Nakamoto has not disclosed any personal information when discussing technical matters.[4] He provided some commentary on banking and fractional-reserve banking. On his P2P Foundation profile as of 2012, Nakamoto claimed to be a 37-year-old male who lived in Japan,[25] but some speculated he was unlikely to be Japanese due to his use of perfect English and his bitcoin software not being documented or labelled in Japanese.[4]

Occasional British English spelling and terminology (such as the phrase "bloody hard") in both source code comments and forum postings led to speculation that Nakamoto, or at least one individual in the consortium claiming to be him, was of Commonwealth origin.[4][6][26] Moreover, the first bitcoin block that could only be mined by Satoshi contains the encoded text The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks which implies that he was reading the London's The Times newspaper at the time of the inception of bitcoin.[16][27]:18

Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and active community member, graphed the time stamps for each of Nakamoto's bitcoin forum posts (more than 500); the resulting chart showed a steep decline to almost no posts between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. This was between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Japanese time, suggesting an unusual sleep pattern for someone presumably living in Japan. As this pattern held true even on Saturdays and Sundays, it suggested that Nakamoto was asleep at this time.[4]

Nakamoto's initial email to Dai is dated 22 August 2008; the metadata for this PDF (pdftk bitcoin.pdf dump_data) yields as the CreationDate the value 20081003134958-07'00' this implies 3 October 2008 or a bit over a month later, which is consistent with the local date mentioned in the Cypherpunk mailing list email. This is an earlier draft than the final draft on bitcoin.org, which is dated 20090324113315-06'00' or 24 March 2009; the timezone differs: 7 vs 6.[28]

Gavin Andresen has said of Nakamoto's code: "He was a brilliant coder, but it was quirky".[29]

There is still doubt about the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.[30]

In December 2013, a blogger named Skye Grey linked Nick Szabo to the bitcoin whitepaper using a stylometric analysis.[31][32][33] Szabo is a decentralized currency enthusiast and published a paper on "bit gold", which is considered a precursor to bitcoin.[32][33] He is known to have been interested in using pseudonyms in the 1990s.[34] In a May 2011 article, Szabo stated about the bitcoin creator: "Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea (or in Dai's case his related idea) enough to pursue it to any significant extent until Nakamoto (assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai)."[35]

Detailed research by financial author Dominic Frisby provides much circumstantial evidence but, as he admits, no proof that Satoshi is Szabo.[36] Speaking on RT's The Keiser Report, he said "I've concluded there is only one person in the whole world that has the sheer breadth but also the specificity of knowledge and it is this chap...".[37] However, Szabo has denied being Satoshi. In a July 2014 email to Frisby, he said: 'Thanks for letting me know. I'm afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi, but I'm used to it'.[38] Nathaniel Popper wrote in the New York Times that "the most convincing evidence pointed to a reclusive American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo."[39]

In a high-profile 6 March 2014 article in the magazine Newsweek,[40] journalist Leah McGrath Goodman identified Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese American man living in California, whose birth name is Satoshi Nakamoto,[40][41][42] as the Nakamoto in question. Besides his name, Goodman pointed to a number of facts that circumstantially suggested he was the bitcoin inventor.[40] Trained as a physicist at Cal Poly University in Pomona, Nakamoto worked as a systems engineer on classified defense projects and computer engineer for technology and financial information services companies. Nakamoto was laid off twice in the early 1990s and turned libertarian, according to his daughter, and encouraged her to start her own business "not under the government's thumb." In the article's seemingly biggest piece of evidence, Goodman wrote that when she asked him about bitcoin during a brief in-person interview, Nakamoto seemed to confirm his identity as the bitcoin founder by stating: "I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it. It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."[40][43] The article's publication led to a flurry of media interest, including reporters camping out near Dorian Nakamoto's house and subtly chasing him by car when he drove to do an interview.[44] However, during the subsequent full-length interview, Dorian Nakamoto denied all connection to bitcoin, saying he had never heard of the currency before, and that he had misinterpreted Goodman's question as being about his previous work for military contractors, much of which was classified.[45] In a Reddit "ask-me-anything" interview, he claimed he had misinterpreted Goodman's question as being related to his work for Citibank.[46] Later that day, the pseudonymous Nakamoto's P2P Foundation account posted its first message in five years, stating: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto."[47][48] However, it is generally believed that Nakamoto's P2P Foundation account had been hacked, and the message was not sent by him.[49][50][51]

