Overview
- The Times investigation, published Wednesday, compared Satoshi’s writings with 134,000 forum posts and ranked Adam Back as the closest match.
- Reporters pointed to shared habits such as British spelling, two spaces after periods, and many of the same hyphen mistakes in technical terms.
- Hashcash, a proof-of-work system Back created, and his late-1990s plans for decentralized e-cash mirror ideas later set out in Bitcoin’s 2008 white paper.
- Back denied being Satoshi on social media and said the overlaps reflect coincidence and his heavy posting on early cryptography mailing lists.
- No signature from early Bitcoin wallets or movement of the roughly 1.1 million coins linked to Satoshi has appeared, and a stylometry expert called Back the closest match without a firm conclusion, naming Hal Finney as a secondary candidate.