Adam Back has heard the question before. He will keep hearing it. But this week, with a New York Times investigation naming him as the most likely identity behind Satoshi Nakamoto, the Blockstream CEO gave his most detailed public response yet, and it raises as many questions as it answers.
“No,” he said when asked directly if he is Satoshi. “I have said this a number of times.”
The Man Who Got the First Email
What makes Back’s denial more complicated than most is the biography he cannot change.
In August 2008, before Bitcoin’s whitepaper was published, before anyone outside a small circle of cryptographers knew it existed, Back received an email from Satoshi Nakamoto. He was the first person Satoshi ever contacted.
“I got the first email that anybody got from Satoshi in August 2008 before the Bitcoin paper was released,” Back confirmed. The communication was limited, a small exchange of emails in the autumn of 2008 and spring of 2009, before Satoshi eventually went silent in 2011 and was never heard from again.
Back later shared those emails publicly as part of the COPA trial against Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who spent years falsely claiming to be Satoshi before being legally forced to retract the claim. The emails are now part of the court record.
His Theory on Who Satoshi Actually Is
Back’s most interesting contribution to the debate was not his denial but his theory about why Satoshi has never been found.
“It’s probable that Satoshi is somebody that nobody knows,” he said, repeating an argument he made to the producer of the HBO documentary that also investigated the mystery. “He’s not talking to documentary film crews, he’s not talking to investigative journalists, he’s not going to conferences speaking under his own name.”
His logic follows from that. If Satoshi is someone known in the cryptography or Bitcoin community, they would have been identified already. Fifteen years of analysis by some of the most technically sophisticated researchers in the world has produced nothing conclusive. The digital breadcrumbs stopped in 2011. There is no new information to analyse.
“I think it’s probable we’ll never know at this point,” Back said.
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