Adam Black Responds To The New York Times Report That He’s The Creator Of Bitcoin

A journalist for the New York Times on Wednesday claimed to have discovered the creator of Bitcoin.

Or so they thought.

In a lengthy article for The New York Times, journalist John Carreyrou argued that British cryptocurrency entrepreneur Adam Black is the founder of Bitcoin.

Black has since responded to the claims, denying that he’s the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto.

Bitcoin Magazine reported more on Black’s denial:

The New York Times published an investigation Tuesday arguing that Adam Back, a British cryptographer and longtime figure in the Bitcoin community, is the most credible candidate yet for Satoshi Nakamoto — the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin.

Back denied the claim before the story ran, denied it inside the story, and denied it again in a public post on X after publication.

“I’m not satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash, privacy tech on cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas,” Back wrote on X.

The Times investigation leans on textual analysis of old emails and forum posts. The methodology focuses on writing patterns, including the use of double hyphens and British spelling conventions. The Times noted that early researchers had explored concepts such as peer-to-peer systems, proof-of-work, and routing models that looked like prototypes for Bitcoin, and that Back’s archived writing contained a high density of those overlaps.

Take a look:

@JohnCarreyrou in his NYT research finds like @AaronvanW in his “genesis block” book, many interesting bitcoin analogs in early attempts to create a decentralized ecash, in effect prototype ideas trying to figure out a bitcoin-like thing, including p2p, BGP, proof of work.

— Adam Back (@adam3us) April 8, 2026

Here’s Black denying he’s Satoshi at a conference:

ADAM BACK SHUT DOWN THE #BITCOIN QUANTUM FEAR NARRATIVE LIVE ON BLOOMBERG 🚫⚛️

SAYS QUANTUM COMPUTERS ARE STILL “EXTREMELY BASIC”

AND THERE’S LIKELY “A DECADE” BEFORE ANY REAL THREAT

IGNORE THE NOISE. STAY CONVICTED. HODL 💎 pic.twitter.com/fZyUAkJVsv

— Bitcoin PulseX (@BitcoinPulseX) April 9, 2026

Read the New York Times original report claiming Black is Satoshi below:

It has been 17 years since a nine-page white paper appeared in an obscure corner of the internet and ushered in the world’s first cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has grown from a curiosity to a mainstream fixture of the financial landscape. Yet the identity of its inventor has remained unknown, concealed behind the now-famous pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. I spent more than a year digging into Satoshi’s identity, sifting through thousands of decades-old internet postings. With the help of computer-assisted reporting provided by my colleague Dylan Freedman, I amassed a body of evidence pointing to Adam Back, a 55-year-old British cryptographer. Mr. Back denied that he was Satoshi, and chalked it all up to a series of coincidences.

Here is what we learned:

Mr. Back came up with almost every feature of Bitcoin first. Both Mr. Back and Satoshi were involved with the Cypherpunks, a group of anarchists formed in the early 1990s who wanted to use cryptography — the art of securing communications through code — to free individuals from government surveillance and censorship. In a series of emails with his fellow Cypherpunks in the late 1990s, Mr. Back suggested creating a kind of electronic cash that would help people avoid government interference in financial transactions. He outlined a decentralized network of computers, or “nodes,” that would keep functioning even if a few tried to collude and take over the network. That’s exactly how Satoshi later designed Bitcoin.

Mr. Back invented Hashcash, a statistical puzzle-solving system. He proposed combining it with another electronic cash idea called b-money put forth by another Cypherpunk. That combination was the blueprint Satoshi later followed in creating Bitcoin. Striking similarities link Mr. Back and Satoshi. Mr. Back got his doctorate in distributed computer systems — Bitcoin is a distributed computer system. He used the same programming language as Satoshi. Both he and Satoshi were masters of keeping computer networks safe. And Mr. Back was an expert in public-key cryptography, which Satoshi incorporated into Bitcoin.

Satoshi and Mr. Back shared a strange preoccupation with emailed spam and proposed identical spam-fighting ideas. Satoshi and Mr. Back both like to operate anonymously on the internet and were both big fans of using pseudonyms. Satoshi and Mr. Back both liked to say they were better at coding than writing.

When Satoshi appeared, Mr. Back disappeared.

After unveiling his invention, Satoshi spent two and a half years trying to improve it. Then, in 2011, he famously disappeared. Mr. Back followed that same pattern, but in reverse. For more than a decade, whenever Cypherpunks discussed electronic money, Mr. Back almost always chimed in. But when Bitcoin, the closest manifestation of the vision he had laid out, was announced in late 2008, Mr. Back was nowhere to be found. Six weeks after Satoshi disappeared, Mr. Back posted about Bitcoin for the first time.

Mr. Back and Satoshi shared many of the same writing tics.

We collected the archives of three internet mailing lists where Cypherpunks congregated in the 1990s and 2000s. We merged them into one big database and compared them to Satoshi’s body of writings. We performed three different writing analyses. All three pointed to Mr. Back as the closest match for Satoshi.

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