Satoshi Nakamoto, Adam Back or Both? 4/10/26

12:05Pete Buttigieg:There are pictures AI generating pictures of this fake disease with your eyes getting from too much computer This is perfect.

12:13John Carreyrou:Are you giving people ideas? We're going to be back in the...

12:16Pete Buttigieg:Well, the researchers intentionally put all kinds of things that any actual academic or professor or medical student would pick up on immediately.

12:28John Carreyrou:Cheese will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod, a fiery conversation with former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The strait was open before he started this. Yeah, but they were close to having a nuclear weapon, 11 nuclear weapons. We had other ways of dealing with it. Like what, Obama's way? Well, that worked. That did not work. The Iran war, fuel prices, inflationary pressures, and much more. All awaiting you on the other side of this break.

13:02John Carreyrou:At Venture Global, we think about what can be done, not what's usually done. Through innovation, Venture Global is not only building some of the largest energy facilities in the world right here in the United States, but delivering American energy at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time. So while others are busy talking, we're busy building. That's Venture Global. That's unstoppable energy. I want to grow the game so every kid can fall in love with soccer like I did. So I asked myself, what would you like the power to do? My answers inspired me to invent a pop-up soccer goal that can turn any basketball court into a street soccer pitch.

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14:02John Carreyrou:This episode is brought to you by Schwab Market Update, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Join host Keith Lansford for this information-packed daily market preview delivered in 10 minutes or less, including projected stock updates, monetary policy decisions, and key results and statistics that may impact your trading. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash market update podcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts.

14:34John Carreyrou:You are listening to Squawk Pod from CNBC. This Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the CPI, or Consumer Price Index, increased for the month. A 10.9 % surge in energy costs pushed the annual inflation rate to 3.3%. That's the highest it's been since April of 2024. And that's a pretty good place to start this next conversation. Here's Becky Quick.

15:04Pete Buttigieg:All right, welcome back, everybody. Joining us right now is Pete Buttigieg. Of course, he is the former Transportation Secretary under President Biden. And, Secretary, thank you for being with us this morning.

15:14John Carreyrou:Thanks for having me in.

15:15Pete Buttigieg:When I first looked at the notes, I kind of laughed because we said we were going to have you on to talk about a reaction to the numbers. I said we're not actually talking to him about a reaction to the numbers, but they did say you were interested in speaking about inflation. So let's start there. We got these numbers not as hot as had been anticipated, but we knew that energy prices were going to be higher, up 10 percent this time around. Food prices up 0%, but there are concerns those will rise down the road. What are your thoughts on where we stand right now?

15:42John Carreyrou:Yeah, as feared, inflation is up. And the big thing that's different right now, I think, is that in many periods in American history, including recent history, you've had inflation and then the administration does things to try to reduce it. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. But the administration is trying to push prices down normally. Right now, we have the administration actively making prices higher. They're actively making goods prices higher with the tariffs, obviously. Typical family paid about$1 ,000 more for that. They're actively making energy prices higher by killing energy transmission projects as well as generation projects.

16:18John Carreyrou:And they're, of course, actively making energy prices higher with a war that nobody wanted, nobody asked for. And that, of course, is the direct reason why inflation is higher now than it was before. You see inflation tripling from last month, not because the administration tried and failed to lower prices. You could put it that way, but really because they actively increased them.

16:37Pete Buttigieg:I see your point with tariffs. That's certainly valid when you look at some of these issues. But with the war, the administration obviously thinks it was going after security issue with Iran, with a player that potentially was very close to having a nuclear weapon.

16:55John Carreyrou:That right there is a huge fail for the White House because they assured us that the nuclear program was obliterated a year ago. Moreover, we've seen that it's possible, or at least it used to be possible, before U.S. credibility was demolished by this White House, to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon through diplomacy. I believe the president started this war because he wanted to. And now we're in a situation where you've got a war that we didn't need to have. Iran has enormous leverage now. Certainly their military has been degraded. But let's be very clear about why the president backed down.

