John Carreyrou

Now, why was he thought to be a member of this group?

Well, there are several indications that Satoshi was one of the cypherpunks.

The most obvious one is that he created Bitcoin.

And the cypherpunk's greatest obsession, arguably, was the concept of electronic cash.

Another reason is that Satoshi unveiled Bitcoin and his white paper outlining Bitcoin on the cryptography list.

which is an offshoot of the Cypherpunks mailing list.

And the cryptography list was a place that a lot of Cypherpunks went to after the Cypherpunks list kind of petered out.

Well, in their heyday, there were about 2,000 subscribers to the Cypherpunks mailing list, and you have to somehow narrow that down.

In this case, I had what I felt was a pretty good lead, Adam Beck.

And it turned out that Adam Beck was among the most prolific and vocal Cypherpunks, so he wrote a lot of posts on the list.

It made for some interesting reading, and...

I quickly began to see a lot of parallels between what he wrote about and what Satoshi wrote.

There's several posts in 97 where Adam Back comes out and says on the list, no uncertain terms, that he's a libertarian and that he sees his crypto anarchist mission as bringing about a more libertarian government.

And that reminded me of something Satoshi had said soon after unveiling Bitcoin.

He had said something along the lines of, it's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint of

That was the first parallel.

There was the fact that Adam Back was anti-copyright and that he was very worried by several legal precedents.

One of them was the fact that Napster, the file sharing service, had been shut down after it had been sued by the music industry.

And after that happened...

He sent a post to The List saying that he'd come to the conclusion that basically anyone developing a peer-to-peer software program had to release it anonymously.