Hal Finney (4 May 1956 28 August 2014) was a pre-bitcoin cryptographic pioneer and the first person (other than Nakamoto himself) to use the software, file bug reports, and make improvements.[52] He also lived a few blocks from Dorian Nakamoto's family home, according to Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg.[53] Greenberg asked the writing analysis consultancy Juola & Associates to compare a sample of Finney's writing to Satoshi Nakamoto's, and they found that it was the closest resemblance they had yet come across (including the candidates suggested by Newsweek, Fast Company, The New Yorker, Ted Nelson and Skye Grey).[53] Greenberg theorized that Finney may have been a ghostwriter on behalf of Nakamoto, or that he simply used his neighbor Dorian's identity as a "drop" or "patsy whose personal information is used to hide online exploits". However, after meeting Finney, seeing the emails between him and Nakamoto and his bitcoin wallet's history (including the very first bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto to him, which he forgot to pay back) and hearing his denial, Greenberg concluded that Finney was telling the truth. Juola & Associates also found that Nakamoto's emails to Finney more closely resemble Nakamoto's other writings than Finney's do. Finney's fellow extropian and sometimes co-blogger Robin Hanson assigned a subjective probability of "at least" 15% that "Hal was more involved than hes said", before further evidence suggested that was not the case.[54]

On 8 December 2015, Wired wrote that Craig Steven Wright, an Australian academic, "either invented bitcoin or is a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did".[55] Craig Wright took down his Twitter account and neither he nor his ex-wife responded to press inquiries. The same day, Gizmodo published a story with evidence obtained by a hacker who supposedly broke into Wright's email accounts, claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto was a joint pseudonym for Craig Steven Wright and computer forensics analyst David Kleiman, who died in 2013.[56] A number of prominent bitcoin promoters remained unconvinced by the reports.[57] Subsequent reports also raised the possibility that the evidence provided was an elaborate hoax,[58][59] which Wired acknowledged "cast doubt" on their suggestion that Wright was Nakamoto.[60]

On 9 December, only hours after Wired claimed Wright was Nakamoto, Wright's home in Gordon, New South Wales was raided by at least ten police officers. His business premises in Ryde, New South Wales were also searched by police. The Australian Federal Police stated they conducted searches to assist the Australian Taxation Office and that "This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency bitcoin."[61] According to a document released by Gizmodo alleged to be a transcript of a meeting between Wright and the ATO, he had been involved in a taxation dispute with them for several years.[56]

On 2 May 2016, Craig Wright posted on his blog publicly claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto. In articles released on the same day, journalists from the BBC and The Economist stated that they saw Wright signing a message using the private key associated with the first bitcoin transaction.[62][63] During his BBC interview (which was also video recorded, aired and published by BBC News) Wright said:

Some people will believe, some people won't, and to tell you the truth, I don't really care.... I didn't decide [to reveal my identity now]. People decided this matter for me. And they're making life difficult not for me but my friends, my family, my staff.... They want to be private. They don't want all of this to affect them. And I don't want any of them to be impacted by this. None of it's true. There are lots of stories out there that have been made up. And I don't like it hurting those people I care about. So I am going to do this thing only once. And once only. I am going to come in front of a camera once. And I will never, ever, be on the camera ever again for any TV station, or any media, ever.

Wright's claim was supported by Jon Matonis (former director of the Bitcoin Foundation) and bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, both of whom met Wright and witnessed a similar signing demonstration.[64]

However, bitcoin developer Peter Todd said that Wright's blog post, which appeared to contain cryptographic proof, actually contained nothing of the sort.[65] The Bitcoin Core project released a statement on Twitter saying "There is currently no publicly available cryptographic proof that anyone in particular is bitcoin's creator."[66][67] Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik agreed that evidence publicly provided by Wright does not prove anything, and security researcher Dan Kaminsky concluded Wright's claim was "intentional scammery".[68][69]

On 4 May 2016, Wright made another post on his blog intimating his intentions to publish "a series of pieces that will lay the foundations for this extraordinary claim".[70][71] But the following day, he deleted all his blog posts and replaced them with a notice entitled "I'm Sorry", which read in part:

I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me. But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot.[72][73]

On Thursday 5 May 2016 shortly before closing his blog, Wright sent around an email link to a news story from an impostor site resembling SiliconAngle saying "Craig Wright faces criminal charges and serious jail time in UK". Wright stated that "I am the source of terrorist funds as bitcoin creator or I am a fraud to the world. At least a fraud is able to see his family. There is nothing I can do."[74].

