It’s a mystery that has confounded the technological and financial worlds for years – who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the secretive creator of controversial online currency bitcoin?
On a blog-post published this morning, at the address www.drcraigwright.net, Australian cryptocurrency expert Dr Craig Wright outed himself as Satoshi, the creator of the “blockchain”, the shared online ledger upon which bitcoin works, and which records all bitcoin transactions.
In it, Dr Wright says he will prove beyond all doubt he is the mysterious Satoshi – an individual that in-depth investigations from the likes of Wired, Newsweek and The New Yorker have all failed to conclusively uncover – by “signing” an early bitcoin address, something many experts say would prove he is the creator.
A spokesman for Dr Wright said: “Dr Wright will be signing messages on his blog … they will be signed with the key associated with Block 9, the only key definitively known to be associated with the Satoshi pseudonym, that used to send Bitcoin to Hal Finney, one of its earliest pioneers and its first identified developer after Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2009.”
If his claim stands up to scrutiny – something sure to be picked over by many experts in the coming days – it would confirm him both as the creator of the first genuinely successful stateless currency (a single bitcoin is currently worth over £300, and reached as much as £850 in 2013), and a remarkably rich individual indeed.
The real Satoshi Nakamoto is widely regarded to be the owner of a vast swathe of early bitcoins – known never to have been cashed in because they have never moved in the online ledger – that at today’s bitcoin values would be worth many hundreds of millions of pounds.
His revealing would also, however, potentially put him in danger of prosecution.
Bitcoin began in early 2009, but by 2011 had garnered a reputation as the currency of choice for the illicit purchase of drugs and arms via the Silk Road – a secretive “dark web” marketplace which has since been raided – due to the relative anonymity of bitcoin transactions compared to traditional bank transfers.
Dr Wright is the individual that Wired magazine named as the mostly likely to be Satoshi in their December 2015 investigation, yet days later rowed back on their claims after it appeared some documentation that had been leaked to them had been electronically tampered with.
They came, however, to the following conclusion: “Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did”.
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