Manu Joseph: Why we cannot be sure Bitcoin’s secret creator is actually Adam Back

What I’m about to say was once obvious, yet it will seem less persuasive with each passing year: Bitcoin is nothing without its origin story. The story is that an unknown man whose real name was certainly not Satoshi Nakamoto created this cryptocurrency between 2008 and 2009 to liberate us from governments and banks. As Bitcoin’s value rose hundreds of times, it became public knowledge that he held about 1.1 million Bitcoin, worth over $120 billion US dollars at some point last year, and over $70 billion at the time of filing this column.

Yet he has not touched them, which gives him the aura of an ascetic. Or, as some people suggest, maybe he has just been dead. He has not been heard from since 2011.

Or, maybe he is many people, a fellowship. The mystery of the only billionaire who is at once anonymous and famous has led to much speculation, except, oddly, that he is probably a woman. Now, the venerated New York Times has claimed that its investigative reporter, John Carreyrou, may have solved one of the great mysteries of the modern world.I don’t think he has.

For a story of this magnitude, I was baffled by the lightness of the circumstantial evidence it presented.Carreyrou (with help from the paper’s AI projects editor, Dylan Freedman) claims that Satoshi is a British cryptographer and computer scientist named Adam Back, who has denied it. Back has always been a person of interest to anyone who has seriously tried to find out who Satoshi really was. So Carreyrou’s answer to the puzzle is not a surprise.

Carreyrou mentions a recent attempt to unmask Satoshi, Cullen Hoback’s documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery. In the film, Hoback meets Back and lists several Satoshi suspects. When his own name came up, Back