In June 2016, the London Review of Books published an article by Andrew O'Hagan about the events, based on his book "The Secret Life: Three True Stories" in which O'Hagan spends several weeks with Wright at the request of Wright's public relations team; which, as revealed in the book, was set up as a result of a business deal between Wright and various individuals including Calvin Ayre after bitcoin was created. All of those involved in the described business deal seemed to agree that they wanted a significant event in human history to be documented by a writer with complete impartiality and freedom to investigate. O'Hagan was with Wright during the time of his various media interviews. O'Hagan also interviews Wright's wife, colleagues and many of the other people involved in his claims.[75][76][77] It also reveals that the Canadian company nTrust was behind Wright's claim made in May 2016 (perhaps referencing nTrust as being the same entity which created the public relations team for Wright). Further, O'Hagan suggests that Wright provided an invalid private key because he was legally unable to provide the valid one as a result of legal obligations agreed as part of a Seychelles trust deal previously reached. O'Hagan's book also corroborates the suggestion that both Wright and David Kleiman were the identies of the moniker "Satoshi Nakamoto".

Following O'Hagan's article, BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones (who interviewed Wright on camera for the BBC) wrote a follow up article citing O'Hagan's account as the possible reasons for Wright's apparent unwillingness to declare himself as Nakamoto:

To me, the key revelation is about this motivation.

He had told the BBC that he had not wanted to come out into the spotlight but needed to dispel damaging rumours affecting his family, friends and colleagues.

But O'Hagan shows us something rather different - a man under intense pressure from business associates who stood to profit from him if he could be shown to be Nakamoto.[78]

This is in reference to O'Hagan's firsthand account, which describes business associates as being furious when they learned that Wright had provided invalid proof (despite showing them valid proof privately) and for his failure to disclose the details of the Seychelles Trust deal which meant that he could neither provide said proof publicly or yet gain access to the bitcoin attributed to Nakamoto. Cellan-Jones concludes his article by expressing doubts about Wright but admits "It seems very likely he was involved, perhaps as part of a team that included Dave Kleiman and Hal Finney, the recipient of the first transaction with the currency."

The 2017 Netflix documentary titled Banking on Bitcoin concluded with an extract of Wright's 2016 interview with the BBC.[79][80]

On February 14, 2018 a suit against Wright (said to be living in London) for more than US$10bn was lodged in a Florida court on behalf of David Kleiman's estate, alleging that Wright has fraudulently appropriated Kleiman's share of the bitcoins that he and Kleiman mined together.[81][82] The suit sets out much detail of the collaboration between Wright and Kleiman, but does not speculate on whether they or either of them created bitcoin.[83]

Ian Grigg, who is credited with inventing triple entry accounting[84] describes the events as follows[85]:

Firstly, Satoshi Nakamoto is not one human being. It is or was a team. Craig Wright named one person in his recent communications, being the late Dave Kleinman. Craig did not name others, nor should I. While he was the quintessential genius who had the original idea for Bitcoin and wrote the lion's share of the code, Craig could not have done it alone. Satoshi Nakamoto was a team effort.

New Liberty Dollar issuer Joseph VaughnPerling says he met Wright at a conference in Amsterdam three years before publication of the bitcoin white paper and that Wright introduced himself as Satoshi Nakamoto at that time.[86][87]

In a 2011 article in The New Yorker, Joshua Davis claimed to have narrowed down the identity of Nakamoto to a number of possible individuals, including the Finnish economic sociologist Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta and Irish student Michael Clear,[88] then a graduate student in cryptography at Trinity College Dublin and now a post-doctoral student at Georgetown University.[89] Clear strongly denied he was Nakamoto,[90] as did Lehdonvirta.[91]

In October 2011, writing for Fast Company, investigative journalist Adam Penenberg cited circumstantial evidence suggesting Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry could be Nakamoto.[92] They jointly filed a patent application that contained the phrase "computationally impractical to reverse" in 2008, which was also used in the bitcoin white paper by Nakamoto.[93] The domain name bitcoin.org was registered three days after the patent was filed. All three men denied being Nakamoto when contacted by Penenberg.[92]