17:30John Carreyrou:Why did the president back down from his demands?

17:33Pete Buttigieg:Why is the president taking a weaker position than he started with? Let's start with just the prospect of the war to begin with. Look, the argument that he started this because he wanted to, there are plenty of people who think there was a very real threat of nuclear. It was presented through intelligence. Israel had an opportunity to really take and strike at this point. And as for diplomacy, that was sunsetting anyway. Well, it wasn't sunsetting.

18:03John Carreyrou:It was detonated by the first Trump administration.

18:07Pete Buttigieg:But it was going to sunset if it hadn't already detonated.

18:09John Carreyrou:They were lying about everything.

18:11Pete Buttigieg:Right. The idea of they had much longer range missiles than they ever admitted to. Compliance problems, for sure. We've seen all of that play out.

18:17John Carreyrou:But the point is they had been stopped from getting anywhere near a nuclear weapon. And last year, the president assured us that he ended their nuclear ambitions. If he wants to come clean with the American people that he failed to do that, And he has to say that before he launches a war. Democrats at that time said, no, you haven't. And then you haven't. Clearly he hadn't. Clearly that he hadn't. So then we needed to go back and take care of it, unless you really think it's okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But again, they don't have a nuclear weapon. They weren't about to get a nuclear weapon.

18:48John Carreyrou:Why do you keep saying they weren't about to get a nuclear weapon? Steve Witkoff said they had enough fissible material for 11 bombs. So are you acknowledging the president lied when he said that their program was obliterated? No one knew what happened at Florida. Either he didn't know or he was lying. Which is it? Is that really the point? No, the point isn't my neighbors in Michigan are paying more for gas. Whether or not he knew it was obliterated or not is not the point. If it wasn't obliterated, then you have to do something. You can't go back and say, well, you lied about this. So that we can't, now we can't actually do what we need to do.

19:18John Carreyrou:Joe, America is weaker because the president launched this war. Well, that's your opinion. No, no, but it's clear. And I'll tell you why. We had the Secretary of NATO say the world is a safer place. He just said that yesterday. His job is to butter up the president. But why do you think the president chickened out on his demand? Why do you think the president backed off of his demand? The president backed off of which demand? Unconditional surrender. Right now, instead of unconditional surrender, which was the president's demand just one month ago. This is not over yet, number one. Is this unconditional surrender?

19:48John Carreyrou:I don't know what it's going to end up being. I'll tell you what we've got. If the strait reopens again and they have no Navy, no missiles, no missiles. Was the strait being open? The strait was open before he started this. Yeah, but they were close to having a nuclear weapon. Eleven nuclear weapons. We had other ways of dealing with that. Like what? Obama's way? Well, that worked. That did not work. Did they get a nuclear weapon under Obama? They were close enough within months. And the president, again, assured us. The whole point of bombing them last year was to, quote, unquote, obliterate the nuclear program.

20:18John Carreyrou:I understand that. And look, I'm saying this as somebody who knows what it's like to be sent to war by a U.S. president. And when a president sends you to war, when you and your buddies are on that great tail plane going into a war zone, you do it with some level of confidence, some level of assurance that your chain of command. Now that we're there, do you hope this has a successful outcome? There were 40 ,000 Iranians that were slaughtered by the same regime. 47 years of killing Americans, stirring trouble all around the world. And how do you feel about that regime being left intact by this president?

20:54John Carreyrou:I don't know if that's going to be the case, and I don't know what might happen.

20:58Pete Buttigieg:Is that an argument for...

20:59John Carreyrou:So you don't want this to work, and it was just a bad move? You want us to pull out now? Look, there's no obvious way out now, but I want to make sure that this ends in a way that, first of all, our economy can recover, that we're not paying so much for gas. I mean, right now, oil's$100, jet fuel's$200, gas is over$4, diesel's like... You averaged 380 under Biden for four years. And when we left, inflation was lower than it is today. You accounted for 21.5 % pricing. This president took the inflation rate up. This president took the inflation rate up. It's more than 3 % year on year. You saw the numbers just come out.

