Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is April 8th, 2026. I'm making a quick video because the New York Times decided to wade into the cryptocurrency space and they've asked a very common question: Who is Satoshi?
There are things in life that you can never definitively answer. For example, we have a little bit about Jesus' early life and a lot about his death, but there are about 30 years in between where we're not exactly sure what happened or where he went. There are many legends about it. Was he a stone mason working in Sepphoris, or was he in Egypt doing mystical stuff as Celsus said? Who knows? Satoshi is yet another one of those figures, the mysterious, mystical founder who decided to leave and then descended into the heavens.
The New York Times has an article asserting that Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto. This is nothing new to me. I was on the Lex Fridman podcast, and Lex asked me, "Who do you think Satoshi is?" You can see the clip; I tweeted it out. The clip goes into a collection of reasons why I think Adam is a suitable candidate.
There are candidate classes, not people who are. Candidate classes refer to the profile you would expect a person like Satoshi to have. I listed a collection of reasons, some technical and some non-technical. Non-technical reasons include the right age and education. Satoshi was working on Bitcoin probably around 2007 to 2008 and launched on January 3rd, 2009. To have worked on that and had the requisite skill set, one would have had to be educated in the late '80s to '90s at the very least or earlier. Given the accumulation of knowledge that went into Bitcoin—distributed systems engineering, cryptographic concepts, knowledge of open-source software, and how peer-to-peer networks work—this is not something a junior, novice programmer would know or be capable of doing.
So, there's an age requirement, which is why a lot of people think of Hal Finney, as he grew up with all those technologies and contributed to them. When you look at the actual knowledge in the code itself, Adam is the most likely candidate because the heart of Bitcoin is proof of work, which he invented at Microsoft Research. He created something called hashcash. There's an Occam's razor principle here: the guy who invented it would likely keep working on it and eventually use it for a distributed system.
There's also styleometric analysis. You can look at the way Adam writes; the way Satoshi writes is very similar, with similar words and double spacing. Additionally, there's domain-specific knowledge, like the use of sec P256K1. That particular curve was a non-standard curve, but it turns out it's not vulnerable to the weaknesses that the NSA had introduced. Microsoft Research would be aware of this type of information because they're in the family, and Adam worked for MSR.
Windows was used as the operating system to compile the code; it was the actual Windows compiler, as opposed to a Unix or Linux compiler for the C++ code. Adam worked at Microsoft and was a Windows user, not a Linux user, which is very unusual for open-source contributors and cypherpunks, who are almost exclusively Linux users. These are all little fingerprints that people leave.
As a prerequisite for cryptographic knowledge, a PhD in cryptography is also significant. There are other things I've noticed, like the programming language for Bitcoin script being based on Forth. That's a very odd stack-based assembly language. It's strange that a person would write a language that way for Bitcoin script. In America, if you grew up in the '80s or '70s, you'd be familiar with the SCIP family of computer science education, which included Lisp and similar languages. If you grew up in the British system, they actually used Forth in their textbooks, and Adam grew up in that tradition.
So, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. Additionally, there was no company or active project he was involved with from 2007 to around 2010 or 2011. He magically appeared after Satoshi left. If you want to dig deeper and do your own homework, one thing you can do is look into these types of techniques. This is probably what's going to create a definitive fingerprint for a Satoshi trail: styleometric code analysis.
Code styleometry means that when you write source code, you leave a fingerprint. That's how we're able to differentiate between AI-generated code, Russian-generated code, or Chinese-generated code. You can take GitHub or any open-source corpus and create a fingerprint for each of those corpuses, determining if it's a single author or multi-author. Then you can take the Bitcoin source code, as we still have the archived code from 2008 and 2009, and compare it to see if the fingerprints match. Styleometric analysis has become so advanced that it provides a very good overlap; in fact, it's better than handwriting analysis.
What this does is not confirm but rather gives a direction. You can say, "Well, that candidate fits," but then you look at a collection of other circumstantial evidence: the age, the knowledge base, the facts and circumstances of their life, their writings, and other such things. This would give you some directionality about it and help identify a candidate. A guy like Adam is what you'd look for, and if it were revealed that it's Adam, it wouldn't be surprising. If it's revealed that it's someone else, like Craig Wright, it would be surprising because there's no indication of any of those things. Craig lacks the education, the knowledge, the connections, and the temperament.
Craig is an egotistical monster, and he probably gets sued over that. You can see in his statements how he conducts himself. I've met him in person. A guy like that could not stay anonymous; it's all about him. It's not possible for him to create something like Bitcoin, receive all this praise, and be worthy of a Nobel Prize in economics without doxing himself.