The late Dave Kleiman has been also named as a possible candidate, and Craig Wright claimed an association with him as well.[94]

In May 2013, Ted Nelson speculated that Nakamoto is really Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki.[95] Later, an article was published in The Age newspaper that claimed that Mochizuki denied these speculations, but without attributing a source for the denial.[96]

A 2013 article[97] in Vice listed Gavin Andresen, Jed McCaleb, or a government agency as possible candidates to be Nakamoto. Dustin D. Trammell, a Texas-based security researcher, was suggested as Nakamoto, but he publicly denied it.[98]

In 2013, two Israeli mathematicians, Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir, published a paper claiming a link between Nakamoto and Ross William Ulbricht. The two based their suspicion on an analysis of the network of bitcoin transactions,[99] but later retracted their claim.[100]

Some have considered that Nakamoto might be a team of people: Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher who read the bitcoin code,[101] said that Nakamoto could either be a "team of people" or a "genius";[26] Laszlo Hanyecz, a former Bitcoin Core developer who had emailed Nakamoto, had the feeling the code was too well designed for one person.[4]

A 2017 article[102] published by a former SpaceX intern espoused the possibility of SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk being the real Satoshi, based on Musk's technical expertise with financial software and history of publishing whitepapers. However, in a tweet on November 28th, Musk denied the claim.[103]

Original post:

Satoshi Nakamoto - Wikipedia

Even as his face towered 10 feet above the crowd at the Bitcoin Investors Conference in Las Vegas, Craig Steven Wright was, to most of the audience of crypto and finance geeks, a nobody.

The 44-year-old Australian, Skyping into the D Hotel ballrooms screen, wore the bitcoin enthusiasts equivalent of camouflage: a black blazer and a tieless, rumpled shirt, his brown hair neatly parted. His name hadnt made the conferences list of "featured speakers." Even the panels moderator, a bitcoin blogger named Michele Seven, seemed concerned the audience wouldnt know why he was there. Wright had hardly begun to introduce himself as a "former academic who does research that no one ever hears about," when she interrupted him.

"Hold on a second, who are you?" Seven cut in, laughing. "Are you a computer scientist?"

"Im a bit of everything," Wright responded. "I have a master's in lawa masters in statistics, a couple doctorates..."

"How did you first learn about bitcoin?" Seven interrupted again, as if still trying to clarify Wrights significance.

Wright paused for three full seconds. "Um. Ive been involved with all this for a long time," he stuttered. "Itry and stayI keep my head down. Um..." He seemed to suppress a smile. The panels moderator moved on. And for what must have been the thousandth time in his last seven years of obscurity, Wright did not say the words WIREDs study of Wright over the past weeks suggests he may be dying to say out loud.

"I am Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin."

Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he's a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.

Since that pseudonymous figure first released bitcoins code on January 9th, 2009, Nakamotos ingenious digital currency has grown from a nerd novelty to a kind of economic miracle. As its been adopted for everything from international money transfers to online narcotrafficking, the total value of all bitcoins has grown to nearly $5 billion. Nakamoto himself, whoever he is, appears to control a stash of bitcoins easily worth a nine-figure fortune (it rose to more than a billion at the cryptocurrencys peak exchange rate in 2014). But the true identity of bitcoins creator remains a cipher. Media outlets from the New Yorker to Fast Company to Newsweek have launched investigations into unmasking Nakamoto that were either inconclusive or, in Newsweeks case, pointed to a man who subsequently denied having anything to do with cryptography, not to mention cryptocurrency. Altogether, the worlds Satoshi-seekers have hardly put a dent in one of the most stubborn mysteries of the 21st century, one whose answer could resonate beyond a small sphere of crypto geeks and have real economic effects.

In the last weeks, WIRED has obtained the strongest evidence yet of Satoshi Nakamotos true identity. The signs point to Craig Steven Wright, a man who never even made it onto any Nakamoto hunters public list of candidates, yet fits the cryptocurrency creators profile in nearly every detail. And despite a massive trove of evidence, we still cant say with absolute certainty that the mystery is solved. But two possibilities outweigh all others: Either Wright invented bitcoin, or hes a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.

