Bitcoin’s creator has hidden behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto for 17 years. But a trail of clues buried deep in crypto lore led to a 55-year-old computer scientist named Adam Back.
By John CarreyrouWith Dylan Freedman John Carreyrou spent a year digging through thousands of decades-old internet postings in search of Bitcoin’s creator. April 8, 2026
One evening in the fall of 2024, my wife and I were sitting in traffic on the Long Island Expressway when, tired of listening to the jazz-funk station I often played on our drives, she switched to a podcast.
It was “Hard Fork,” the New York Times tech show, and the hosts were discussing a new HBO documentary claiming to have unmasked Bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.
I was instantly riveted. I had long considered the question of Satoshi’s true identity one of our age’s great enigmas and had poked at it before without success. Two years earlier, I had even spent several ...
If quantum computers develop to a certain extent, the private keys of old addresses like Satoshi Nakamoto's will be instantly cracked, and the dusted coins will flow into the market, causing large change to bitcoin. Bitcoin may plummet in those years, but it will develop better afterwards.
“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” ~ George Orwell, 1984