Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

I know this is going to seem very biased, but literally, there is no evidence for it being a group, and generally the people who float this idea tend to have the idea that since several candidates seem to have decent evidence of being Satoshi, the easiest way to resolve this is to say that they were working together, like it's some kind of murder mystery novel or Netflix show.

I am giving this strong negative weight because I think it's obvious that the main reason people ever come up with this idea is resolving cognitive dissonance. I understand the motivation - that's sort of why I am making this page, to reduce my own confusion and analyze my thoughts on this.

I do acknowledge that such a large amount of people (albeit mostly new to the topic) believe it was a group, so I don't want to completely torpedo this with a -10 or anything here.

I mentioned in the Nick Szabo section that I don't lend a lot of credence to general analysis of language, but in this case, I have to give some weight to the fact that Adam Back is actually British and apparently used the same two-spaces-after-a-period convention that Satoshi did.

I've had mixed feelings about the two-spaces thing, because it just sort of feels like it's at least 50-50 on whether it's legit or the most obvious way for a non-British person to disguise their identity. The fact that Satoshi used it when he was privately emailing Finney (note to self: add link to that PDF site of their email exchanges) is what makes me give it a 50-50 chance of being legit, because otherwise, it just feels incredibly fake to me.

I'm having such a hard time weighting this one, but I suppose I'll give it a 2, which I think is on the high end of what I'd go with.

So, there's a long Youtube video series which culminates with a video saying that Adam Back is definitely Satoshi. I think most of the reasoning in this video is quite bad, it seems to really be assigning way too much important to things that I wouldn't rate higher than neutral (it also ends with the video-maker basically ranting about some boring Bitcoin in-fighting).

Having said that, one thing that the video makes a big deal about is that Satoshi wrote to Wei Dai about his b-money paper, and when he did, he said "Adam Back noticed the similarities and pointed me to your site". So the argument in the video was that since there was no evidence that Satoshi had actually talked to Adam Back at that time, it seemed suspicious that Satoshi referenced him.

I'm a little unclear about the whole point of this argument - if someone could definitively prove that Satoshi did not email Adam Back, yes, that would be strong evidence. But if Adam Back says "Yes, he emailed me" (which he does say), then the point becomes meaningless, even if he never provides any emails.

In any event, in February 2024, the emails did come out during the COPA vs. Wright court case.

I've seen people speculate that they were faked. Of course, any non-public piece of communication could be faked, but there's no reason to think these are. Moreso, Adam Back swore a declaration that he exported the Satoshi email from Gmail using its export function and that he is being honest, etc., and he would risk legal repercussions if he was lying. Although very unlikely, if he was lying, this could actually be proven if for some reason it an issue large enough for someone to subpoena Gmail to verify that the emails existed and he exported them as he swore.

I'm giving a very strong negative weight to these. It does not remotely feel like he wrote these to himself 4 months ahead of the release just to cover his tracks in the future.

The signature was later shown to be copied from a 2009 Bitcoin transaction; public “proof” blog post relied on cut-and-paste commands; Wright never released an independently verifiable signature.

This brings up a question that I think will come up a few times in this section: If someone is caught being dishonest when it comes to one piece of evidence, does that just negate the evidence (we give it a neutral score) or actually make it a negative signal? Seems like the latter to me. I give this negative weight.

Multiple courts found the trust deeds and address lists riddled with forgeries and inconsistencies; Justice Mellor called the Tulip-Trust evidence “plainly forged.”

Seems like a somewhat negative indicator lol - I am going to give this significant negative weight.

Copyright Office registrations are declarations, not validations; they were filed ex-parte and carry no presumption of truth. COPA’s 2024 judgment states Wright is not the author and has no copyright to assert. (link)

This seems, let us say, slightly negative!

Back-dated blog posts, e-mails & academic papers presented as 2008–10 proof of involvement.

Forensic analysis in Kleiman v Wright and COPA showed metadata and content inserted years later; dozens of documents determined to be "deliberately falsified."

Sorry, I'm using AI to summarize some of this. This is the only section where I'm doing this, but I don't have the energy to research all this guy's goings-on.

He made a pretty convincing case later that he didn't know what the reporter was talking about, and thought it was something he was under NDA for or whatever (I have read varying ideas of what he was actually working on during the time Bitcoin came about, some being "top secret" government work, some just doing NDA stuff for a telecom).

Had he been emailed questions about his involvement, or knew he would speak to a reporter ahead of time, and still said these 2 sentences, it would be much less believable that he did not know what was going on, but he was just sort of approached outside his house.

I would give this a little more weight if I knew for sure that those two sentences were absolutely direct quotes from him. I would not give it huge weight, but I would give it a little more away, but I'm not convinced. If he had said even slightly different sentences, they could've carried a very different meaning.