21:41John Carreyrou:It's more than 3 % year on year. Okay. There's PCE, there's poor. It is. The math is direct. The math is the math. It fluctuates these months from 2.7 % to 3%. It's higher than when he got here, Joe. It's not 9%. His central campaign promise was he was going to take inflation and drive it down, and instead he took inflation and it's up. It's not 9%. It was 3 % when he got here, and now it's more. It could not be simpler than that. It's around 3%, and we're involved in a war with the street. He said on day one it would go down. He came in on day one, and now it's up. It's up to 3%. It was 21.5%.

22:15John Carreyrou:He promised it would go down. Over four years, it was 21.5%. He promised it would go down. Democrats own the affordability crisis. Listen to me. Period. Why did the president fail to keep his promise? You don't think Democrats own the affordability crisis? Why did the president fail to keep his promise to lower prices, in your opinion? I'm laughing because this piece of it is basic. The president did say that he wanted to be in office to bring inflation down, and he has not brought inflation down. That's all. He drove it up. He not only failed, he drove it up. Mr. Secretary, let's talk a little bit.

22:48John Carreyrou:Parents have had a minimal effect on... You tell a family where I live that$1 ,000 per household is minimal. From the 21.5 % increase that you're the Democrats. We can argue all day about just how bad COVID was and how bad it got and what it took to come back from that. You call it$1 ,000. Where I live,$1 ,000 per household isn't minimal. Now Democrats found religion on inflation. After presiding over the worst inflation in 40 years, now you found religion. It's 2026. I ain't aware of that. They're in charge. You guys are in charge. I'm aware of that. What are you going to do differently? Look.

23:21John Carreyrou:What are you going to do differently to make the prices actually go down like you promised to your neighbor? Number one, we've got to get through this war. And you've heard people... We've got to get through this war. We didn't have to be fighting this war. What are we doing? That's a matter of opinion. You can't say that. It's a matter of opinion that I share with most Americans and a large number of Republicans and a whole bunch of MAGA people who bought into this president because they actually believe in what he said he wouldn't get us through the war. He's got 75 % Republican approval for the war.

23:42John Carreyrou:You don't start with the approval you have within your own party. But the point is, the MAGA coalition signed up for this. Democrats aren't going to approve of anything. I'm talking about Americans. Americans disapprove of the president and their right to do so. He's got the same approval rating other presidents have had at this point in the term. A little bit above, 42%. This president, right now, is unpopular for very good reasons. One of which is that he's made life more expensive. He's no more unpopular than Obama was or Biden was at the same point of his presidency. That depends on which polls you're looking at.

24:11John Carreyrou:But by and large, no, I'm sorry. But like, I've been out on the trail. I was in Marjorie Taylor Greene's district. Marjorie Taylor Greene. This is a Trump plus 38 district. Or it was. I've seen. We had 500 people. You'll get a chance to prove that in November this year. We had a chance to prove it last week. The Senate might go. I understand. Yeah, because people are. Presidents make difficult decisions, obviously. Yeah. But usually they make difficult decisions to try to make other people better off. This president has made decisions to make himself better off. That's definitely happened. If you're the kind of person who can pay a million bucks for the entry fee to Mar-a-Lago, then you're doing great.

24:49John Carreyrou:But everybody else is hurting right now.

24:51Pete Buttigieg:Mr. Secretary, let's talk about a few things that fell under your former purview when you look at transportation. One of the issues we're dealing with right now is government shutdown that's been affecting the TSA agents. Obviously, the president has started paying them. The lines have gone down.

25:09John Carreyrou:But when you combine that with the shortage we have with air traffic controllers, I think a lot of people feel less safe in the air right now.

25:18Pete Buttigieg:What happened? How do we fix it?

