Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

Summary

I still had a few things I wanted to confront Mr. Back with, but his aides said he had other meetings to attend. We took the elevator back down to the lobby and shook hands like two chess players after a hard-fought match.As I watched Mr. Back disappear into the crowd of jovial conference goers, something nagged at me. For a fleeting moment, I thought I had heard him slip and say something as though he was Satoshi himself. But I couldn’t remember what it was.When I got home to New York, I found it in the recording I’d made of the interview. It was when I was walking him through the similarities between things he and Satoshi had written. I brought up one of Satoshi’s quotes, but before I had a chance to explain why I was mentioning it, Mr. Back interrupted.Me: There’s a quote that I mentioned earlier where Satoshi says, “I’m better with code than with words.”Adam Back: I did a lot of talking though for somebody, I mean … I mean, I’m not saying I’m good with words but I sure did a lot of yakking on these lists actually.To my ears, it sounded like he was saying that for someone who preferred code over words, he sure had written a lot of words. Implicit in that was an acknowledgment that he had been the one who wrote the quote. In other words, for a few seconds, Mr. Back had let the mask fall and turned into Satoshi.I emailed him to confront him about it a few days later. He denied that it was a slip. “I was just responding conversationally to a general observation about technical people often feeling more comfortable expressing ideas in code than in prose,” he wrote.But I had been crystal clear: I had asked about a specific Satoshi quote, and I suspected Mr. Back knew that.I recalled how 10 years before, Satoshi had come out of hiding to help Mr. Back win the war over block size. And here Satoshi was, back again in a luxury hotel in El Salvador. Only this time, he had served Mr. Back less well because he’d removed any lingering doubt in my mind that I had the right man...