John Carreyrou

And there was a guy in Paris, a French expert named Florian Caffiero, and I asked him to analyze

the Satoshi corpus and compare it with some of the top suspects.

Took about six weeks for him to get back to me.

So the suspense was kind of mounting.

And when he got back to me, finally, he texted me to say that the person who was the closest match

to Satoshi's white paper was Adam Back.

But, he immediately added, Back was barely ahead of another person in the pool of candidates, and that was Hal Finney.

According to Floriano, they were barely distinguishable.

And as a result, he felt that his analysis was inconclusive.

Well, it was definitely disappointing.

I'd spent, you know, many months researching, reporting this story.

Right.

And I had felt so close, and now solving the mystery seemed out of reach again.

But I also felt by then like I had a pretty good idea of what the problem was.

I knew for a fact that Adam Back knew about stylometry and knew how to defeat it because he'd been writing back in the 90s about how to defeat writing analysis.

Right.

So that stylometry wouldn't catch him.

And so with that in mind, I pivoted to a new approach.

What I did is I wanted to find a more systematic way of analyzing Satoshi's writing and comparing it to Cypherpunk's writing.

And so I brought in a New York Times colleague named Dylan Friedman, who's a journalist and an engineer.