The first evidence pointing to Wright appeared in mid-November, when an anonymous source close to Wright began leaking documents to Gwern Branwen, a pseudonymous, independent security researcher and dark web analyst. Branwen provided those documents to WIRED, and they immediately led to several direct, publicly visible connections between Nakamoto and Wright:

WIRED

In addition to those three blog posts, we received a cache of leaked emails, transcripts, and accounting forms that corroborate the link. Theres a leaked message from Wright to his lawyer date June 2008 in which Wright imagines "a P2P distributed ledger"an apparent reference to bitcoins public record of transactions known as the blockchain, long before it was publicly released. The email goes on to reference a paper called "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party" that Wright expects to release in 2009.

'I did my best to try and hide the fact that I've been running bitcoin since 2009. By the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know.'

Craig Steven Wright

Another leaked email from Wright to computer forensics analyst David Kleiman, a close friend and confidant, just before bitcoins January 2009 launch discusses a paper theyd been working on together. Wright talks about taking a buyout from his job and investing in hundreds of computer processors to "get [his] idea going." Theres also a PDF authored by Kleiman, who died in April of 2013, in which he agrees to take control of a trust fund, codenamed the "Tulip Trust," containing 1.1 million bitcoins. The PDF is signed with Kleimans PGP signature, a cryptographic technique that ensures it couldnt have been altered post-signature.

That million-coin troveThe Tulip Trustis the same size as a mysterious bitcoin fortune thats long been visible on bitcoins blockchain and widely attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. No one but Nakamoto is known to have assembled such a massive hoard of the cryptocurrency, and only Nakamoto could have generated so many bitcoins so early in its evolution, when a bitcoin could be mined with relatively small amounts of processing power. Only one such bitcoin megapile exists, and the closely-watched coins havent moved in bitcoins entire history.

Another clue as to Wrights bitcoin fortune wasnt leaked to WIRED but instead remains hosted on the website of the corporate advisory firm McGrathNicol: a liquidation report on one of several companies Wright founded known as Hotwire, an attempt to create a bitcoin-based bank. It shows that the startup was backed in June 2013 by $23 million in bitcoins owned by Wright. That sum would be worth more than $60 million today. At the time of the companys incorporation, Wrights investment in that one firm alone represented more than 1.5 percent of all existing bitcoins, a strangely large stash for an unknown player in the bitcoin world.

The giveaways go on: Theres a leaked email from Wright to an associate in January 2014 about a tax dispute with the Australian government. In it, he seems to consider using Nakamotos name to wield influence with New South Wales Senator Arthur Sinodinos "Would our Japanese friend have weight coming out of retirement?" Wright asks. It includes a draft email to the senator signed "Satoshi Nakamoto." And a leaked transcript of Wrights meeting with attorneys and tax officials in February 2014 quotes him in a moment of exasperation: "I did my best to try and hide the fact that I've been running bitcoin since 2009," Wright says. "By the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know."

On December 1st, WIRED sent an encrypted email to Wright suggesting that we knew his secret and asking for a meeting. A few hours later, we received a wary response from the address Tessier-Ashpool@AnonymousSpeech.com, a cyberpunk reference to a rich and powerful corporate dynasty in William Gibsons Sprawl trilogy. Wright had referenced the same fictional family in the bio of his private twitter profile. The emails IP showed that it came from an IP address in Panama controlled by Vistomail, the same service that Satoshi Nakamoto had used to send his emails introducing bitcoin and to run Bitcoin.org. This is a throw away account. There are ways even with [the anonymity software] Tor, but the people in Panama are exteremly [sic] good and do not violate people's desired privacy, the email read. You are digging, the question is how deep are you? The message ended, Regards, the Director of Tessier-Ashpool

After WIRED sent an encrypted email to Wright suggesting that we knew his secret, we received a perplexing message: 'You seem to know a few things. More than you should.'

A few hours later, we received another, even more perplexing message from the same account. The nature of this moniker is selected for a purpose. I now have resources. This makes me a we now. I am still within that early phase of learning just what my capabilities happen to be. So, even now with resources I remain vulnerable, it read. You seem to know a few things. More than you should.

When we responded by describing the three blog posts that showed Wrights clear connection to bitcoins creation and asking again for a meeting, he gave a revealing answer. Although we all desire some level of credit, I have moved past many of these things, read his response from the same Tessier-Ashpool account. Too many already know secrets, the world does not need to know. There are other means to lead change than to be a dictator.

