possible Satoshi since 2019 when Evan Ratliff suggested it as a possibility in an article in Wired.
However, Ratliff also noted that there was insufficient evidence at the time to substantiate the idea.
One of the reasons that Le Roux is an attractive candidate is that his arrest corresponds somewhat to some of the late Satoshi posts, suggesting to some viewers that Satoshi’s withdrawal from the public may have been rooted in these legal issues.
Le Roux was arrested in September 2012, after several of his conspirators and associates had been arrested in the months beforehand. Satoshi told Mike Hearn that he’d “moved on to other things” in April 2011.
However, we should note that there are 17 months between these two dates, over a year, for a technology that was only a few years old.
Finding Satoshi considered Le Roux before concluding that he wasn’t the Satoshi candidate, believing he didn’t fit the profile they constructed for him.
Craig Wright
Craig Wright is one of the least likely candidates, despite his prolific claims to being Satoshi.
Wright has spent years in complex legal cases trying to claim various levels of creation, control, or ownership over the Bitcoin system as a whole, eventually committing his reputation to a fork of a fork, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision.
Craig Wright’s new X account still makes it clear he’s not Satoshi
Throughout Wright’s legal battles, judges, lawyers, critics, journalists, and neutral viewers of every sort have regularly observed his willingness to flout reality and invent history.
Eventually courts in the UK ordered Wright to display a notice that made clear that he wasn’t Satoshi, and acknowledge that he had “lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly.”
Dave Kleiman
Dave Kleiman was, largely, pulled posthumously into Satoshi speculation by Wright.
Kleiman was initially suggested as a possible Satoshi candidate when documents suggesting his involvement with Wright to create Bitcoin were distributed to the press in 2015.
Wright would later endorse this theory publicly.
Craig Wright still owes $143M two years after Kleiman judgment
Kleiman’s family would end up suing Wright, claiming he’d misappropriated Bitcoin-related intellectual property from the partnership between the men.
Wright owes the Kleiman estate substantial amounts in this case.
Len Sassaman
Len Sassaman was a cryptographer and cypherpunk.
Sassaman has been proposed a couple times, often again because he had both the technical skills and desire to build this kind of thing.
There are also some stylistic similarities between the two.
Sassaman died by suicide in July 2011, several months after Satoshi said he had “moved on to other things.”
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Sassaman was the other candidate flagged by Finding Satoshi because of the times that he posted.
Additionally, we are told by Sassaman’s widow that Sassaman was very interested in pseudoynyms and avoiding stylometric analysis.
Interestingly, as the documentary observes, Sassaman regularly publicly criticized Bitcoin.
Peter Todd
Peter Todd, a bitcoin developer, was the candidate flagged as Satoshi in the HBO documentary Money Electric.
This theory relied on Todd’s background as a cryptographer, raised by an economist.
Todd denies being Satoshi.
Todd has also been accused of sexual misconduct, allegations he also denies, and he has filed a suit against the person who made the allegations.
Nick Szabo
Nick Szabo is a programmer, cryptographer, and the creator of smart contracts and Bit Gold.
Szabo is one of the forerunners cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been put forward as a Satoshi candidate for years.
Szabo was considered a possible candidate by Finding Satoshi before concluding he didn’t post at the appropriate times to be Satoshi.
Other Satoshi candidates
Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto was originally flagged by Newsweek in a disastrous misdiagnosis.
Wei Dai was considered as a possible Satoshi by Finding Satoshi; however, it concluded he didn’t post at the right times.
Other even less credible candidates have been put forward, including Elon Musk, Ross Ulbricht, and assorted random mathematicians and cryptographers.
Did Finding Satoshi find Finney and Sassaman?
Put simply, the documentary provides effectively zero new insight into the long-standing question: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
At one point, Kathleen Puckett, a former behavioral analyst at the FBI, makes the argument that Satoshi is an individual because Satoshi always used “we,” a plural pronoun, just like Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who she exposed.
That isn’t evidence.
Another piece of “evidence” she cites is the fact that Satoshi cited a book from the 1950s, An Introduction to Probability Theory and Applications, in the whitepaper.
Puckett believes this suggests that Satoshi is either older than we thought or a free thinker.
However, Satoshi cited this paper because he believed that the best way to capture the probability of an attacker catching the honest chain was an example of a “Gambler’s Ruin” problem.
So rather than being evidence about the type of person that Satoshi is, instead it mostly tells us that he knew probability math.
The very fact that every serious investigative journalist, documentarian, and random Twitter personality has their own candidate really suggests that we need to stop trying.
Each and every one uses a different combination of stylistic analysis, a different set of vibes, and a different set of hunches from people who maybe worked with Satoshi; at the end of the day they’re all speculating.
There are quite a few people who have the interest, who have the capability, who were present in these communities at this time.
None of these candidates are willing to sign; none of these candidates are willing to move $BTC; none of these candidates (at least the believable ones) claim to be Satoshi.
This is a cryptographic system where every person who investigates it is forced to rely on weak circumstantial evidence, because the cryptography that would provide real evidence will not appear.
Let dead men lie.