One simple reason why I think Satoshi is no longer with us

The New York Times thinks Adam Back is Satoshi; their analysis is based on Back’s membership in the cypherpunk community and prior work on Hashcash, as well as some linguistic quirks he shares with Bitcoin’s creator. There is no meaningfully new evidence presented. The piece is surprisingly weak for a journalist as credentialed as John Carreyrou, who famously exposed Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

Back is taking a magnanimous approach; harvesting goodwill from the Bitcoin community, while denying any Satoshi affiliation with a wink and a nod (as all Satoshi candidates are expected to do).

I saw nothing in this article that caused me to revisit my view that Back is not Satoshi. The burden of proof is extraordinarily high, and the Carreyrou didn’t clear the bar. Stylometric analysis can be trivially P-hacked. The NYT didn’t really do any rigorous statistical work; they appear to have looked at superficial patterns of grammar and spelling. I have my own guesses regarding Satoshi’s identity,¹ and I think the mystery might finally be cracked soon thanks to AI, but I don’t think this is it.

nic carter@nic_carter

one thing I believe is that as LLMs get better they will eventually be able to identify Satoshi with stylometry. probably in the next couple of years arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800

3:09 PM · Feb 25, 2026 · 84K Views

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80 Replies · 10 Reposts · 408 Likes

Why might someone egg on a NYT journalist who thinks they are Satoshi? I leave that as an exercise for the reader. I don’t think anyone sane would want the public to think they secretly controlled a hoard of $120 billion in digital bearer assets.

But there’s another good reason to be skeptical of the Back as Satoshi story.

If Satoshi were alive today, they would have an enormous responsibility to resolve the biggest lingering problem for Bitcoin – the roughly 1.7m BTC sitting naked in “pay to public key” (p2pk) outputs, waiting to be seized by a quantum computer.

As a reminder, sufficiently powerful quantum computers could reverse-engineer the cryptographic relationship between public and private key. Recent papers from Google and Caltech suggest that this might be easier than previously expected, potentially doable by a quantum computer with as few as 26k quantum bits (qubits) in a few days. Google and Cloudflare consequently set themselves 2029 deadlines to fully upgrade to post-quantum crypto. The US government has asked its critical agencies to be ready by 2030. Serious organizations expect quantum computers to be a problem in the not-too-distant future.

Now, as “Q-day” approaches, I expect that Bitcoin will get its act together and upgrade its cryptography so that addresses cannot be cracked by a quantum computer. In the next decade or so, each holder of BTC will most likely have to rotate their coins into new addresses, secured by new cryptography. But here’s the trouble:

There are a few million BTC in addresses held by Satoshi and other early miners that are presumed to be abandoned or lost. Moreover, a large subset of these coins – 1.7m BTC or around $120 billion worth – are in outdated p2pk addresses that expose the public key, meaning anyone with a sufficiently capable quantum computer could reverse-engineer the private key and claim the coins for themselves. This could entail the unexpected resurfacing to the market of nine percent of Bitcoin supply thought forever lost. The price impact would be catastrophic.

Now unfortunately, as Satoshi and some of their early peers have either lost or abandoned their keys, or passed away, it appears that coins in these old addresses cannot be rotated to a newer, stronger encryption format. Thus, around 1.7m BTC appear permanently vulnerable to a quantum attacker – and the owner of that computer would have a near unlimited amount of time to crack the addresses open.

Of course, the Bitcoin developers could propose a software update that prohibits expenditures from these old address types, effectively freezing those coins in place forever. This would be unprecedented in Bitcoin history and would represent an effective confiscation of user funds – something Bitcoin culture strenuously rejects. For this reason, I think it’s unlikely such a freeze takes place. If it does, something inherent in Bitcoin – its rigorous adherence to property rights and an untampered monetary schedule – would be lost.

This brings us back to Satoshi. Satoshi is the main person that can get us out of this mess. They could either move their hoard of coins to a newer, safer address type, or, if they don’t want to claim the coins, they could move them to a “burn” address, thus provably rendering them unspendable. This would put to rest the risk of these coins unexpectedly waking from their slumber. And they could do this while retaining their anonymity.

This is why I have concluded that it is unlikely that Satoshi is still alive. Barring an extraordinary intervention from the developers to freeze almost 10% of the supply, only Satoshi can resolve Bitcoin’s quantum liability. If Satoshi was alive, they would feel an overwhelming sense of duty to resolve the p2pk coins problem, either by rotating their coins to safer addresses, or burning them. Even if they had lost access to their coins, they could presumably prove that they were Satoshi with old files, emails, credentials, and use this authority to coordinate a solution (for instance, giving their formal approval for a freeze).

Back in 2010, Satoshi did participate in discussions about quantum risk to Bitcoin’s cryptography and was therefore aware of the issue. Satoshi was quite relaxed about it, casually suggesting that Bitcoin could simply adopt a new cryptographic function and move on if necessary.

Fifteen years on, quantum computers have significantly advanced and now look to pose a genuine threat in the coming decade.

This is why the NYT’s identification of Back as Satoshi doesn’t pass muster for me. Not because Back doesn’t have the credentials or the talent, but because if Satoshi were alive, and positively disposed towards Bitcoin, they would feel overwhelming pressure to resolve the issue of the quantum-vulnerable coins, which is getting worse with each passing day. It’s hard to believe that Satoshi could be watching Bitcoin’s plight from the sidelines with callous indifference.

This leads me to conclude that Satoshi is no longer with us. As Q-day looms, we need Satoshi more than ever. And Satoshi isn’t answering.

1. It’s impolite to speculate about Satoshi’s identity.