John Carreyrou

If you're Satoshi Nakamoto, you just have a bunch of cryptographic keys that hold the keys to your fortune.

And anyone who kidnaps you can try to extort those keys out of you.

And there's another reason he wouldn't want to be unmasked.

which is that right now he's in the process of taking one of his Bitcoin companies public on the NASDAQ stock market.

Now, under U.S.

securities law, when you are the CEO of a public company, you must disclose all information

material information to your investors.

If Adam Back is Satoshi and he's sitting on 1.1 million Bitcoins, then that could be considered material information because it means that he's sitting on a huge trove of Bitcoins that if it were suddenly sold could crash the Bitcoin market.

Absolutely.

There's also one more very fundamental reason why BAC wouldn't want to be unmasked as Satoshi, which is the ethos of Bitcoin.

It's this decentralized currency outside the control of governments.

It's this collective software project that hundreds of developers have been working on for more than a decade.

Bitcoin belongs to every member of the community.

The community doesn't want a leader.

It doesn't want an authority figure.

In fact, one of the favorite slogans of the community is, we are all Satoshi.

I think there's going to be a faction of the community that will not believe me and that will say the only thing we'll believe, the only proof that we'll believe is when someone moves one or several or many of Satoshi's coins.

Or when someone signs with a cryptographic key associated with one of the wallets that holds these coins.

As long as they don't have that cryptographic proof, they're going to say it's not good enough.

There was an interesting moment in our interview in El Salvador where he said that what he thought would happen is that the coins wouldn't move until Satoshi died and left them to his heirs.