After our second followup message asking for a chance to talk, Wright responded that he would consider our request. Then he stopped responding altogether.

Despite that overwhelming collection of clues, none of it fully proves that Wright is Nakamoto. All of it could be an elaborate hoaxperhaps orchestrated by Wright himself. The unverified leaked documents could be faked in whole or in part. And most inexplicably of all, comparisons of different archived versions of the three smoking gun posts from Wrights blog show that he did edit all threeto insert evidence of his bitcoin history. The PGP key associated with Nakamotos email address and references to an upcoming "cryptocurrency paper" and "triple entry accounting" were added sometime after 2013. Even the post noting bitcoins beta launch is questionable. While it was ostensibly posted in January 2009, it later seems to have been deleted and then undeletedor possibly even written for the first timesometime between October 2013 and June of 2014.

Wrights blog, his public records, and his verified writings on mail lists and Twitter sketch a man who matches with Satoshi Nakamoto's known characteristics well enough to place him leagues above other candidates.

Why those breadcrumbs were dropped remains a mystery. Is Wright trying to falsely steal Nakamotos glory (or money)? Is he quietly revealing himself as bitcoins creator?

But this much is clear: If Wright is seeking to fake his Nakamoto connection, his hoax would be practically as ambitious as bitcoin itself. Some of the clues added to his blog were made more than 20 months agoa very patient deception if it were one. His references to Griggs "triple entry accounting" paper would represent an uncannily inventive lie, representing a new and obscure possible inspiration for bitcoin. And theres little doubt Wright is a certified bitcoin mogul. Even the $60 million portion of his cryptocurrency stash thats verifiable in McGrathNicols public audit record is suspiciously large.

More circumstantially, Wrights blog, his public records, and his verified writings on mail lists and Twitter sketch a man who matches with Satoshi Nakamotos known characteristics well enough to place him leagues above other candidates. Hes a former subscriber to the 1990s "cypherpunks" mailing list devoted to anti-authoritarianism and encryption, an advocate of gold as a financial tool, an accomplished C++ coder, a security professional plausibly capable of writing a tough-to-hack protocol like bitcoin, a libertarian who battled with tax authorities, and a fan of Japanese culture.

He is alsoparallels to Nakamoto asidea strange and remarkable person: an almost obsessive autodidact and double-PhD who once boasted of obtaining new graduate degrees at a rate of about one a year. Hes a climate-change denier, a serial entrepreneur who started companies ranging from security consultancies to a bitcoin bank, and an eccentric who wrote on his blog that he once accepted a challenge to create a pencil from scratch and spent years on the problem, going so far as to make his own bricks to build his own kiln in which to mix the pencils graphite.

Wrights blogging and leaked emails describe a man so committed to an unproven cryptocurrency idea that he mortgaged three properties and invested more than $1 million in computers, power, and connectivityeven going so far as to lay fiberoptic cables to his remote rural home in eastern Australia to mine the first bitcoins. His company, Tulip Trading, built two supercomputers that have officially ranked among the top 500 in the world, both seemingly related to his cryptocurrency projects. (Wright seems to enjoy tulip references, a likely taunt at those who have compared bitcoin to the Netherlands 17th century "tulip bubble.") The first of those supercomputers he named Sukuriputo OkaneJapanese for "script money." Another, named Co1n, holds the title of the worlds most powerful privately owned supercomputer. As Wright told the Bitcoin Investors conference, hes applying that second machine towards the mysterious task of "modeling Bitcoins scalability," and meanwhile building an even more powerful supercomputing cluster in Iceland because of its cheap geothermal power.

Bitcoin watchers have long wondered why the giant cache of coins they attribute to Satoshi Nakamoto never moved on the bitcoins publicly visible blockchain. Wrights "Tulip" trust fund of 1.1 million bitcoins may hold the key to that mystery. The trust fund PDF signed by Wrights late friend David Kleiman keeps those coins locked in place until 2020, yet gives Wright the freedom to borrow them for applications including "research into peer-to-peer systems" and "commercial activities that enhance the value and position of bitcoin."

Despite those exceptions to the trusts rules, the million-coin hoard has yet to budge, even after Kleimans death in 2013. That may be because Wright could be keeping the coins in place as an investment. He could be leveraging the trust in less visible ways, like legally transferring ownership of money to fund his companies while still leaving it at the same bitcoin address. Or he might still be waiting for January 1st, 2020, a countdown to a date that could take the lid off the biggest cryptocurrency fortune in history.