25:20John Carreyrou:Here's what I can tell you. For about three decades, the number of air traffic controllers in this country went down. We worked hard to make it go back up. And I was the first secretary in decades to hand my successor an air traffic control workforce that was growing instead of shrinking. When we left, it was a little bit shy of 11 ,000. I know that right away, air traffic controllers got an email, the notorious Elon email, saying you should go work in the private sector instead. Then there was this scramble saying, oh, we didn't mean you, you should stay. The last time I saw the secretary in front of Congress testifying on whether the number was going up and down, we didn't get a clear answer.

25:58John Carreyrou:So I don't know exactly.

25:59Pete Buttigieg:We lost more than 300 because of the government shutdown. Second? We lost more than 300. That's not surprising, right?

26:04John Carreyrou:I mean, this is a tough job on the festive days. And these controllers, let's remember.

26:08Pete Buttigieg:And I'm sorry, I'm confusing 300 with the TSA agents, not with the controllers.

26:11John Carreyrou:But these controllers do such an important job and such a good job. And we forget sometimes the track record of U.S. aviation safety over the last 10, 20 years. I just wonder if we're stretching them to these extreme lengths.

26:23Pete Buttigieg:Absolutely. Accident that happened at LaGuardia. Not that this was because of this. They're still investigating it. But there were only two air traffic controllers in the tower at that point, one of whom was responsible for landing active flights, dealing with a crisis and trying to guide a fire crew across an active runaway.

26:39John Carreyrou:And it's not just how many are in the tower, but when you have fewer on the bench, more of them are working overtime or they're working these tough schedules, then you're going to have fatigue issues. We did a whole project on fatigue. I trust and expect that the FAA currently is working on this. All of this is to say, look, I've got my differences with my successor. Obviously, one area where I'm rooting for him to succeed and for the FAA to succeed is to get more controllers, to get the technology up to speed. These implementations are notoriously complicated. You're not for the way the Democrats orchestrated two shutdowns of the government.

27:14John Carreyrou:I thought we were talking about air traffic controllers, but we can come to that. But I want to make sure we send an aviation safety person. That's why they're not, but the TSA agents are not being paid because of the government shutdown. They can be paid at the stroke of a pen by this president. All right, if you carve out, but the government is shut down. That part is shut down, partial shut down because of Democrats. Well, no, they're shut down because Speaker Johnson refuses to even have an up or down vote on the bipartisan compromise. That's a compromise. But just closing down the... Yeah, that's a compromise.

27:43John Carreyrou:That's how you solve problems.

27:44Pete Buttigieg:I will say Jay Johnson was here. He was the former Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama. You don't like when Republicans do it. And he said nobody should be dealing with any government shutdowns, no matter who's in power. No, that's right.

27:55John Carreyrou:Look, this is... And you said, well, we learned from Republicans. You said we learned from Republicans. Well, no, what I said is you guys started it. But look, I'm being a little playful about that. But can we all agree that this is no way to run a ball club? I was looking up the last time that a budget actually got passed on time, like all 12 appropriations and the whole budget, was in the 90s. And by the way, on time means on the eve of the new fiscal year. Is there anybody who runs a company of any size who would approve their budget the day before the new fiscal year, let alone months into the new fiscal year?

28:27John Carreyrou:This is insane. And it's one of many, many, many things we're doing in this country, acting as if it's normal. None of this is normal. It's not normal to fail to have a budget or an appropriation before the deadline. It's not normal to have our Congress as out of whack as it is. If I were to sit here and say the system is broken, you'd roll your eyes because that's something everybody, it's a stock phrase right now. It's a cliche because it's so obviously true. Why do we keep behaving like it's not?

28:52Pete Buttigieg:Mr. Secretary, I want to thank you very much for coming in today. We appreciate your time.

