In December, Wired magazine suggested Wright was the inventor of bitcoin and said he held hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the cryptocurrency, which has attracted the interest of banks, speculators, criminals and regulators.
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Wright has revealed his identity to three media organisations – the BBC, the Economist and GQ. One Bitcoin can be exchanged for nearly every other type of currency, on any number of “exchanges”.
FILE – In this April 7, 2014 file photo, a man arrives for the Inside Bitcoins conference and trade show in NY.
Wright identified himself as Satoshi Nakamato, the pseudonym he says he created when launching the currency in 2009. For years, the press dizzied itself looking for the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin. “Our conclusion is that Mr. Wright could well be Mr. Nakamoto, but that important questions remain”. He also posted a highly technical blog post asserting his role.
His identity had been shrouded in uncertainty until now, and the media’s inability to pinpoint the person responsible had led to a series of investigations. “It is my firm belief that Craig Wright satisfies all three categories”, Matonis told the BBC.
In a statement, he said he is identifying himself because: “I care so passionately about my work, and also to dispel any negative myths and fears about bitcoin”.
He said he would now be able to release his research and academic work to help people understand the potential of Bitcoin.
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.
Currently, there are around 15.5 million bitcoins in circulation, including the million or so owned by Craig Wright the bitcoin founder.
The BBC said that Wright supported his claim by signing digital messages using cryptographic keys used during the early days of Bitcoin.
“An initial email conversation convinced me that there was a very good chance he was the same person I’d communicated with in 2010 and early 2011”. He claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto – and some of the biggest names in Bitcoin believe him.
The BBC reports that “prominent members of the Bitcoin community” have confirmed Wright’s claim.
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Hopes that bitcoin would become broadly used helped buoy its price to more than US$1,000 in December 2013, when its market capitalization was US$13 billion. Attention focused for a time on a Finnish sociologist, a Japanese math whiz and a Japanese-American engineer. Several experts said verifying the information has proved hard, and many are calling for Wright to provide further evidence that he is in fact Satoshi Nakamoto. He was living in an upscale suburb of Sydney at the time.