In spite of all the clues as to Wrights possible secret lifesome that he apparently placed himselfWright has demonstrated such a talent for obfuscation and a love of privacy that hes never even raised the suspicions of most Nakamoto-worshipping bitcoiners. "If we don't want to go out there and say Im a billionaire, or Im running XYZ, or this is my life, I shouldn't have to tell people that," Wright told the Las Vegas crowd in October when an audience member asked his thoughts about what bitcoin means for property rights. "We should be able to choose how we live."

In the leaked emails, Wright seems to bristle at the few times anyone has attempted to out bitcoins creator. "I am not from the bloody USA! Nor am I called Dorien [sic]," reads a message from Wright to a colleague dated March 6, 2014. Thats the same day as Newsweeks largely discredited story claimed the inventor of bitcoin to be the American Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto.

If Wright is bitcoin's creator, the revelation of his work carries more importance than merely sating the curiosity of a few million geeks.

Wright seemed to take personal offense at the Newsweek story. "I do not want to be your posterboy. I am not found and I do not want to be," he writes in another message the same day. The email, addressed to a colleague and titled "please leak," may have been an early draft of the Nakamotos posted denial of Newsweeks story. That public denial, a rare message from Nakamoto posted from his account on the P2P Foundation forum, simply read I am not Dorian Nakamoto. But Wrights private response was far angrier. "Stop looking... Do you know what privacy means? A gift freely given is just that and no more!"

At times, however, Wright has seemed practically envious of Nakamoto. "People love my secret identity and hate me," he complained to Kleiman in a leaked email from 2011. "I have hundreds of papers. Satoshi has one. Nothing, just one bloody paper and I [cant] associate myself with ME!"

If Wright is bitcoins creator, the revelation of his work carries more importance than merely sating the curiosity of a few million geeks. The bitcoin economy would need to consider that if his million-bitcoin trust unlocks in 2020, Wright and those to whom he may have assigned hundreds of thousands of bitcoins would be free to sell them on the open market, potentially tanking the cryptocurrencys price; debates within the bitcoin community like the current fracas over bitcoins "block size may look to long-lost Nakamoto for guidance; the world would have to grapple with the full scope of Wright's vision when he unleashes the result of his companies' post-bitcoin research. The other suspected Satoshis may finally get a reprieve from nosey reporters like us. And the intellectual history of cryptocurrencies would be forever rewritten.

Wright himself, despite his hostile response to Satoshi-seekers, has lately seemed to be dropping clues of a double life. In the last two years hes started to write more frequently about bitcoin on his blog; hes even peppered Twitter with hints (Though he also deleted many of those earlier this month and made his tweets private.)

"'Identity' is not your name. Where people go wrong is that they do not see it to be the set of shared experiences with other individuals," he wrote in one tweet in October.

When a UCLA professor nominated Satoshi Nakamoto for a Nobel Prize earlier this monthand he was declared ineligible due to the mystery of his identityWright lashed out. "If Satoshi-chan was made for an ACM turing price [sic] or an Alfred Nobel in Economics he would let you bloody know that," he wrote on twitter, using the Japanese "chan" suffix that indicates familiarity or a nickname.

"I never desired to be a leader but the choice is not mine," reads a third recent tweet from Wright. "We are a product of the things we create. They change us."

In one cryptic and meandering blog post in September in which Wright takes stock of his long career, he even seems to concede that no one can build and wield the wealth that Satoshi Nakamoto has amassed and remain hidden indefinitely. "There is a certain power and mystery in secrets," Wright mused.

"Am slowly coming to the realisation and acceptance," he added, "No secret remains forever."

Update 12/14/2015 2:40pm: New clues following the publication of this story have shown inconsistencies in Wright's academic and supercomputing claims that may point to the second, strange possibility we noted: an elaborate, long-planned hoax.

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Bitcoin's Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Probably This ...

Cryptocurrencies have revolutionized the finance industry and the way people perceive the concept of money. Digital assets that use cryptography to secure transactions and creation, cryptocurrencies are the first form of decentralized currency meaning no bank or middleman controls its use.

One of the best-known forms of cryptocurrency isbitcoin. Created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin is the first (and currently most valuable) cryptocurrency in the world. December 2017 saw the highest recorded value of the currency at more than $19,000. While the price of a single bitcoin has since fallen to around $10,000, even that is incredibly impressive considering bitcoin was only worth $1,000 at the start of the year.

