On May 15, 2015, the New York Times published “Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin” by Nathaniel Popper, the paper’s cryptocurrency reporter. The article was an excerpt from Popper’s book Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, published the same month by Harper. The piece concluded that Nick Szabo — the cypherpunk-era cryptographer who designed Bit Gold (conceived in 1998, fully published December 29, 2005) and coined the term “smart contracts” (1994) — was the most likely individual behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym.
The reporting
Popper wrote that he had been working on the book over the previous year, and that in conversations with the programmers and entrepreneurs most involved in Bitcoin he had met “a quiet but widely held belief that much of the most convincing evidence pointed to a reclusive American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo.” The article laid out the case along four lines:
- Bit gold. In 1998 Szabo sent the outline of bit gold to a small group that included Wei Dai and Hal Finney. Popper called it “a Bitcoin predecessor” and wrote that its concept “was very similar to Bitcoin.”
- 2008. That spring Szabo revived bit gold on his blog and asked his readers, “Anybody want to help me code one up?” After Bitcoin appeared, the post was re-dated to look as if it had been written after Bitcoin’s release, “archived versions of the website show.” Once Bitcoin was out, Szabo said nothing about it for months and, unlike Dai, Finney and Back, never released any correspondence from Satoshi.
- Writing. Popper found “striking parallels” between Szabo’s bit gold writing and Satoshi’s description of Bitcoin, and cited the 2014 Aston University study, whose lead, Jack Grieve, called the similarity “uncanny.”
- Colleagues. At Vaurum, a Bitcoin start-up Szabo joined at the beginning of 2014, his range of skills led several colleagues to conclude that he was most likely involved in Bitcoin’s creation, according to people briefed on the company.
Szabo’s denial
Popper met Szabo in March 2014 at a Bitcoin event at the Lake Tahoe vacation home of Dan Morehead. When Popper cited what was being said about him on the internet, Szabo bristled: “I’m not Satoshi, and I’m not a college professor. In fact, I never was a college professor.” When Popper emailed him in the week the article ran, Szabo repeated the denial: “As I’ve stated many times before, all this speculation is flattering, but wrong — I am not Satoshi.” Szabo also acknowledged that there are many parallels between his work and Bitcoin.
Reception
The Popper piece marked the point at which the Szabo-as-Satoshi hypothesis crossed from cypherpunk-community discussion (Skye Grey’s December 2013 LikeInAMirror article, the April 2014 Aston University forensic-linguistic study) into the mainstream U.S. paper of record. Digital Gold itself became the standard journalistic history of Bitcoin’s origin period. Later pieces that return to Szabo include:
- Tim Ferriss Show #244 (June 4, 2017), a long-form interview with Szabo co-hosted by Naval Ravikant.
- Jeff John Roberts / Fortune, “Is There Any Doubt This Man Created Bitcoin?” (October 31, 2018), which cites Popper’s book and argues that Szabo is the likeliest creator.
Records on this site relevant to the article
Primary-source material on this site bears directly on Popper’s identification and on Szabo’s denial:
- Szabo’s April 10, 2008 comment on his Unenumerated blog — six months before the Bitcoin whitepaper — asking “anybody want to help me code one up?” for Bit Gold. The comment is the strongest single counter-signal to the identification: it places Szabo, in April 2008, publicly soliciting implementation help for a system architecturally simpler than the one the Bitcoin whitepaper would describe in October.
- Szabo’s May 28, 2011 Unenumerated post “Bitcoin, what took ye so long?”, in which Szabo wrote “Nakamoto improved a significant security shortcoming that my design had” — discussing Nakamoto in the third person while crediting himself with Bit Gold’s design. The same post names Wei Dai and Hal Finney beside Szabo as the only people he knew of who pursued the idea to any significant extent before Nakamoto, “assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai” (see the Wei Dai and Hal Finney hypothesis entries).
- The Szabo biography page covering the full Unenumerated and Bit Gold record.
Methodological framing
Popper’s identification rested on circumstance and on the Aston study’s stylometry rather than on forensic evidence. No code, no key, no email metadata, and no financial trail were tied to Szabo. The hypothesis rests on conceptual proximity (Bit Gold → Bitcoin) and pattern matches in writing and biography. Szabo’s denial is the position on record from the named individual; the structural arguments against the identification are laid out in the analytical entry.
The Popper / NYT 2015 article and Digital Gold remain, eleven years on, the highest-profile mainstream-press identification of Szabo as the likely Satoshi. The 2026 John Carreyrou / NYT investigation named Adam Back as its leading candidate using a different methodology (large-population stylometric comparison with independent linguistic review). The two NYT identifications, separated by eleven years, name different candidates by different methods — both are denied by their named subjects.
For the analytical treatment of the Nick Szabo = Satoshi hypothesis (Popper’s evidence weighed against the April 2008 implementation request, the May 2011 third-person framing, the continuous Unenumerated visibility throughout 2007–2008, and Szabo’s repeated denials), see the Nick Szabo = Satoshi identity hypothesis entry.