Some might say, "Well, he did dox himself." However, he came much later and could reveal at any time that he's Satoshi by simply signing something with the PGP key or signing something with one of the block keys, which Satoshi surely could do and had done many times before in the process of building and testing Bitcoin and verifying the cryptography.
It's a lot of trial and error that goes into this. It's one of those things where everybody's going to talk about it, and just like the last years of Jesus, you're never going to find it because the records are destroyed. I doubt that anyone was going to talk about it. The operational security of Satoshi was impeccable. Everybody's been looking for this person, and even the email address got compromised.
I've read a lot of the emails that went back and forth. In the early days, when I was running the Bitcoin Education Project, I actually created an archive of Satoshi's emails, and many people forwarded their emails to me. The best were from Mike Hearn, who was communicating with Satoshi as early as 2009 about the Bitcoin Java client. Having read the emails and looked at the professionalism and persona, it's clear that whoever was in that role had a lot of operational security experience.
Why haven't the keys been touched? There's a very high probability that when they exited the persona, they destroyed all the cryptographic capabilities, meaning they destroyed the keys. I believe the Bitcoin that Satoshi has is unspendable, and I think the PGP key has no private key corresponding to it.
We do have a ticking time bomb with quantum computers because those coins are vulnerable and can't be rotated. We also have a ticking time bomb with the PGP key. At some point, that capability will be able to break those. So, everyone gets to be Satoshi at some point. If Satoshi were still alive, the best thing he could do is rotate and move things to more secure accounts and be quantum resistant. However, I think the persona is dead, meaning that all the ability to use the persona was destroyed or lost, either because the person who had it destroyed it or died.
I think Adam is the most likely living candidate. The most likely not alive candidate is Hal Finney, and there are a collection of less likely candidates, like Nick Szabo, for example. Having met many of these people throughout the years, I think Adam probably fits the MO, and I wouldn't be surprised if the New York Times is right about this one.
I will point out, though, that everyone in the industry has an opinion and domain-specific knowledge, and there are many people who actually worked with and talked to Satoshi. It's a bit strange that, as investigative journalists, they didn't involve those people more in the story. Mike was front and center, as were Gavin Andresen, Martti Malmi, and others. It would have been very easy to get more feedback. Maybe they didn't want to participate, or perhaps they just never asked.
This shows you the state of investigative journalism; instead of going straight to the source with primary first-hand accounts, they just try to piece it all together. The other thing is they have the capabilities at the Times to do code stylometry. Frankly speaking, that would have been a much better approach to find some corpus of different candidates. If the code that Adam Back writes is somewhat connected to the code Satoshi wrote, it's a very damning signal that there's a connection point there.
It's very hard to obfuscate and hide your source code. There are specialized tools that people use to do that when they work at intelligence agencies to make it look like it's someone else, but those tools didn't really exist and weren't used in mainstream when Bitcoin was first written back in 2007 and 2008. Remember, you can compare that code to historical code. If anything is floating around from the '90s or 2000s as a corpus, it's very unlikely that it would have been obfuscated in any way.
So, stylometry is the best way to identify the candidate. Anyway, this is just a quick video on this topic. It's something that comes up every few years, especially in a bear market when people are always looking for the real Satoshi. It's a very good thing that Bitcoin doesn't have a founder. The minute that it's a known person, a large group of people will only seek to attack that founder.
If it's Adam Back, a straight white male, the whole woke movement will attack him, saying, "Oh, see, it's the patriarchy reasserting itself and all this other stuff." If he ever had a bad experience with a secretary or a colleague at some point in his life, it would be, "Bitcoin sexually harassed," or "Bitcoin did this." It was genius of Satoshi to walk away.
All of us who are cryptocurrency founders are deeply envious that he had that ability. We had to stick around because the things we were doing were longer horizon and more complicated than simply building and releasing a protocol. We have to manage the upgrades, but in the process, the protocol gets reduced to the founder. People love Cardano because of me, and people hate Cardano because of me. Not all people, but certainly some. You can see that on cryptocurrency Reddit and within the Cardano ecosystem, both on the positive and negative sides.
That's deeply unfair because Cardano has nothing to do with me. It's a protocol; it lives in the cloud. Thousands of people have touched it, built it, and done things with it that aren't Charles Hoskinson. So, why does one person impact the chain in such a way? Satoshi realized this before anyone else and very wisely, as Bitcoin was starting its ascendancy, got out of the limelight and let other people step in. By being the anonymous founder, he enjoyed the mysticism. Doxing him doesn't help Bitcoin; it would actually damage the credibility of the protocol.
So, while we say we think it's Adam, it can't be Adam. All right then. Thanks, everyone. Cheers.
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