28:56John Carreyrou:Appreciate it. Thank you. I am not Satoshi Nakamoto. At least that's the refrain of Adam Back, famed computer scientist who's made notable contributions to the creation of Bitcoin. New York Times investigative journalist John Carreyrou did a deep dive into the real identity of the Bitcoin creator, and he concluded that it is indeed Adam Back. Adam Back himself says, nope. There's a view of maybe the lady, you know, does protest too much.

29:27Adam Back:Well, I'm kind of reminded of this Monty Python skit. It's difficult to prove it negative or dissuade people out of something.

29:35John Carreyrou:Mr. I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto is up next on SquawkPod.

29:45John Carreyrou:Adventure Global. We think about what can be done, not what's usually done. Through innovation, Venture Global is not only building some of the largest energy facilities in the world, right here in the United States, but delivering American energy at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. So while others are busy talking, we're busy building. That's Venture Global. That's unstoppable energy.

30:15Adam Back:I'm honored to make history and to make my community proud.

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31:02John Carreyrou:This is Squawk Pod. You're watching Squawk Box right here on CNBC. I'm Andrew Ross Sorkin, along with Joe Kernan and Becky Quick. Investigative journalist at The New York Times, John Carrey, who did a deep dive into the real identity of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. He documented his years-long investigation, which concluded that Satoshi is the secret identity of computer scientist Adam Back. Despite his notable contributions to the creation of Bitcoin, Back himself has repeatedly denied this. And now this morning, we have Adam Back on the program, CEO and co-founder of Blockstream. Good morning to you.

31:37John Carreyrou:It's great to talk to you. You have been making the rounds on the back of this article, including with John Carreau himself. And so there is a sort of unique question in all this as to why you've decided to be this public about your denial, Adam.

31:56Adam Back:Well, I think, you know, people generally don't want to be considered to be Satoshi because it brings with it risks, right? But, you know, I think there's effectively some amount of selection bias because Satoshi stopped participating in the forums in 2011, right? So Bitcoin was released in 2009, and by 2011, he stopped participating in the forums. And so there's been a lot of interest over the last 15 years because of the intriguing question. Right. I speculate myself. It's clearly an interesting story that Bitcoin has this mysterious puzzle. And I don't think, you know, I think we're going to find anything because it's been 15 years.

32:38Adam Back:It's been analyzed by many people and nobody's found anything conclusive. So what you're left with is. Yeah, go ahead.

32:44John Carreyrou:I was going to say, Adam, but what's so interesting, you've been public for quite some time about your view that nobody should know who Satoshi is, that it's better off that way. And so now that you've been sort of pointed to as the person, there's a view of maybe the lady, you know, doth protest too much.

33:01Adam Back:Well, I'm kind of reminded of this Monty Python skit where, you know, the masses are saying, you are the Messiah, right, to this poor guy. And he's, you know, he's denying it. And the response is, well, you're really the Messiah, because the Messiah would deny it, right? So So it's difficult to prove a negative or dissuade people out of something they want to believe. I think there is useful evidence that is relatively convincing that I'm not, though it's generally hard to prove a negative, if you like. So, for example, in the early era, 2013, when I was catching up on the Bitcoin details, there's some chat discussions asking developers how things work, which show that I'm going through a learning process, for example.

33:47Adam Back:All right.

33:48John Carreyrou:So, Adam, one of the things that's so interesting about this article is he uses John, who, by the way, wrote Bad Blood and outed, you know, the Theranos founder for what had happened in that instance, uses telemetry to try to look through your writing and the writing of Satoshi. and there are some very unusual similarities. And one of the things that he asked you during the process of writing this article was to provide the metadata for some emails that you had back and forth with Satoshi himself back in the day. His view is that those emails, as you know, are false, that you actually wrote them to yourself effectively.

