Miguel Afonso Caetano

"After several months in the depths of the Cypherpunks list archives, I sometimes lost track of where I was in my research and followed false leads down bizarre cul-de-sacs. While responding to one of the first criticisms of his white paper on the Cryptography list, Satoshi had written: “I didn’t really make that statement as strong as I could have.” I thought I had seen that phrase before and spent several evenings wading through hundreds of 1990s mailing-list posts I’d already read. It soon became clear I had imagined it.

But my rereading wasn’t all in vain. Other parallels between Mr. Back and Satoshi started to become apparent. For instance, Mr. Back and Satoshi shared a dislike for copyright.

“Scrap patents and copyright,” Mr. Back wrote in September 1997.

In keeping with this belief, Mr. Back made his Hashcash spam-throttling software open source.

Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license, which allowed anyone to use, modify and distribute it without restrictions.

In the spirit of building something in the public domain, Mr. Back and Satoshi also both created internet mailing lists dedicated to their creations — the Hashcash list and the Bitcoin-dev list — where they posted software updates listing new features and bug fixes in a format and style that looked strikingly similar.

Satoshi’s Back-like bias against copyright surfaced in other ways. He expressly waived copyright when he shared images of a Bitcoin logo he had designed on Bitcointalk, and he encouraged people who wanted to improve upon it to “make their graphics public domain.”

In the early 2000s, copyright enforcement became mainstream news when the popular file-sharing service Napster shut down after being sued by the big music companies. Napster was what’s known as peer-to-peer software, where users share content with one another directly..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto-identity-adam-back.html

#Bitcoin #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #CipherPunks

Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? My Quest to Unmask Bitcoin’s Creator

Bitcoin’s creator has hidden behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto for 17 years. But a trail of clues buried deep in crypto lore led to a 55-year-old computer scientist named Adam Back.

The New York Times
Apr 11 at 10:14amWeb
Show threadMiguel Afonso Caetano1d ago

"All these similarities were intriguing, but I didn’t have anything that tied Mr. Back directly to the creation of Bitcoin. That changed when I discovered a cluster of Cypherpunks posts Mr. Back had written between 1997 and 1999, a decade before Bitcoin was launched.

On April 30, 1997, he suggested creating an electronic cash system “entirely disconnected” from modern banking that would have four key attributes: It would preserve the privacy of both payer and payee; it would be distributed across a network of computers to make it hard to shut down; it would have some built-in scarcity to prevent excessive inflation; and it wouldn’t require trust in any individual or bank. To achieve the latter, he suggested a fifth component two days later: a publicly verifiable protocol.

All five of these elements later became core to Bitcoin.

Four months later, Mr. Back returned to the topic of electronic cash, introducing a new feature rooted in game theory.

“An application I have put a bit of thought into is the idea of creating a distributed banking system,” he wrote. “Ideally it is a system where all nodes are equivalent, and k of n of those nodes have to collude before they can compromise the operation of the bank.”

Mr. Back was alluding to the Byzantine Generals Problem, a computer science problem that bedevils decentralized systems. In the analogy, “n” number of generals surround an enemy city at war with Byzantium. To invade successfully, they must all agree to attack at the same time, but a subset of “k” generals may be traitors and sabotage the plan. This is also true of distributed computer networks: They can be sabotaged by malicious participants, or nodes, in the network.

Mr. Back wanted to create an electronic cash network with so many nodes in so many different places that no one in the mood to sabotage it would be able to find enough conspirators.

That sounded a lot like the system Satoshi described in his white paper 11 years later:"