Entertainment
Was Bitcoins creator unmasked by the New York Times? Dont bet on it.
Who is the real human behind Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym for the still-anonymous creator of Bitcoin?
The question is more than just academic, and it’s not about who controls the currency. If Satoshi (as he is universally known) is still alive, he’s spent years sitting on about $68 billion worth of Bitcoin. It was worth about twice that at its peak in October 2025; crypto has had a bad six months. There may be worse to come, according to Google, now that quantum computers could unlock every Bitcoin. Spend it while you can, Satoshi!
The “Who is Satoshi?” parlor game has been going for more than a decade. We’ve seen more than a few con artists claim to be the Banksy of Bitcoin. We’ve even seen a Satoshi memoir announced (likely fake — whomever Satoshi is, he hasn’t written anything under that name since 2011). A recent HBO documentary made its own case for Satoshi’s secret identity.
So it was a big deal when a New York Times investigation pointed the finger at British cryptography expert Adam Back, a veteran bitcoin miner active in the crypto community around the time Satoshi was posting. This investigation is especially notable, as the reporter behind the story, John Carreyrou, is known for uncovering a lot of Elizabeth Holmes’s infamous fraud at Theranos.
And it was a poke in the eye for the Times when Back calmly and clearly denied the claim in multiple social media posts.
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The TL;DR of Back’s denial: Damn, I wish.
“[Of course I’m] kicking myself for not [bitcoin] mining in anger in 2009,” Back told one user on X. “Hindsight is always 20:20 in trading, so I’m relaxed about that could-have should-have.”
This isn’t the first time Back’s name has been mentioned as the real identity of Satoshi. Carreyrou says he grew suspicious of Back after seeing his body language in the HBO documentary on this subject, which listed Back as a possible Satoshi.
The Times claim relies in part on an AI examination of early cryptography listservs where Satoshi was active; the AI noted that both Back and Satoshi mixed up their “its” and “it’s” and shared a common vocabulary. Back said he told Carreyrou there was a form of “cognitive bias” at work in the fact that he simply posted on a lot of the same topics at Satoshi.
And of course, as Back didn’t need to mention, AI is inherently and increasingly prone to hallucination.
“I also don’t know who Satoshi is,” Back wrote, “and I think it is good for bitcoin that this is the case, as it helps bitcoin be viewed a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity.”
Back also tweeted an image he’d sent years earlier, one that emphasized the decentralized nature of Bitcoin: “we are all Satoshi.”
Topics
Bitcoin
Cryptocurrency
Entertainment
One dashboard, 20+ AI models — get ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more for $79
TL;DR: Pay $79 once (reg. $619) for ChatPlayground AI Unlimited Lifetime and compare 20+ leading AI models side by side, chat with PDFs and images, and generate AI art.
Credit: ChatPlayground AI
If you’ve ever copied the same prompt into three different AI tools just to see which one gives the best answer, you’re not alone. Different models excel at different things — but juggling tabs and subscriptions gets old fast.
ChatPlayground AI puts the top AI models in one place, so you can compare responses side by side without the back-and-forth. For a limited time, a lifetime subscription is on sale for $79 (reg. $619).
GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, Gemini, DeepSeek, Llama, Perplexity, and more — all in one clean interface. It’s built for people who iterate fast, test variations, and actually care about optimizing results.
Beyond comparisons, ChatPlayground AI includes prompt engineering tools to refine outputs, image and PDF chat for context-aware responses, saved chat history for ongoing projects, and AI image generation powered by leading models. There’s even a Chrome extension to integrate it directly into your browsing workflow.
The Unlimited Plan means unlimited messages per month, making it ideal for startups, product teams, marketers, and prompt engineers who run experiments nonstop. You also get priority support and early access to new features and future models.
If you’re already paying for multiple AI tools — or constantly switching between them — this consolidates everything into one streamlined platform.
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Grab lifetime access to ChatPlayground AI Unlimited for $79 (reg. $619) and stop juggling models for good.
StackSocial prices subject to change.
Topics
Artificial Intelligence
Entertainment
The best Dyson vacuums actually make vacuuming fun: See my favorites for 2026
Read my full review of the Dyson PencilVac.
The Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones takes the small space vacuum to a whole new level. It’s unbelievably slim and lightweight, and seamlessly scoots into tight crevices near furniture that don’t get dusted often enough. If there are certain spots in your home that you avoid cleaning just because it’s too tight of a squeeze, the PencilVac is about to change your life.
“Fluffy” references the ultra-soft material cushioning the four brush rolls, which provide a gloriously glide on hardwood you don’t want to scratch. The PencilVac’s short battery life and limited suction power wouldn’t be ideal in homes with more than just a few rooms or lots of carpeting.
No stick vacuum takes “stick” as literally as the Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones. It doesn’t have a main body with a battery pack, handle, or dustbin like any other traditional cordless vacuum. It’s just a wand and a funky cleaning head with four microfiber cones as brush rolls — the coolest little vacuum that’s truly grab and go.
The whole vacuum can fit just about anywhere, and tight squeezes are even more accessible with a cleaning head that can spin a full 360 degrees. The agile design led me to so many awkward dusty spots that other cordless vacuums can’t comfortably reach: the small chunks of floor between furniture and the wall, between island and bar stool legs, beside the toilet, or under the low-hanging credenza. The PencilVac had commendable hard floor performance in my apartment, offering near-perfect pickup of daily debris like cat hair and long human hair, kitchen crumbs, multiple types of cat litter, and dust.
Oh yeah, the Fluffycones cleaning head has two dust-detecting lasers. One laser projects out the front to point out the hair and tiny flecks lying ahead, and one laser projects out the back to illuminate anything that you just missed. It’s so satisfying that you’ll accidentally end up cleaning for much longer than you meant to, only to be cut off by the pitiful battery life.
With the precision nozzle wand attached, the PencilVac weighs in at just 2.9 pounds. This uniquely compact design makes cleaning cobwebs out of ceiling corners or dusting baseboards so much less of a pain. The wand’s diameter is just 1.5 inches the entire way down, which made it possible to vacuum behind my dresser without pulling it out a foot from the wall.
Entertainment
RAMageddon is making it harder to find the best Windows laptops. These 10 are actually worth it.
I highly recommend the Acer Swift X 14 for creatives who need a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU for running the most demanding sorts of apps. That includes photo and video editors, graphic designers, and animators.
Most professional creatives need a Windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card to handle their intensive workloads. I like the $2,000 Acer Swift X 14 with a top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU and RTX 5070 graphics because it’s super powerful, fairly priced, equipped with a glorious OLED screen, and long-lasting, relatively speaking. You can go with a gaming laptop instead, but most aren’t nearly as compact.
This 14-inch desktop replacement is just as fast as an M5 MacBook Pro when it comes to demanding multi-core scenarios (i.e., most creative tasks). In my testing, its RTX 5070 GPU was more than capable of running graphically taxing games like Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100fps at 1080p resolution without the help of any AI upscaling technology, so it’s very well-suited for the likes of Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. (And other AAA games, obviously.)
For what it’s worth, I also tried a $1,700 Acer Swift X 14 AI with an AMD processor and RTX 5060 graphics, and the Intel/RTX 5070 version performed much better. The AMD/RTX 5060 one had 17 percent worse multi-core performance, so it couldn’t compete with the MacBook Pro, and it could barely run Cyberpunk at its 60fps minimum without upscaling tech. It also had a much worse battery life of about 6.5 hours per charge. My go-to RTX 5070 model lasted just over 10 hours, which is fantastic for a laptop with a dedicated GPU.
Note that the Swift X 14 is not a Copilot+ PC, meaning it doesn’t have a super-powerful NPU for running on-device AI tasks. This isn’t a deal-breaker for creatives, but it is for serious machine learning engineers and software developers.
The Swift X 14 comes with plenty of creator-forward ports (like a microSD card slot) as well as a crisp, vivid 120Hz OLED touchscreen. It’s a real attention-getter on an otherwise plain laptop. You can’t draw on it with the included stylus, but you can do so on its haptic trackpad. It functions kind of like a built-in drawing pad.
After 'huge' win, Mariners vie for series win vs. Twins
Padres look to capture series against visiting Giants
