The New York Times says it found Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. Not so fast

The quest to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, has been going on for more than a decade now, and resulted in some embarrassing misfires. The most notorious came in 2014 when Newsweek magazine dropped a bombshell cover story claiming the Bitcoin inventor was a 64-year-old man named Dorian Nakamoto, hiding in plain sight outside Los Angeles. More recently, a 2024 HBO documentary put forth the dramatic—and dramatically wrong—revelation that Satoshi was a little known and improbably young Canadian software developer.

The latest to take up the case is legendary journalist John Carreyrou, famous for exposing a massive scandal involving fraudster Elizabeth Holmes’ blood-testing startup Theranos. In a lengthy investigation published on Wednesday in the New York Times, Carreyrou claims to have cracked the case and found that Satoshi Nakamoto is none other than British computer scientist Adam Back.

It’s not a bad guess. Back has long been an influential figure in crypto circles, and is also famous ...