What I've read is that Leah McGrath Goodman, the reporter who wrote about this, still believes it was him, which basically nobody on earth believes other than her. What that tells me she has some kind of bias now, and is way too attached to the story, and in turn, with THAT tells me is that she may easily have (consciously or unconsciously) changed his exact quote a little bit.

I myself was interviews a bunch of times for newspaper or magazines in the early days of blogging, and one thing I noticed was that EVERY single story would misquote me at least once. It was never even anything interesting or important to the story, but they would always gets at least one thing wrong, it was wild.

Anyway, I give this basically a tiny weight, because assuming he said exactly these 2 sentences word for word, we can't ignore it completely, but his explanation seems pretty believable, considering he was sort of ambushed on his driveway.

In a talk that William Hern gave in 2018, he mentions that the "kinds of forum postings that he was placing and things on Amazon did not match, to put it mildly, the style of the writing of Satoshi". I did a quick search about this and couldn't find any references, but I do remember seeing something about this before, and the rest of Hern's talk is pretty good and I trust this is correct.

I think for me, the fact Dorian was placing Amazon reviews period is a decent enough negative signal. It's not a very Satoshi Nakamoto-like thing to do. If we ever find out the definite identity of Satoshi, they're probably not going to have posted a bunch of Yelp reviews of pizza places or anything.

I haven't looked at the code! But assuming this comment is correct, it seems strong.

I guess the one thing I'm not sure about here is that it's saying that Finney wrote UNIX-style C code, and that the Bitcoin 0.1 code is Win32 GUI C++ code, which of course it is, since it was for a Windows GUI app. if you were adept at writing "UNIX-style C code", but a novice to programming Windows GUI apps, would you have to make adjustments that would account for this difference?

My guess is not really - at least the idea that Finney organized code into neat directories, and Satoshi just stuck everything in the same directory - that seems significant, and also something that it'd be somewhat weird to really do to throw people off the trail, so to speak.

He was running a 10k race on April 18, 2009, at the same time Satoshi was actively emailing back and forth with Mike Hearn and transmitting coins.

Barring shenanigans, this is a pretty huge negative signal imo.

This is strong to me. I'm not a crypto guy, and I kept seeing mentions of Chaum when I reading old posts on the Cypherpunks list, and I didn't know who it was. Reading his Wikipedia, and seeing a video that discussed him really shocked me. He is a huge figure in the digital currency world.

Sassaman having him as an advisor at least makes it likely he would have a thorough knowledge of all the domain knowledge around Bitcoin, etc.

So the theory here would presumably be that some element of Satoshi quitting was related to depression, and that his continued silence since then was because he was no longer alive.

Looks good to start, but there are 2 instances of Satoshi purportedly communicating with the world way after 2010. The first is a message posted under Satoshi's account on P2PFoundation when Dorian Nakamoto was"outed" by Newsweek, the second was an email sent from a known Satoshi address during a debate about block sizes. Neither of these messages has been debunked, so if you assume either of them was true, they would invalidate Sassaman completely. And in the same way, to really make any good case that Sassaman was Satoshi, you would have to have good reasons that those 2 messages were both illegitimate (and not just circular reasons of "Well Sassaman created Bitcoin so those messages must be fake)).

In the light of having never seen any good arguments that those messages were both fake, I give this a large negative weight.

You can get the details in the article linked, it's pretty interesting stuff.

I did read elsewhere that a trait Hal Finney had was that he would be the first to try out new software that people would post to the Cypherpunks list, which makes his actual personal connection to Sassaman perhaps a bit less notable. Having said that, I still can never get over the fact that Dorian Nakamoto lived within a mile of Finney, and I've always thought there's a decent chance that Finney suggested the name. So I supposed the way that would tie in would be that if Satoshi released Bitcoin and Finney started interacting with him, perhaps Sassaman would have emailed Finney and said "hey it's actually me, Len" and they might have continued a second non-public chat. This is such wild speculation though, not remotely evidence!

In general, when you read articles about possible Satoshis, the authors throw around "they have the right technical skills" pretty liberally. In this case, it's actually true. Without getting into boring technical details, Bit Gold is clearly very similar to Bitcoin. Having said that, I still don't think this can be weighted super-high, since his work was public, so anyone could have read it and built on it if they wanted.

I should mention that a lot of the stuff on Nick Szabo here is very well summed up in this article.

At first, I read the Finney post and then Satoshi's reply and I thought wow, this is very strong, he replies to most of the other paragraphs by Finney. On second read though, it's clear that Satoshi replied to all the questions, or implied questions, that Finney asked, and the first 2 paragraphs (which Satoshi didn't address) were just statements. So I'm including this here for completeness, but I think it's much weaker than it seemed when I first saw it mentioned.

I'm a bit torn on whether I should default to giving negative weights if a programmer has no known history of using C++ or giving positive weights if they DO. I think the latter is more correct, so I'm giving no weight if they have no history of C++, and positive weight if they do.

