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.
