Bitcoin’s creator: when the quest matters more than the conclusion

Last week, we briefly mentioned John Carreyrou's piece in the NYT claiming our dear Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto. It's worth returning to it. As a former journalist, I don't make a habit of commenting on colleagues' work. I'll say only this: some conclusions feel reached before the reporting begins.

The article is worth reading regardless, if nothing else, as a reminder of the Bitcointalk Forum, where the early arguments were had and the culture was formed.

Satoshi is not Bitcoin

But the identity question, in the end, is the least interesting thing about Satoshi. The code is open. Anyone can use it, build on it, fork it. Even its author would carry no special authority over its direction today, and hasn't for a long time. This is worth stating plainly: despite those saying it hasn’t, Bitcoin has changed substantially since those early days. The protocol that exists now is not Satoshi's alone. It belongs to the developers who proposed changes and the users who chose to adopt them. That's not a weakness because it's precisely how it was designed to work.

The Paris Blockchain Week has ended: thousands of people, from dozens of countries, here for an industry that didn't exist twenty years ago. This week alone: the founder of the world's first regulated on-chain stock exchange; the co-founder of one of the largest fintechs in the world, that spent years having its bank accounts closed for its association with Bitcoin and is now in a position to choose which banks it works with; a German exchange building digital asset infrastructure for institutions. All of it traces back to Satoshi’s planted seeds: the same source code, the same whitepaper, the same pseudonym.

Whoever Satoshi is, the legacy holds.