John Carreyrou

Oh, we're talking about many hundreds of pages.

Wow.

And then I got the idea, well, why don't I write down words and expressions that Satoshi uses that jump out to me as unusual?

And then I thought, well, you know, there's been like a list of about 10 or 12 people that's been talked about for years and comprised of the top Satoshi candidates.

Why don't I at least take the names from this list and see if any of these guys use these same phrases or words as Satoshi?

I figured that the best way to do that was to do an advanced Twitter search, because a lot of these top Satoshi candidates have Twitter accounts.

Sure enough, one of them used almost every single word and expression that I had jotted down in my notebook, and I had jotted down more than 100.

Adam Beck.

Yep.

I got a shot of adrenaline when I realized this.

I felt like the hunch that I'd had watching the HBO film was, you know, at the very least partially founded.

And quickly reminded myself that this didn't really prove anything, but I felt like it was a lead.

And I asked myself if there was something else I could compare Satoshi's writings to.

And there was.

There are these emails from this group, the Cypherpunks, that Adam Back happens to have belonged to in the 1990s.

The Cypherpunks were this group of techno-anarchists that was formed in the early 90s who believed in using cryptography to ward off government surveillance and censorship.

I would say they were libertarians on steroids.

Some of their ideas were really, you know, at the limits of the law.

And they sometimes met in person in the Bay Area, but mostly they communicated through something called an internet mailing list, which is essentially big group email and old typewriter font that you receive in your inbox if you subscribe to it and you reply all to when you want to participate in the discussion.

And it's very likely that one of the members of this community eventually went on to take the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto.