Body language, linguistic forensics and other nonsense

What I’m about to say was once obvious, yet it will seem less persuasive with each passing year: Bitcoin is nothing without its origin story. The story is that an unknown man whose real name was certainly not Satoshi Nakamoto created this cryptocurrency between 2008 and 2009 to liberate us from governments and banks. As Bitcoin’s value rose hundreds of times, it became public knowledge that he held about 1.1 million bitcoins, worth over $120 billion US dollars at some point last year, and over $70 billion at the time of filing this column. Yet he has not touched them, which gives him the aura of an ascetic. Or, as some people suggest, maybe he has just been dead. He has not been heard from since 2011. Or, maybe he is many people, a fellowship. The mystery of the only billionaire who is at once anonymous and famous has led to much speculation, except, oddly, that he is probably a woman. Now, the venerated New York Times has claimed that its investigative reporter, John Carreyrou, may have solved one of the great mysteries of the modern world.
I don’t think he has. For a story of this magnitude, I was baffled by the lightness of the circumstantial evidence it presented.
Carreyrou (with help from the paper’s AI projects editor, Dylan Freedman) claims that Satoshi is a British cryptographer and computer scientist named Adam Back, who has denied it. Back has always been a person of interest to anyone who has seriously tried to find out who Satoshi really was. So Carreyrou’s answer to the puzzle is not a surprise.
Carreyrou mentions a recent account of an attempt to unmask Satoshi, Cullen Hoback’s documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery. In the film, Hoback meets Back and lists several Satoshi suspects. When his own name came up, Back “tensed up,” Carreyrou writes, “Having encountered my share of liars and developed something of an expertise in their tells, Mr. Back’s demeanor—his shifty eyes, his awkward chuckle, the jerky movement of his left hand—struck me as fishy.” This set Carreyrou on the chase.
Body language is as much science as astrology. The nonsense that you rub your nose because you have been up to no good, for example, emerges from the same fallacy. People can exhibit signs of nervousness for reasons other than lying. (This explains why many Indians fare poorly at menacing immigration counters in the US even when they have nothing to hide.) Also, Back has been asked whether he is Satoshi several times over the years, so it is not a question that must startle him. To be fair, Carreyrou does not offer this as evidence, but as his trigger for digging. Just that most of what he unearths is in the same family of psychology.
For instance, he sees too much in the emails and posts by Satoshi and Back, especially the similarities in their philosophy and language: “Like Mr. Back, Satoshi argued that the Bitcoin network’s increasing centralization jeopardized its security. He called the big block proposal very “dangerous”—the same term Mr. Back had used repeatedly. He also used other words and phrases Mr. Back had used: “widespread consensus,” “consensus rules,” “technical,” “trivial” and “robust”.”
Cypherpunks are a small community and the sameness of ideas is not only a matter of probability but also the basis of their bond. Such a tight network invariably results in infecting each other with clichés. The same principle is behind why people in the humanities often say some long dreary piece is “a meditation” and management types still like to say “disrupt” a lot. In fact, there can be no community without stock phrases.
Back has been of interest, apart from his technical prowess and political thought. For being a Briton. Satoshi has used both American and British spellings. That is odd, unless the goal is to create another layer of anonymity. But then, intuitively, it looks like a mask a non-American would use. Americans dominate cryptography and every aspect of what Bitcoin is about. So an American Satoshi would have no reason to hide his American spelling. A British Satoshi, on the other hand, would. This is not something Carreyrou implies. I say this to suggest the linguistic trail does have a scent. Just that nothing conclusive has emerged yet to suggest Satoshi is Back.
There is a thrill, though, towards the end of Carreyrou’s story. Satoshi once wrote, “I’m better with code than with words.” Years before that, Back had said something similar. When Carreyrou met Back in El Salvador, he brought it up: “There’s a quote that I mentioned earlier where Satoshi says, ‘I’m better with code than with words’.” Back’s response: “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.” Carreyrou concludes from this that Back had accidentally let the mask slip by speaking as Satoshi.
But then, attempts to unmask Satoshi have had more persuasive moments with other suspects. In 2010, Peter Todd appeared to complete the thought of a forum post by Satoshi after he left off, as though Satoshi had accidentally signed in through the wrong account. Todd rubbished the claim.
Carreyrou does raise technical points. He says that Back and Satoshi had the same conceptual ideas in their vision of an e-cash system cut off from modern banking. But then if Newton and Leibniz could come up with calculus separately, Satoshi and Back too could have independently arrived at the same ideas. Also, there is the matter of influence. One could have been influenced by the other. I am not saying Back isn’t Satoshi. Just that we still don’t know.