Chapter 1: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto and why is his identity a mystery?
In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family. Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals, and I wouldn't even call my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen. But it's one thing to know and another thing to understand. Alan, murder me? What the hell was Alan thinking? From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Em Gessen, and this is The Idiot.
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From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitro-Eff. This is The Daily. It's been one of the world's biggest mysteries and best-kept secrets. Who is the inventor of Bitcoin? This is a person who's been known only by an alias, Satoshi Nakamoto.
And despite many attempts to unmask him, he's remained anonymous for 17 years, even as his creation spawned a whole system of cryptocurrency, revolutionized finance, and minted a powerful new class of billionaires, including Satoshi himself. Today, we talk to our colleague, John Carreyrou, who says he thinks he found Satoshi. And then we talk directly to that person. It's Thursday, April 9th.
Hi, John. Welcome to the studio.
Thanks for having me.
John, you've just finished this truly extraordinary investigation, and I am obsessed with it. I can't stop thinking about it. It is incredible.
Thank you.
So, I want to start with a really basic question. What percent convinced are you that you have identified Satoshi Nakamoto?
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Chapter 2: What evidence points to John Carreyrou's suspect for Satoshi?
As soon as we got in, I logged into the HBO Max app. and pressed play and watched it.
With Bitcoin being woven into the fabric of the financial system, affecting everyone, perhaps the question of Satoshi's identity was more pressing than ever.
In the end, I wasn't convinced. By the film's conclusion, they singled out a young Canadian software developer named Peter Todd, and I felt like their evidence was too thin to justify, you know, asserting that they had solved the mystery.
Still worth watching.
Yeah, absolutely. It's an entertaining romp through the world of crypto. But what really caught my attention was the scene in the middle. It features Adam Back, this British cryptographer, who is actually a pretty influential person in the Bitcoin community. He's got this mini empire of Bitcoin-related companies.
And he's sitting on a bench in Riga, Latvia, next to the filmmaker, whose name is Colin Hoback.
Do you think it'll ever be known who Satoshi is?
I don't think so, no. I mean, just because all of the people that have been identified have various reasons, believable reasons, is probably not them.
And Cullen starts enumerating the big Satoshi suspects.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did John face in his investigation?
Hal Finney did not hyphenate pre-image, whereas Adam Back did.
But, John, how much should we really read into this? Like, who among us hasn't screwed up a hyphen here and there, you know?
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. He was pathologically incapable of using hyphens correctly. You know who else was pathologically incapable of using hyphens correctly? Adam Back. And it wasn't just hyphens. Satoshi had a habit of confusing its... I mean, who among us, but yes. And he sometimes put also at the end of sentences. Adam backed the exact same thing.
There turned out to be a lot of similarities.
And how significant are Are those similarities? Like, did you ask someone? Did you try to get a sense of how likely it is that any of that could just be coincidence?
So if you find one instance of similarities, it's not necessarily something you can hang your hat on. It's not enough on its own. But if you find a bunch... then it becomes more significant.
And I talked to a forensic expert at Hofstra who ended up telling me that what I had done, the way it homed in on certain words and phrases that Satoshi uses is exactly what he does when he's working on cases where he's trying to identify a writer.
You have to be a real grammar expert to crack this case, it turns out.
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Chapter 4: How did John analyze Satoshi's writing style?
Yeah, all loud and clear. Adam, I just want to set aside for a second the question of whether you're Satoshi and ask you, if Satoshi were calling into this show today and I asked him, are you Satoshi, do you think he would say yes?
It's kind of hypothetical to me, right? Because I'm not, but... I have seen a number of people in interview settings being asked that question and saying they wouldn't say or something like that, right? Yeah, I think that's the common answer and it sounds logical to me.
In other words, the common answer would be that Satoshi calling into the show wouldn't admit that he's Satoshi.
Well, I mean, I think my assumption is Satoshi simply would decline to participate or, you know, be hard to identify even as a candidate to try to contact or bring into an interview.
So I just want to get to some of the specific pieces of evidence in John's story that I found most convincing, again, just as a lay reader here. One of the things that really struck me was this very systematic analysis that John and our colleague Dylan Friedman, who works with AI and machine learning, discussed.
They combed through thousands of pages of these forum posts and looked at specific kinds of grammatical errors, specific writing ticks, not just one, but a bunch of things. And they used three separate methods of analysis, and all three came to the same conclusion, which is that you were the number one match out of all of these people in this community to the writings of Satoshi.
Right, and we've gotten actually feedback, Dylan and I have gotten feedback today from readers. Some readers find the hyphenation analysis the most compelling, and by far the closest match to these hyphenation error patterns was you.
What do you make of that, Adam?
I mean, I guess it's coincidence, unless there is some kind of link in the sense that he did read my paper. Some of the things we're talking about hyphenating are... sort of niche technical terms like proof of work.
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Chapter 5: What parallels exist between Adam Back and Satoshi Nakamoto?
Here's what else you need to know today. A new wave of attacks tested the U.S. and Iran's day-old ceasefire, which was strained by confusion over the deal's terms and over the status of the Strait of Hormuz. One of the biggest points of contention was whether the truce applied to Lebanon.
The Israeli military said it carried out some of its largest strikes in Lebanon yet, killing more than 180 people there. President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the ceasefire did not include Lebanon, but Iran and Pakistan, which helped mediate the truce, said it did.
On Wednesday afternoon, Iran said the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump demanded be kept open as part of the ceasefire deal, had been fully closed and that some tankers had been turned away. Today's episode was produced by Stella Tan, Jack DeSidoro, and Nina Feldman. It was edited by Paige Cowett and Rob Zipko and contains music by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, and Rowan Nemisto.
Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitchell. See you tomorrow.