On Wednesday, police in Australia raided the home as well as office in Sydney of a man who was named as one of the probable creators of the bitcoin and the holder of hundreds of millions of dollars of that cryptocurrency.
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Neighbors said the tenant of the rental property had an unusual amount of electronics.
The stories published by Wired and Gizmodo rely on a batch of documents given to the publications, which include emails from Wright to a business partner in Florida and documents regarding bitcoin queries with the Australian Tax Office.
On Gizmodo, reporters Sam Biddle and Andy Cush write of their inquiry into Wright and Dave Kleiman, a computer forensics expert who died in 2013, that they “obtained confirmation from on-the-record sources that Wright claimed on at least two occasions that he and Kleiman were both involved in the creation of Bitcoin”. Previous attempts to unravel the great conundrum have proven unsuccessful over the last several years, with outlets from The New Yorker to Fast Company failing to reach any satisfying conclusions. There have been several theories about its creator, most recently a year ago when Newsweek reported-erroneously-that Nakamoto was, in fact, a Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a physicist living in California.
Unlike traditional currency, bitcoins are not distributed by a central bank or backed by physical assets like gold, but are “mined” by users who use computers to calculate increasingly complex algorithmic formulas.
In emails and documents sent to Gizmodo by an apparent hacker, Wright repeatedly claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Naturally, lots of attention was given to Wired’s revelation and even WikiLeaks reacted by publishing a post on Twitter claiming that Craig S Wright was highly unlikely “to be the principal coder behind Bitcoin”.
The topic of an August 2008 post on Wright’s blog mentions his intention to release a “cryptocurrency paper”.
When bitcoin first appeared in 2008 a “Satoshi Nakamoto” took the credit and ever since supporters of the currency have wondered about and searched for the real person behind that pseudonym. But in their recent exposé, Wired points to a veritable treasure trove of information that points strongly toward Wright as Bitcoin’s founder.
When he asked how much of the virtual currency he had, Wright replied he had enough to buy a pizza.
While any changes to the bitcoin protocol can only be implemented by consensus, the proven founder of the cryptocurrency could hold considerable sway.
After his death, “Coin-Exch”, one of Wright’s businesses, was listed as an “authorized person” after the company was reinstated as an LLC. It says that Wright is a 44-year-old technology genius who’s been involved with bitcoin since its inception.
The creator of Bitcoin is popularly believed to have as many as 1 million bitcoins that were created early on, which would be worth $415m. The email included a signature of Satoshi Nakamoto and the number of Wright.
Australian authorities raided a residence in the suburbs of Sydney following the articles’ publication, according to the Guardian.
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Wired acknowledged that the trail of evidence leading to Mr Wright could be part of an elaborate hoax.
