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My Quest to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery

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 ...