John Carreyrou

And then, though he reappeared on the list before Satoshi disappeared, he never addressed Bitcoin.

He never talked about it until Satoshi vanished.

And I thought that was very significant.

But I didn't think I was there yet.

I mean, this is a case that's been unsolved for 17 years now.

There have been a bunch of attempts to unmask this guy.

And I felt like I needed to provide more definitive evidence that I had the right man.

So I decided to keep digging to provide something that was almost forensic evidence.

It meant looking much more closely at the way these two people wrote, the way Satoshi wrote and the way Adam Back wrote.

And as I did that, I began to notice similarities in words and expressions and phrases that they used.

So there was this cryptographic term that I noticed in Satoshi's writings, partial pre-image, which he wrote putting a hyphen between pre and image.

And I went back to the Cypherpunks and the cryptography mailing list and determined that over all the years that those lists were live, only two people had ever used that term, Adam Back and Hal Finney.

who was another really important member of the cypherpunk community.

And actually, many people have thought over the years that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.

But there was one difference in the way they used that term.

Hal Finney did not hyphenate pre-image, whereas Adam Back did.

Except this is a term no one else used amid this community of thousands of cryptographers who were active bantering on these lists for more than a decade.

No one else but these two guys used that term, and one of them spelled it exactly the same way Satoshi did.

And by the way, that hyphen in partial preimage, it wasn't the only weird hyphen in Satoshi's corpus.

I actually found that Satoshi was very bad at using hyphens.