Finding Satoshi

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is April 8th, 2026. I'm making a quick video because the New York Times has decided to wade into the cryptocurrency space, and they've asked a very common question: Who is Satoshi? There are things in life where you can never definitively answer them. We have a little bit about Jesus's early life and a lot about his death, but there are all these 30 years in between where we're not exactly sure what happened or where he went.

There are many legends about it. Was he a stonemason working in Sephora's, or was he in Egypt doing mystical stuff, as Celsus said? Who knows? Satoshi is yet another one of those figures—the mysterious, mystical founder who decided to leave and then descended into the heavens. The New York Times has an article asserting that Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto, and there's nothing new to me about that.

I was on the Lex Fridman podcast, and Lex asked me who I think Satoshi is. You can see the clip; I tweeted it out. The clip goes into a collection of reasons why I think Adam is a suitable candidate. There are candidate classes—not people who are Satoshi, but candidate classes that describe the profile you would expect a person like Satoshi to have. I listed a collection of reasons, some technical and some non-technical.

Non-technical reasons include the right age and education. Satoshi was working on Bitcoin probably around 2007 to 2008 and launched it on January 3rd, 2009. To have worked on that and had the requisite skill set, he would have had to be educated in the late '80s to '90s, at the very least, or earlier. Given the accumulation of knowledge that went into Bitcoin—distributed systems engineering, cryptographic knowledge, and open-source software—how peer-to-peer networks work, it's not something a junior, novice programmer would know or be capable of doing. So, there's an age requirement, which is why a lot of people think Hal Finney is a candidate; he grew up with all those technologies and contributed to them.

When you look at the actual knowledge in the code itself, Adam is the most likely candidate because the heart of Bitcoin is proof-of-work, which he invented at Microsoft Research. He created something called Hashcash. There's an Occam's razor argument: the guy who invented it would keep working on it and eventually use it for a distributed system. There is also stylometric analysis. You can look at the way he writes; the way Satoshi writes is very similar.

Similar words, double spacing, all this type of stuff. Then there's also domain-specific knowledge, the use of SEC P256 K1. That particular curve was a non-standard curve, but it turns out it's not vulnerable to things that the NSA had weakened. Microsoft Research would be aware of this type of stuff because they're in the family, and Adam worked for MSR. Windows was used as the operating system to compile the code; it was an actual Windows compiler as opposed to a Unix or Linux compiler for the C++ code.

Adam worked at Microsoft and was a Windows user, not a Linux user, which is very unusual for open-source contributors and cypherpunks, who are almost exclusively Linux users. These are all like little fingerprints that people leave. Also, just as a prerequisite of cryptographic knowledge, Adam has a PhD in cryptography. There are other things I noticed, the programming language for Bitcoin Script, which is based on Forth. That's a very odd stack-based assembly language.

It's strange that a person would write a language that way for Bitcoin Script. In America, if you grew up in the '80s or '70s, you'd be in the SCI P family of computer science education, growing up with Lisp and stuff like that, especially if you're an academic computer scientist. If you grew up in the British system, however, it actually is Forth in the textbooks, and Adam grew up in that tradition. So, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence there. Also, where was he?

There was no company or active thing he was doing from 2007 to around 2010 or 2011. He magically appeared after Satoshi left. If you want to dig even deeper and do your own homework, one of the things you can do is start looking into these types of techniques. This is probably what's going to create a definitive fingerprint for a Satoshi trail. Stylometric code analysis means that when you write source code, you leave a fingerprint.

That's how we're able to tell between AI-generated code or Russian-generated code or Chinese-generated code. You can take GitHub or any open-source corpus and create a fingerprint for each of those corpuses to know if it's single-author or multi-author. Then you can take the Bitcoin source code, as we still have the archived code from 2008 and 2009, and compare that to see if the fingerprints match. Stylometric analysis has gotten so good that it gives you a really good overlap; in fact, it's better than handwriting analysis. What this does is not confirm, but it confirms a direction.

You say, "Well, that candidate..." Then you'd look at a collection of other circumstantial evidence: the age, the knowledge base, the facts and circumstances of their life, their writings, and other such things. You'd get some directionality about it and identify a candidate. A guy like Adam is what you'd look for. If it were revealed that it's Adam, it's not surprising.

If it's revealed that someone like Craig Wright is Satoshi, that would be surprising because there's no indication of any of those things. He doesn't have the education, the knowledge, the purpose, the connections, or the temperament. Craig is an egotistical monster, and you can see in his statements how he conducts himself. I've met him in person; a guy like that could not stay anonymous. It's all "me, me, me, I, I, I.

