John Carreyrou

They're not enough to prove that Satoshi is Adam Back.

But I kept looking and reading the Cypherpunks list.

And soon enough, I came across these posts where Adam Back, over the course of two years, basically between 1997 and 1999, laid out in detail virtually every single aspect of Bitcoin.

Hmm.

So it was to create a decentralized currency using peer-to-peer software where the payer and the payee would be anonymous, just like they are in Bitcoin.

It would have a publicly viewable ledger.

It would use hash cash as the way to mint the coins.

And Satoshi had ended up borrowing hash cash and turning it into the method by which new Bitcoins were minted.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

And there was one other really interesting clue as I poured over these archives.

I noticed that Atomback disappeared from the cryptography mailing list before Satoshi posted his white paper there.

And then he stayed away while Satoshi was active.

So it was like Batman and Bruce Wayne.

Whenever Bruce Wayne disappeared, Batman appeared.

The Bitcoin white paper was basically the closest manifestation of the electronic cash vision Adam Back had laid out on the Cypherpunks list a decade before.

And when it was unveiled, Adam Back was nowhere to be found.

I mean, don't you think that he would have at least said something and commented about it?

Right.

It stretches credulity that this guy who's been talking about exactly the same thing when it gets unveiled is AWOL.