NYT investigates and finds out the real name of bitcoin developer Satoshi Nakamoto

The investigative journalist known for exposing Theranos spent more than a year gathering evidence against Blockstream’s CEO. Adam Beck denies everything.

Adam Beck is a 55-year-old British cryptographer and CEO of Blockstream, one of the most influential companies in the Bitcoin infrastructure. Back in 1997, he proposed the Hashcash system, a Proof-of-Work mechanism that Сатоші Накамото" href="https://noworries.news/biography/satoshi-nakamoto/" data-bio-id="4232">Satoshi Nakamoto directly quotes in the Bitcoin white paper. Blockstream has attracted over $ 1 billion in investment and reached a valuation of $ 3.2 billion. Beck also heads the Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company (BSTR), which holds more than 30,000 BTC and is entering the public market through a merger with the Cantor Fitzgerald bank.

The investigation was led by John Carreiro, a French-American journalist known primarily for exposing the Theranos startup and helping to convict its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. He was prompted to work on the material by Beck’s behavior in the HBO documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery" (2024): moving eyes, nervous gestures, and laughter when asked about Satoshi.

Together with AI project editor Dillan Friedman, Carreiro collected the archives of three crypto mailing lists — Cypherpunks, Cryptography, and Hashcash — and created a single database of 134,308 posts from 620 participants discussing digital money. Three independent methods of stylometric analysis pointed to the same author.

Satoshi’s stylistic fingerprint is unique: two spaces between sentences, British spelling, hyphenated spelling of «proof-of-work,» the word «bugfix» without a space, «halfway» with a space, and inconsistent alternation of «e-mail» and «email.» Out of all 620 mailing list participants, only Beck reproduces each of these features. Linguistic stylometrist Florian Cafiero identified Beck as the closest in style to the Bitcoin white paper among the 12 suspects.

In addition, Beck was the only one among the correspondents to use the hyphenated «proof-of-work» and to refer to the little-known Russian payment system WebMoney, both of which are present in Satoshi’s letters. He was one of only two people to write «partial pre-image» and the only one to use the expression «burning the money» in reference to digital coins. Investigators counted 67 common spelling features between Beck and Satoshi — almost twice as many as the next candidate.

The behavioral pattern is no less telling. For years, Beck has been an active and vocal participant in discussions about electronic money. When Bitcoin went public at the end of 2008, he went silent. He made his first public comment about Bitcoin in June 2011, exactly six weeks after Satoshi disappeared from the network.

Carreiro met Beck in person at a Bitcoin conference in El Salvador in January 2026. During the conversation, Beck denied his involvement more than six times. Beck responded publicly in X, calling the evidence proof of bias and noting that his high activity in crypto discussions makes statistical coincidences inevitable.

The crypto community reacted with skepticism. Galaxy Digital researcher Alex Thorne wrote that the NYT «continues to publish garbage.» However, some analysts recognize that this is the most technical and detailed investigation in 17 years.

The issue is not just academic. Approximately 1.1 million BTC attributed to Satoshi’s early wallets have never moved since 2009. Any credible identification of the creator will inevitably raise the question: will he sell them? Even a hint of movement of coins from known Satoshi wallets has caused sharp price fluctuations in the past. Added to this are the regulatory implications: if the creator of Bitcoin is known, the IRS and SEC will have a specific target for action regarding taxation and asset status.