There is some stylometrics data that seems to point to Szabo's writing style being closer to Satoshi than other candidates.

This is from Bitcoin: The future of money? apparently, although I have not read the book.

I hate to give HUGE amounts of weight to attempts to match writing style between Satoshi and other people. It seems really obvious to me that if somebody was trying to remain anonymous to the point where from the outset they had picked an anonymous name, they would make some changes to their writing style. I also question how scientific this kind of thing is, and what kind of sample size you need.

I guess this is not related to Szabo directly, but since this is the first I'm talking about writing style: To me, the absolute very easiest thing to do if you wanted to create a fake writing style would be to write in British English, add 2 spaces after words, etc.

When I was younger, I had a friend who was recording an album for his band. One day, he told me that he was using sampled drums for all the songs, instead of just recording the actual drummer in the band, and I displayed some skepticism (translation: I'm pretty sure I was kind of a dick about this.. I was in my 20s, it happens!). My friend told me "No man, trust me, nobody will ever know these are fake, I'm not going to tell you what it is, but I included something that will trick everybody". I thought about it for about 3 seconds and I said "Did you include a sample of the drummer dropping a stick at the end of a song?" and he went "Oh. Yeah."

To me, the "I want to throw people off the trail" equivalent of "fake the drummer dropping a stick at the end of the song" is "use some British writing quirks" - it's just SUCH an obvious way to do it.

I also have the general feeling (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that "stylometrics" is just not a very reliable thing, ESPECIALLY to apply in cases where someone is already trying to disguise their identity, and where all the examples we have of writing from everyone involved are still fairly small sample sizes. I give it no weight in either direction.

I think people focus on Satoshi's British writing style simply because all there is from Satoshi is written text. The fact his writing exists means that people can analyze it.

Szabo referenced FDR signing this order in a blog post (interestingly, from 10 days before Bitcoin.org was registered.

He also mentioned it in this Youtube video (which is linked to the timestamp where he mentions it.

I will note that in the great article I've already linked, the author made a big deal about the fact this blog post was made 10 days before bitcoin.org was registered - I'm not sure that timing matters at all. I guess the idea that the FDR gold ban was on his mind around the time he would have been working on Bitcoin (if he was Satoshi) is slightly significant, but the main thing here is just that he is aware of the FDR gold confiscation thing, and in fact seems to care about it.

Anyway, sticking your actual birthday but a fake year into a web form seems pretty natural. Personally, I always put a fake, but memorable, birthday but my actual birth year when I sign up for more trivial online things, because I feel like it'd be easier to recover the password later if I reallllly had to talk to someone. Doing it the opposite way - actual birthday, fake year - seems less optimal to me, but I could see it.

A couple of times in my life, I signed up for some website where I knew they had a birthday coupon and I put the next day's date as my birthday - this has nothing to do with Bitcoin, just a fun little trick for you if you want to save some money or maybe get a free snack.

Anyway, I'm giving this about the same weight as the other April 5 thing. If there was only one of them, it'd get a higher weight obviously.

Speculation would be that "another szabo" would be a different version of himself, ie. Satoshi, although the name doesn't compeletely make perfect sense. Like if this folder had been named 'Satoshi' or "FakeCoinName", this would be a slam dunk and nobody would debate this issue at all anymore.

1. He had a '/anotherszabo' folder containing all sorts of Bitcoin-related stuff, and he cleared it out in anticipation of registering bitcoin.org
2. He was going to take a break from posting on his blog for some other reason, and he copied a bunch of documents into '/anotherszabo' to organize them for re-posting, or something like that. 3. Obviously, there could be many other reasons for this folder's existence.

Here's something I don't get at all though: How did archive.org even find this folder? Where was it linked to begin with? I have no clue on this. I can't find a link from the Wayback Machine's cache of his main website, although I've never found it to be very easy to navigate to find anything like this.

Anyhow I'm giving this a fairly strong weight. I think the idea of "another szabo" on it's own is strong, and the timing is very strong.

Szabo mentioned "Internet video poker" on the cypherpunks mailing list, and called eBay "One of our most advanced high-tech marketplaces" in an essay on money.

The eBay thing also just does not seem that huge. The essay where Szabo mentioned eBay was in 2002, and he didn't really even say he loved it or anything, he just called it an advanced marketplace.

Setting a weight or a prior for this is very tough. Here are some considerations, for and against:

- There are billions of people in the world who are not listed here.
- On the other hand, basically none of those people were active in the communities that Satoshi was active in like the Cypherpunks list.
- It does seem like there's a high likelihood Satoshi was someone who was already active in the general anonymity/privacy/cypherpunk community and had at least some digital footprint.
- A really interesting point to me is that Len Sassaman was only ever put forward a teeny, tiny bit as a Satoshi candidate until very recently. To me, this makes it clear that there could be many more people out there who are at least candidates that could be considered, but have not so far.

