What the latest search for Satoshi means for the crypto industry
My heart sank last week when I woke up to discover that The New York Times had “identified” Satoshi Nakamoto. I was less worried about the impact on the market than I was about the flood of well-meaning “Hey, did you see they found the inventor of Bitcoin” texts and emails I would soon be receiving. I suspected, correctly it turned out, that the Times had probably got it wrong like other publications had before.
In case you’ve been living under the crypto world’s version of a rock, the Times claims Adam Back, a crypto OG who founded the Bitcoin precursor Hashcash, is Satoshi. It’s not a bad guess but, for reasons I outline here, the reporter appears to have been led astray due to confirmation bias.
Laura Shin, who like me has been on this beat forever and doesn’t have a dog in this fight, likewise thinks the Times whiffed. She delicately points out that Back has been all over the media in the last week, which would be odd behavior if he really were Satoshi—but is not so odd for someone who is trying to whip up enthusiasm for his Bitcoin treasury company.
Ultimately, the Times piece is interesting not so much for its conclusion but for what the piece says about the state of crypto and the world we live in. On the latter, my longtime tech-watcher pal Om Malik decries the “unmasking impulse” and how, in recent efforts to unmask both Banksy and Satoshi, something is being lost.
“Banksy and Satoshi weren’t hiding wrongdoing. They were hiding themselves. In Banksy’s case, the anonymity IS the art … With Satoshi, the anonymity IS the architecture,” Malik writes. “Unmasking either one isn’t just invasive. It is destructive to what they built.”
Malik rightfully laments how, in an always-on and attention-hungry online environment, the Times’ exposé seems to attack the very idea of anonymity. Meanwhile, anonymous or pseudonymous participation seems to be on the decline in the world of crypto, too. This is ironic given how privacy and decentralization have always been touchstone values in crypto culture. But it’s also understandable in light of pressure from governments, and from the sad fact that shady operators have so often used the “we’re anonymous like Satoshi” shtick as a pretext to rip people off.
That’s why the Times piece, and all the attention surrounding it, may ultimately be good for crypto. At a time when the industry is coming to be defined by Wall Street and backroom deals in Washington, D.C., it’s refreshing to go back to basics and recall an earlier time: A time when one man, disgusted by government profligacy and enchanted by the potential of blockchain, decided to build an alternate financial universe and, once he succeeded, chose to fade into the mists forever.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com