Craig Wright, an Australian businessman, said he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy creator of the shadowy virtual currency known as bitcoin. Bitcoin became very popular in the recent years but no one knew who started the encrypted currency. The report also said that some prominent members of the Bitcoin community and its core development team have backed Wright’s claim.
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Mr Wright was first outed as the founder of bitcoin in December past year by technology publications Gizmodo and Wired. The treatment of bitcoin for tax purposes has been the subject of investigation by the Australian Tax Office.
As for why he’s now emerging, Wright says he wants to clear the record, citing distractions and privacy concerns related to his family and staff stemming from the fixation on unmasking bitcoin’s creator.
“Some people will believe, some people won’t, and to tell you the truth, I don’t really care”.
Wright’s statements, and his use of Nakamoto’s encrypted signature, known as a PGP key, appear to have confirmed his role.
“I can not allow the misinformation that has been spread to impact the future of Bitcoin”, he said.
Nakamoto published a white paper in late 2008 describing bitcoin, and software for the currency formally debuted months later.
But the evidence these news organizations used to connect Wright to Nakamoto turned out to be bogus and some claim that Wright might even have had a hand in planting the evidence cited by the news organizations, according to Brito. Anderson, a chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, says that Wright demonstrated the supposed verifications keys to him at a meeting in London a couple of weeks ago. Jon Matonis, founding director of the Bitcoin Foundation, gave Wright’s demonstration legitimacy and said that he believes that the Australian cryptography guru is truly the man that created Bitcoin. He was supposedly identified through leaked transcripts of legal interviews, blog posts and emails, although Satoshi Nakamoto’s real identity was never revealed.
In the blog post, the self-declared Bitcoin founder offered his gratitude to those who supported him and the project, and who made some important sacrifices that could have easily turn into nothing. Instead, its community of users control and regulate it.
Wright has now published details of his claim on a personal blog.
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Wright told the BBC he had decided to make his identity known to stop the spread of “misinformation” about Bitcoin.
