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Adam Back Denies He Is Satoshi Nakamoto in Response to Times Investigation

“Dr. Adam Back has consistently stated that he is not Satoshi Nakamoto,” his company said in a statement. “What is not speculative is Adam’s foundational contribution to Bitcoin.”

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Adam Back onstage at a conference in Miami in February.

Credit...

Amir Hamja for The New York Times

By

Kailyn Rhone

April 8, 2026

Updated

2:34 p.m. ET

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The British computer scientist Adam Back said on Wednesday that he is not the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin known as Satoshi Nakamoto, after a New York Times

investigation

presented evidence that he is.

“I’m not satoshi,” Mr. Back said on the

social media platform X

on Wednesday. He added that he is merely one of a number of developers who came “so close yet so far” to building something like Bitcoin.

The true identity of the creator of the world’s first cryptocurrency has remained hidden for 17 years. The

Times’s investigation

, led by reporter John Carreyrou, showed that Mr. Back had, in a series of obscure emails, outlined almost every feature of Bitcoin a decade before Satoshi did. It showed that during Satoshi’s two and a half years posting frequently online, Mr. Back largely disappeared from forums discussing Bitcoin, only to reappear soon after Satoshi famously vanished in 2011. And it found striking similarities between Mr. Back’s and Satoshi’s online posts and emails.

Contacted for the investigation, Mr. Back denied that he is Satoshi and chalked up its findings to a series of coincidences. He reiterated that on X on Wednesday, saying that much of the article featured “a combination of coincidence and similar phrases from people with similar experience and interests.”

Mr. Back was a member of the Cypherpunks, a group of anarchists formed in the early 1990s who wanted to use cryptography — the art of securing communications through code — to free individuals from government surveillance and censorship. Satoshi is believed to have been a Cypherpunk because of the group’s interest in digital money that could not be traced by the government, and because he

announced

his white paper on a forum where many Cypherpunks congregated.

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