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Home of Bitcoin ‘Founder’ is Raided by Australian Police

On Wednesday, Guardian Australia reported up to 10 police officers had raided Wright’s suburban home on Sydney’s north shore, some “searching the cupboards and surfaces of the garage”.

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The first evidence, Wired says, is a series of documents that were leaked by an anonymous source close to Wright to the independent security researcher, Gwern Branwen, who sent the said documents to Wired.

According to a Linkedin profile, Craig Steven Wright is the CEO of DeMorgan Limited, which he describes as a company “focused on alternative currency”.

Since Wright was named as being the potential originator behind bitcoin police have raided his home and office, although the Guardian reports the raids surround tax issues and not the bitcoin revelations specifically.

The AFP referred all inquiries about the raids to the Australian Tax Office, which said it could not comment on “any individual’s or entity’s tax affairs” due to legal confidentiality.

A Reuters reporter said officers told them that police were “clearing the house”.

It also points to a now-deleted blog post from Wright in 2009 that reads “The Beta of Bitcoin is live tomorrow”.

Although the transcript does not state if Wright is the founder of Bitcoin, other emails Gizmodo claim are from the entrepreneur suggest he may have had more involvement in the virtual currency’s development.

The latest sequence of events began on Tuesday with the Wired website naming Wright under the headline Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto is probably this unknown Australian genius.

Bitcoins are not distributed by a central bank or backed by physical assets such as gold, but circulate in a decentralized system, enabling users to make electronic purchases and sales.

There has always been speculation about who was behind the software written in 2009 under the Japanese-sounding name Satoshi Nakamoto, with various media outlets unsuccessfully trying to find out.

The true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto has been a mystery to the world: in 2014, after an extensive search, Newsweek published an article claiming that Nakamoto was a government contractor named Dorian Nakamoto, an assertion that few believed at the time. One of the news sites, WIRED, said it has evidence to prove that Craig Steven Wright might be the Bitcoin creator everyone, including law enforcement, was looking for.

– If Wright is indeed the bitcoin creator, he is also sitting on about 1 million bitcoins, worth more than $400 million at present exchange rates, according to bitcoin expert Sergio Demian Lerner.

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Though the currency hasn’t caught on, the technology behind Bitcoin, a public ledger known as the blockchain, is being considered for use in land registries in Greece and Honduras.

'Bitcoin founder's' Australia home raided by Sydney police