The BBC, The Economist and GQ magazine led the PR stunt as they got early access to Craig Wright’s story under NDA.
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An Australian developer called Craig Wright claims he is the Bitcoin creator and even offered to perform a “digital paternity test”.
The hunt for elusive Satoshi Nakamoto has led tech reporters on a wild good chase many a times. Bitcoins are a digital currency traded on the MTGox exchange, and the value of the virtual money fluctuated from United States dollars 260 per bitcoin down to USD 130 per bitcoin yesterday and recovered somewhat in trading today.
Police at the time referred all inquiries about the raids to the ATO, which said it could not comment on “any individual’s or entity’s tax affairs” due to legal confidentiality.
Bitcoin is a technically sophisticated and untraceable currency based on the same underlying mathematics used to encrypt codes used by governments and the military.
He was also a lecturer at Charles Sturt University for five years up until 2015, where he says he developed a Masters degree in digital forensics. The Bitcoin creator used the name Satoshi Nakamoto but nearly all bitcoin aficionados believe that this name is an alias.
In a statement, Wright said he was going public because he wanted to “dispel any negative myths” about Bitcoin.
Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright published a blog post on Monday in which he claims to be the creator of bitcoin and claims to have “cryptographic proof” that he is Satoshi Nakamoto – bitcoin’s mysterious founder.
“I can not allow the misinformation that has been spread to impact the future of Bitcoin and the blockchain”. It added that prominent people around bitcoin have accepted Wright as Nakamoto, including Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, who blogged his support. “There are lots of stories out there that have been made up and I don’t like it hurting those people I care about”, he says. In that meeting, he witnessed messages signed with keys – keys that should only be in Satoshi Nakamoto’s possession – verified on a computer that couldn’t have been tampered with.
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Wright also said he has no intention of becoming a public personality, telling the BBC that he will “never, ever be on a camera again”. Instead, its community of users control and regulate it. “I believe that the scale of his achievement, especially the original design of chaining blocks to achieve Nakamoto consensus, has far-reaching implications for our world beyond just a single vertical industry”.