34:33John Carreyrou:collectively you are satoshi that you wrote these emails to yourself uh as a sort of ruse so that you people could look back and say that you were not him he asked you for the metadata and you have been at least from what i understand thus far unwilling to provide it why right i ask you for

34:52Adam Back:that metadata today if possible uh yeah so i mean i thought about so what happened was you know i got the email from Satoshi August 2008 and didn't think anything of it. Just another researcher, programmer using some open source software or papers I have online. And by the time people were interested in starting to share and collect Satoshi's previous communications, it wasn't possible to contact him. So it's generally considered impolite to share private correspondence without permission. You can't get permission from somebody who's, you know, not responding to emails anymore, right? So I kind of sailed them.

35:26Adam Back:And then finally, there was the COPPA trial, you know, the kind of infamous Craig Wright versus Bitcoin developers. And the lawyers working for the developers asked, could they see those emails? And so I shared them, including the headers for evidentiary reasons with those researchers. So, you know, in the public interest. So I assumed actually that they would be part of the court record and they are, but not the headers. So I think that's the distinction. Would you be willing to provide the headers now,

35:53John Carreyrou:though, because I do think that that would potentially either rule you in or out, if you will, or be able to lead potentially even investigators or others who would ultimately want to find out who Satoshi is. I know you don't want anybody to find out who Satoshi is, which is also what leads people to think that you are, in fact, him.

36:11Adam Back:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was the other kind of small hesitation that, you know, well, maybe just hypothetically, there's a mistake in those headers and he accidentally forgot to turn on his vpn or whatever kind of technology he used now i'm supposing that's not the case you know weidai who received email from satoshi the very next day because i told satoshi hey you might look at the b money paper by weidai and he did share his emails and they're on a blog online including the headers and you know so it's low probability i did actually uh reach out to the researchers who are working for the copa trial to ask you know is you looked at them, was there anything in there?

36:49Adam Back:And so, you know, if they can assure me that it's all good, then I'm not averse to sharing them because I suspect there's nothing there.

36:57John Carreyrou:Hey, Satoshi. Oh, see, he didn't. Yeah.

37:03Pete Buttigieg:I wanted to ask the same thing. Basically, you're not under oath here. You're not hooked up to a lie detector. But let's ask you these questions. I just ask you to be honest. Are you either Satoshi or did you help create Satoshi?

37:18Adam Back:No. So, I mean, I think the thing that is a little confusing because this happened like a decade before Bitcoin is that people were, you know, in the open, on a mailing list, brainstorming about how to create a Bitcoin-like system. So myself and Hal Finney and Nick Szabo and Wei Dai and a few people were involved in these discussions and you can go and read them. Aaron Van Weedem, read through all those, wrote a book. John Carrey refers to a number of those and say, because we're trying to design a Bitcoin-like system, it involves proof of work, it involves a peer-to-peer network. This was in the fallout of a centralized electronic cash system that people were excited about failing because it was centralized.

38:00Adam Back:So people figured, well, OK, to survive, it needs to be decentralized. That's hard. How do we do it? So we're brainstorming, you know, a period of five years or so, actually, right? And so now John Carrier has made the interesting observation that Satoshi seems actually to be using some of the phrases we were using or, you know, referring to precedents like Napster versus Nutella. So I'm starting to think that John is onto something, except the conclusion is inverted, which is maybe our old writings informed and influenced Satoshi. So that's why he sees these connections. It's causal, right?

38:34Pete Buttigieg:Just very quickly, Adam, a couple other questions, because these are the things that Satoshi supposedly did. Did you write the Bitcoin white paper? Did you create the blockchain?

38:44Adam Back:No. I mean, I proposed some early ideas that Bitcoin ends up using, but there were gaps in our ideas. That's why it didn't get implemented. Right. And so Satoshi really solved a few key problems that myself and others who were trying to figure out how to do this in sort of 1997 to 2005, something like that, ultimately didn't quite manage to make work. So she squared that problem.

39:10John Carreyrou:There's some people who think that Satoshi could be a group of people and that you may be one of the Satoshis, if you will, or connected to the Satoshis. A lot of people have speculated that Hal Finney, who's no longer alive, who was a friend of yours of sorts, may very well have done this. Obviously, whoever is Satoshi, at least from the blockchain, there is someone who has$70 or$80 billion of Bitcoin that has not moved from the blockchain the entire time. And my question to you is in terms of what your theory of the case is there. Do you think someone lost the key? Do you think it's somebody who's no longer alive?