" It's not possible for him to create something like Bitcoin and then get all this praise and be worthy of a Nobel Prize in Economics without doxing himself. What did he do? He came much later on. He could reveal at any time that he's Satoshi by a very simple standard: just signing something with the PGP key or signing something with one of the block keys, which Satoshi surely could do and had done many, many times before in the process of building and testing Bitcoin and verifying the cryptography works. It's not vibe coding; a lot of trial and error goes into this.

It's just one of those things where everybody's going to talk about it, and just the lost years of Jesus, you're never going to find it because the records are destroyed. I doubt that anybody was going to talk about it. The opposite of Satoshi was impeccable; everybody's been looking for this guy, and even the email address got compromised. I've read a lot of the emails that went back and forth in the early days when I was running the Bitcoin Education Project. I actually created an archive of Satoshi's emails, and many people forwarded their emails to me.

The best were from Mike Hearn, who was communicating with Satoshi as early as 2009. They were talking about the Bitcoin Java client. Having read the emails, the professionalism, the persona, and how elegantly the persona came to an end is very clear. Whoever was in that role had a lot of operational security experience. Why haven't the keys been touched?

There's a very high probability that when they exited the persona, they destroyed all the cryptographic capabilities, meaning they destroyed the keys. I think the Bitcoin that Satoshi has is unspendable, and I think the PGP key has no private key corresponding to it. Now, we do have a ticking time bomb with quantum computers because those coins are vulnerable, and they can't be rotated. We do have a ticking time bomb with the PGP key; at some point, that capability will be able to break those. So, everybody gets to be Satoshi at some point.

The persona will be doxxed. If Satoshi was still alive, the best thing he could do is rotate and move things to more secure accounts and be quantum resistant. But I think the persona is dead, meaning that all the ability to use the persona was destroyed or lost, either because the person who had it destroyed it or died. I think Adam is the most likely living candidate. The most likely deceased candidate is Hal Finney, and there are a collection of less likely candidates, like Nick Szabo, for example.

Having met many of these people throughout the years, I think Adam probably fits the MO, and I wouldn't be surprised if the New York Times is right about this one. I will point something out, though: everybody in the industry has an opinion and domain-specific knowledge, and there are a lot of people who actually worked and talked with Satoshi. It's a bit strange that, as investigative journalists, they didn't involve those people more in the story. Mike was front and center, as were Gavin, Tracy, and Marty Malmy. It would have been very easy to get more feedback.

Maybe they didn't want to participate, or perhaps they were never asked, but it shows you the state of investigative journalism. Instead of going straight to the source with primary firsthand accounts, they just tried to piece it all together. The other thing is they do have the capabilities at the Times to do code stylometry, and frankly speaking, that would have been a much better approach. They could have found some corpus of different candidates, and if the code that Back writes is somewhat connected to the code Satoshi wrote, it's a very damning signal that there's a connection point there. It's very hard to obfuscate and hide your source code.

There are specialized tools that people use to do that when they work at intelligence agencies to make it look it's somebody else, but those tools didn't really exist, and they weren't used in mainstream when Bitcoin was first written back in 2007 and 2008. Remember, you can compare that code to historical code. If anything is floating around from the '90s or 2000s as a corpus, it's very unlikely that it would have been obfuscated in any way. So, stylometry is the best way to identify the candidate. Anyway, just a quick video on this topic.

It's something that comes up every few years, especially in a bear market. People are always looking for the great Satoshi. It's a very good thing that Bitcoin doesn't have a founder. The minute that it's a known person, a large group of people whose only job in life is to attack that founder will emerge. So if it's Adam Back, a straight white male, the whole woke movement is going to attack it, saying, "Oh, see, it's patriarchy reasserting itself.

" If he ever had a bad experience with a secretary or some colleague at some point in his life, it would be "Bitcoin sexually harassed" or "Bitcoin did this." It was genius of Satoshi to walk away. All of us who are cryptocurrency founders are deeply envious that he had that ability. We had to stick around because the things we were doing were longer horizon and more complicated than building and releasing a protocol. You have to kind of manage the upgrading, but in the process, the protocol gets reduced to the founder.

People love Cardano because of me; people hate Cardano because of me—not all people, but certainly some. You can see that on cryptocurrency Reddit and within the Cardano ecosystem, both on the positive and negative sides. That's deeply unfair because Cardano has nothing to do with me. It's a protocol; it lives in the cloud. Thousands of people have touched it, built it, and done things with it that aren't Charles Hoskinson.

So why does one person infect the chain in such a way? Satoshi realized this before anybody else and very wisely, as Bitcoin was starting its ascendancy, got out of the limelight and let other people step in. By being the anonymous founder, he enjoyed the mysticism. Doxing him doesn't help Bitcoin; it would actually damage the credibility of the protocol. So while we say we think it's Adam, it can't be Adam.

All right, then. Thanks, everyone. Cheers.