This really is a very hard number to figure out. I've given it a prior (which SEEMS like the most logical thing? I'm open to thoughts on this) but I'm leaving the weight here neutral - I just wanted to use this space to make notes about this.

First off let me say, I hated this documentary so much. I had to skip through most of it because most of the scenes that don't focus around Adam Back and Peter Todd are insanely cringey. I subscribed to Crave (streaming service that distributes HBO shows in Canada) to watch this, and I regret it. The director only really gets to the point in the last 10 minutes when he tosses out a few things and names Peter Todd as Satoshi.

Okay, so back to this particular piece of evidence: It's not nothing but it feels weak compared to most facts about supposed Satoshis. As a 15 year old, Peter Todd was thinking about hashcash - it's interesting, but I give it a low score.

First off, there is precedent for this type of thing, so the concept makes sense. In November, 2020, Dean Browning, a former commissioner in Pennsylvania, who is white, and whose bio lists him as a "proud pro-life & pro-2A Christian conservative" posted something about Obama. Someone named ADunks5 disagreed with him, and Browning replied with a tweet that began "I’m a black gay guy and I can personally say that Obama did nothing for me".

In April, 2025, Matthew Yglesias replied to his own Bluesky post with a post that started "I sincerely cannot think of a less provocative, less trolley thinker than Yglesias" that was widely taken to be him logging into the wrong account (Yglesias had a confusing reply that I think essentially claimed "I meant to do that").

I watched a Youtube video on the "People Who Read People" channel where a crypto expert named Jeremy Clark discusses this with a behaviour expert. One thing Clark points out is that at the time that Todd posted the alleged correction, his username was a pseudonym, not "Peter Todd", so once he realized his mistake, he could have just stopped using that pseudonymous account forever. If he was Satoshi, continuing to use that account, and in fact changing it to reflect his actual name later on, would be incredibly out of character - probably his biggest slip-up.

Clark also pointed out that Satoshi never uses asterisks for emphasis, as the Peter Todd post did with the word "*exactly*", so it doesn't seem likely Todd was pretending to be Satoshi at the time.

Added to these points, the idea that Todd's post was a continuation of a thought that Satoshi had is not clear. It can easily be read as just someone adding another comment. I give this a pretty weak score.

Makes sense. The only thing I'll say here is that, as I mentioned in another comment here, this documentary was very bad in my opinion, and when they pointed this out, they didn't exactly come out and say that Todd did this. They said something about him being Canadian, and that the Canadian writing style is similar to the British style, and they showed some very zoomed-in text on the screen that seemed to be something he wrote, but they didn't really get specific, or talk at all about how many times he might have written like this.

I feel very biased against this documentary, and I have a strong urge to give this a low score for that reason, but I think it deserves a 2. It's obviously not insignificant, if correct.

The documentary makes a big deal about an email conversation Todd had with someone with the pseudonym John Dillon, who later disappeared. This person put up a bounty of $500 for someone to add RBF (Replace-By_Fee).

The doc makes a big deal of $500 not being a lot of money, and a theory that Todd made up John Dillon to give himself an excuse to implement RBF. I tried to read about this whole thing and most of the discussion online about it is annoying and filled with people talking about "psy-ops", never a great sign. I guess the director's point though, is that if Todd made up John Dillon as a way to add RBF and be taken seriously, perhaps he made up Satoshi Nakamoto as a way for his Bitcoin work to be taken seriously.

I think the director could have made his point more clearly. I am not sure I see the through-lines here. I'm going to give this a 0.5 weight, simply because I can feel how negatively biased I am towards this documentary, and surely this piece of evidence can't be worth NOTHING.

Right when I thought the documentary was over (with literally 2 minutes left), it brought up an old IRC log where Todd said "I'm probably the world leading expert on how to sacrifice your Bitcoins (a rather dubious honor...) and I've done exactly one such sacrifice and I did it and I did it by hand."

The doc shows a clip of Todd saying that he thinks Satoshi probably destroyed the private keys to his big Bitcoin stash (which off-topic, I agree with), and so connects the chat message to the idea that Todd was the creator, had the stash, and destroyed the private keys.

My very first thought is that this quote could mean so many things depending on the context, but the doc just shows a small amount of the conversation around this statement. I was not shocked, then, when I found this post by Peter Todd himself (while I was trying to find the whole conversation).

Todd's explanation makes sense and seems solid. I paused the doc but the controls on this streaming service obscure almost half the screen when I do this, but what I can see is way more in line with what Todd says than what the documentary says. I'm giving this no weight - I think the doc waited until there was 1 minute and 50 seconds left in the movie to bring this up because it's really lacking substance.