A foreign media report has claimed that ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, the creator of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, who has not been heard from for 17 years since 2010, is a British cryptographer.

John Carreyrou, an investigative journalist at The New York Times (NYT), reported after 18 months of close analysis that Adam Back (55), a world-renowned cryptographer from the United Kingdom, is highly likely to be Satoshi.

Satoshi, the creator of Bitcoin, left his last message online in 2010 and has remained out of contact for 17 years. He is estimated to hold 1.1 million bitcoins, worth about 110 trillion won at current market prices, but has never sold any of them. This has led some to assert that Satoshi may already have died.

NYT said it conducted a close analysis of thousands of internet posts and emails to uncover Satoshi’s identity. It cited linguistic analysis indicating that Satoshi’s writing style was similar to Back’s. For example, both showed the same habit of placing a hyphen (-) in certain positions and of mixing in British spellings. NYT also pointed to emails Back exchanged with members of the 1990s anarchist collective ‘Cypherpunk’, in which he outlined ideas for a virtual currency that could avoid government intervention. Satoshi is likewise known to have been influenced by the Cypherpunk movement.

Assessments also found similarities on the technical side. Back founded the Bitcoin technology company ‘Blockstream’ and, in 1997, invented ‘Hashcash’, which formed the basis of Bitcoin’s core technology. NYT emphasized that Back had already conceived a related design approach a decade before the launch of Bitcoin, and that the period when he disappeared from the internet coincided with the period of Satoshi’s activity, arguing that this makes it highly likely that Back is Satoshi.

Back himself denied the report. He wrote on X, “I am not Satoshi.” He added, “However, I paid early attention to the impact that cryptography, online privacy, and electronic cash would have on society,” explaining that since 1992 he has been actively engaged in applied research on virtual currency and privacy technologies, which led to ideas such as Hashcash.