39:50John Carreyrou:Do you think it's somebody who burned the key and did this on purpose so that people would guess and that this was part of the entire sort of broader strategy around what Bitcoin would ultimately become and the myth around its creation?

40:03Adam Back:Yeah, so during the HBO film Electric Money, produced by Colin Hoback, we got to talk with him quite a bit because he did a lot of filming, 100 times the filming versus the output or something. And, you know, one of the things I said to him is, look, you know, I suspect, and it's very easy for Satoshi to not get identified, is he won't be participating in conferences in person under his real name. He won't be giving interviews to documentary film crews and investigative journalists. and there are lots of clever people in the world, including some who were participating anonymously on the Cypherpunks list back in the 2008 period, right?

40:45Adam Back:So from our point of view, given that all of the public people have various reasonably plausible reasons why it's not them, like how Finney was running a marathon while Satoshi was transacting and emailing people, right? It turns out. So I think it's therefore likely that we're not going to find out. And presumably that's because it's somebody nobody has even identified as a candidate. Because what people do, which is reasonable... Do you think it's a person? Yeah.

41:14Pete Buttigieg:Do you think it's one person and not a conglomerate of people?

41:17Adam Back:Yeah, I suspect so. Because, you know, it's hard to keep a secret. If you have a group of friends, it's a fun topic. The rumor spreads. Somebody gets drunk and says something inadvisable. So it's much better for one person. And stylistically, I think the code is sort of, you know, the code and logic is done by one person, I think. You know, there's a Satoshi comment on a forum. In 2013, I went and read all of the history. Like, he'd already left by a couple of years at that point. And he said it took him 18 months to decode it.

41:44John Carreyrou:What is the explanation? One of the things that John does raise in his piece is that you sort of disappeared from the forums. Effectively, once Bitcoin was created for this sort of unique period of time, sort of talking online and then all of a sudden he stopped talking and you appeared how do you

42:05Adam Back:reconcile yeah well i was a co-founder of a startup called pico with paul moritz former number three at microsoft and we had just sold that to emc and so he became this the head of the consumer division i was the chief security officer we got merged with another recent acquisition so That was a pit bit of sort of collaboration software that I did some implementation design on. And so we got merged with another company. So I was just basically very busy with some very fun and interesting things in my career as a security researcher and software engineer.

42:42John Carreyrou:Fair enough. Two final questions for you. one of which is you are starting a new fund that may, as John has described in the piece, require disclosure, legal disclosure, about how much crypto you ultimately own to the government. So now that this piece has come out, do you imagine you're going to be investigated by either the IRS or by the SEC or CFTC? I don't even know who would ultimately regulate this component part of whatever documentations you've had to sign about how much Bitcoin you either have or don't have or have access to.

43:22Adam Back:Yeah, I mean, they put that to me. I think that was yesterday. And my response was, well, I haven't really thought about it. But, you know, assuming you're right in terms of the disclosure requirements, you know, the filings will be public before the approval is in. And the absence of this disclosure is, in fact, you know, a form of proof that it's not me. Right. Because there are hazards to not filling these things in correctly.

43:47John Carreyrou:Right. The benefit to it not being you is personal security. I mean, if in fact you are Satoshi, you would be worth 80 billion dollars. You'd probably want some personal security around you. is there another reason why it would be bad for people to know, I mean, beyond sort of your sort of philosophical, theoretical view about Bitcoin itself?

44:11Adam Back:Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually quite beneficial for Bitcoin that, you know, for whatever reason that Stacey chose to step away in 2011, that there is no identifiable founder, because then you don't, you know, it feels more like a discovery than an invention or a product. of a company. And it doesn't have a CEO or, you know, like an Elon Musk or Linux, the operating system has. Linus Torvalds is a very outspoken person. And so, you know, if you have that phenomena, a lot of the world thinks hierarchically, they want to ask that person questions. And so without that, Bitcoin is much more free to be considered like digital gold, a global commodity that sovereigns will allocate to US states, the Swiss National Bank, Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund.

