The quest to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, has been going on for more than a decade now, and resulted in some embarrassing misfires. The most notorious came in 2014 when Newsweek magazine dropped a bombshell cover story claiming the Bitcoin inventor was a 64-year-old man named Dorian Nakamoto hiding in plain sight outside Los Angeles. More recently, a 2024 HBO documentary put forth a dramatic—and dramatically wrong—revelation that Satoshi was a little known and improbably young Canadian software developer.

The latest to take up the case is legendary journalist John Carreyrou, famous for exposing a massive scandal involving fraudster Elizabeth Holmes’ blood-testing startup Theranos. In a lengthy investigation published on Wednesday in the New York Times, Carreyrou claims to have cracked the case and found that Satoshi Nakamoto is none other than the British computer scientist Adam Back.

It’s not a bad guess. Back has long been an influential figure in crypto circles, and is also famous as the inventor of Hashcash, a form of digital money that predates Bitcoin. Back is also the CEO of an early Bitcoin infrastructure firm known as Blockstream, and is currently operating a company that issues shares to amass a hoard of Bitcoin.

In his exposé, which runs to an eye-glazing 12,000 words, Carreyrou seizes on Back’s business activities and layers on heaps of circumstantial evidence to make the case he has found Satoshi. Carreyrou doesn’t produce any smoking guns, but instead relies heavily on characteristics that are attributable to both Satoshi and Back: the use of British spelling, libertarian beliefs, involvement in the Cypherpunk movement, and the employment of punctuation like “proof-of-work” used in the Bitcoin white paper.

Carreyrou acknowledged an obvious objection to this thesis—that there is a lengthy paper trail of Back corresponding with Satoshi—but explains it away by saying that Back was actually writing to himself as part of an elaborate ruse to throw would-be unmaskers off the trail.

It all sounds good until you recall that journalists, like anyone else, are prone to confirmation bias. This is the psychological phenomenon in which people seek out evidence that confirms their existing beliefs and ignore facts that might refute them. Confirmation bias is what tripped up Newsweek and HBO, and it appears to have tripped up Carreyrou as well.

The evidence he provides about Back’s involvement with the Cypherpunk movement and his political beliefs support his case—but are also attributes common to nearly everyone else in the early Bitcoin days. As for the common literary quirks between Back and Satoshi, Carreyrou himself acknowledges they are not dispositive.

Even as Carreyrou frantically pursues every scrap of information that might confirm his thesis, he is quick to gloss over a better suspect that is right under his nose. That suspect is the reclusive polymath Nick Szabo who ticks all of the same boxes as Back and whose initials are conveniently the inverse of Satoshi Nakamoto. What’s more, you can make the case Szabo is Satoshi without having to explain away mounds of correspondence as an elaborate ruse concocted years after Bitcoin’s invention.

Ironically, Carreyrou does point to a 2015 New York Times article identifying Szabo but quickly dismisses it. He shouldn’t have. The piece is authored by Nathaniel Popper, who not only wrote the definitive early history of Bitcoin culture, Digital Gold, but actually spent considerable time hanging out with all the early crypto figures.

Finally, Carreyrou engages in what looks like another serious instance o