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NYT is WRONG! Adam Back Did Not Create Bitcoin!
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See the video:
Last week, John Carreyrou and Dylan Freedman of The New York Times reported that Satoshi Nakamoto is Adam Back.
Read the full New York Times article (and to bypass the NYT paywall legally).
Or if you have a NYT subscription, read the original.
Last year, I interviewed Benjamin Wallace about his remarkable book, "The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto."
Watch the interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0KVOcLJe50X post by a pro programmer comparing Adam Back's code with Satoshi Nakamoto's code, circa 2008.
My video mentions:
At the start of the NYT Daily podcast, Carreyrou said he is "99.5% and 100%" sure Satoshi is Adam Back.
That surprised me for two reasons:
1. I respect Carreyrou's reporting. He's best known for unmasking Elizabeth Holmes, proving she was a deceptive crook. Carreyrou is a brilliant reporter. He's not into hyperbole. If he says he's 99.75% sure, we must pay attention.
2. I also respect Benjamin Wallace's reporting, especially regarding Nakamoto. Wallace has spent probably ten times more time researching Satoshi than Carreyrou has. And Wallace is unconvinced that Adam Back is Satoshi. Wallace thinks Adam could be Satoshi, but he's confident that Satoshi is someone else. Adam is not one of Wallace's top two candidates. Indeed, on WanderLearn Show, Wallace said there's "more than a 50% chance" that Satoshi is none of the dozens of candidates he evaluated in his book.
Therefore, we have a dilemma. Whom should we believe: Carreyrou or Wallace? Both are outstanding reporters.
Wallace and I exchanged emails after the NYT's declaration. He's busy reporting, so he didn't have time to appear on the podcast again this month, but his book explains why Wallace is unconvinced that Adam Back is Nakamoto.
Although the NYT used stylometry to match Back & Satoshi based on their writing in bitcoin forums, the NYT did not use it to match their programming stylometry, whereas Wallace did. Programmers, like English prose writers, have style tics. Adam Back's programming style does not match Satoshi's. Some observers argue that the code style does not line up cleanly. A few commentators described Back’s code as looking like typical academic Unix-programmer code, while Satoshi’s looked more like the work of a professional software engineer, suggesting stylistic differences rather than a strong match.
Let’s review his points:
Page 27:
Amir Taaki told Wallace, “Adam has a consistent style across his projects. His style does not match Satoshi’s.”
“Amir elaborated that Back followed standard programming conventions, wrote in C, and was a Unix/Linux programmer, while Nakamoto was stylistically erratic, wrote in C++, and was a Windows guy. Back was also known at the time as a privacy absolutist, someone likely to balk at Bitcoin’s anonymity trade-offs.... I also thought it implausibly clumsy for someone trying to elude detection, who’d cited only a handful of precedents, to include his own work among them.”
On the other hand, Carreyrou’s article says:
“And Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the bitcoin software.”
Everyone agrees that Satosh