44:55Adam Back:And so, you know, for it to be a neutral digital thing. And I think, you know, if you imagine back 6 ,000 years ago, whoever in the Neolithic era decided and figured out to use gold as a story, we don't really know what those guys were thinking. Maybe they didn't have.

45:11John Carreyrou:Adam, I read somebody online who apparently is a pal of yours. I don't know if this is true. Back in 2013, 14, 15, who said that you had, and maybe this would be in your favor, that you had money problems. And I thought that was interesting if in fact you were Satoshi.

45:29Adam Back:True? No. I mean, I was, people sometimes criticize sort of the securitization of Bitcoin, like ETFs and things like that. But I was, you know, a day trader back in the 90s. I'm living in the UK at the time and I was trading on E-Trade. So, you know, I think the cypherpunks were quite sympathetic and, you know, they liked capital markets. It's it's like an arc of capitalism, right? They're capitalists. They believe in a very free market. So the idea that a hallmark of Bitcoin success is that it gets adopted into more and more areas in the financial system is a sign of success. Right. It's not a loss of, you know, value or.

46:09John Carreyrou:Adam, you might not be, Satoshi, but if you're sitting around thinking about how to do blockchain and Bitcoin, I was not there thinking about those things. That's all I'm going to tell you. But can you just do you worry about quantum and the threat to Bitcoin 10 years from now? Because that's what everyone tells me, that it's only a matter of time.

46:32Adam Back:Right. Blockstream is a technology company, so we have a big cryptographic R &D group. And we have a number of people working on post-quantum security. We've released a few papers. We've implemented post-quantum security in a Bitcoin layer, too. which is liquid. And that layer two has a lot of track record in bringing to general use features that end up in Bitcoin sort of three to seven years later. And so, you know, we have that there. There are many other groups working on post-quantum. So I think, you know, the hardware today is very basic. So, you know, 10, 20 years ahead is where you're looking at if it ever works.

47:14Adam Back:And in the meantime, the simple thing for Bitcoin to do, the best de-risk is to be early prepared to integrate into Bitcoin some post-quantum secure options so that people can migrate their coins to a new format and not think about, you know, will it work? Will it work in 10 years, 20 years? It has some kind of cold fusion aspects because, you know, I went to some university classes in the early 2000s talking about quantum computers. and it's been the same thing for 30 years, right? Which is, you know, amazing performance is going to come around the corner. So it has this kind of cold fusion property that people are like, well, we'll have fusion power one day.

47:53Adam Back:And then people say, well, maybe it's 50 years, maybe it's 30 years. So you have that field. There's still a lot of physics research to do. It's not in any way to dismiss the very interesting physics research they're doing to try to incrementally get closer to it. But they have a lot of challenges. today's quantum computers, the best calculation they've done, completely not a joke, it's straight up fact that is to calculate that 15 is three times five, like to factorize something that primary school children do. So they really have something below the power of a desk calculator today, right?

48:26John Carreyrou:We want to thank you. We got to leave it there. Satoshi Nakamoto, thank you for being with us. Appreciate it very, very much. Adam, no, thank you. Thank you both. Thank you. that's squawk pod for today and for the week thank you for listening squawk box is hosted by joe kernan becky quick and andrew ross sorkin and you can catch them live for three hours every weekday morning on cnbc starting at 6 a.m eastern the best bits of that tv show can be found right here on squawk pod as long as you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts we'll meet you right back here on Monday. Have a great weekend.

49:07Adam Back:We are clear. Thanks, guys.

49:33John Carreyrou:policy decisions and key results and statistics that may impact your trading. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash market update podcast or find Schwab market update wherever you get your podcasts.