Unlike other forms of currency, bitcoin is not backed by any central organization (like a bank or country) or by a physical item (like gold). It sits atop a public ledgerblockchain, where a highly sophisticated mathematical formula creates scarcity and allows users to mine portions of the currency.

Creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is also credited with the invention of the first blockchain database, which set the foundation for more forms of cryptocurrency to emerge like Ethereum and Litecoin. However, despite the fact that Nakamoto is such an important figure in the world of modern finance, not much is known about the elusive cryptocurrency creator.

Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to be a Japanese-born man in his 40s, but the thing is, no one really knows for sure. Whether Nakamoto is a man, woman, or group of individuals is unknown as well, because the mysterious creator has somehow remained anonymous despite the rising popularity of the cryptocurrencies that Nakamoto helped create.

Which begs the questions: Where did the name Satoshi Nakamoto come from if no one actually knows who this person is? Even though the name Satoshi Nakamoto is being used a placeholder until the real creator(s) come forward, the name itself certainly didnt show up randomly.

An online profile under the name Satoshi Nakamoto was first used on the P2P Foundation website in 2008, a peer-to-peer networking site where the first papers on bitcoin were released. Another account under the same name released Version 0.1 of the bitcoin software on Sourceforge in 2009. Its clear that whether or not Satoshi Nakamoto is the cryptocurrency creators actual name or not, its the name they want us to know them by.

Nakamoto also communicated with users via email for a few years after the softwares release, but as not been involved with bitcoin since 2011. Nakamotos anonymity hasnt stopped people from trying to figure out their true identity. A feature in Newsweek, which was released back in 2014, claimed to have discovered the true identity of Nakamoto, and pointed to a retired Japanese-American man living in California named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto.

Dorian Nakamoto denied any role in the creation of bitcoin and says that he is not Satoshi Nakamoto, but some people werent convinced. The day after the Newsweek piece ran, a comment from the original Satoshi Nakamoto on P2P posted simply I am not Dorian Nakamoto.

Another feature, this time in The New York Times, claimed the creator of bitcoin was an American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo. While Szabos career and interest in bitcoin might point to his involvement in the creation of the first cryptocurrency, he has denied that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, so the trail runs cold again.

But the search for Satoshi Nakamoto has posed more questions, like what the unmasking of the bitcoin creator would actually mean for the future of the currency and cryptocurrencies as a whole.

Many people dont seem to care who Nakamoto is, and unless Nakamoto one day decides to step out from the shadows, there isnt really much we can do to find out their identity and probably not much to be gained from it either.

Bitcoin hasnt and never existed in a vacuum. It wasnt something that suddenly showed up out of the blue, but was created by building off the ideas of multiple people over several decades. And while Satoshi Nakamoto helped push the industry to new limits, they werent the only person/people capable of doing so.

Satoshi Nakamoto has been instrumental in the cryptocurrency market for sure, but they also havent really been involved in it in any meaningful way since 2010. Most of the open-source code has been rewritten by a group of programmers whose identities are known,drawing focus away from Nakamoto. So while it might be interested in finally learn who Satoshi Nakamoto really is, it wouldnt likely have a big impact.

However, despite their anonymity, Satoshi Nakamoto is estimated to be worth upwards of $20 billion (although the exact number varies widely from $6-20 billion, but theyre still a millionaire whichever way you spin it) and could be the 44th richest person in the world, according to Forbes.

Knowing who holds that much money (5% of the entire bitcoin stash) could definitely have lasting implications, but wont likely affect the future of cryptocurrencies as a whole.

So for now the identity of the father of cryptocurrency will remain a mystery. But bitcoin and other currencies like it will continue to have lasting impacts on money for a very long time.

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Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, Cryptocurrency's Elusive Creator ...

Craig Wright, the man who claimed to be the inventor of bitcoin, has been sued for stealing $5 billion worth of cryptocurrency from his business partner.

Wright, who claimed in 2016 that he had created bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, has allegedly participated in a joint bitcoin-mining venture with the now-deceased IT consultant, Dave Kleiman.

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The lawsuit is being brought by Kleimans brother (Ira Kleiman), who accused Wright of using phony contracts and signatures to lay claim to bitcoins mined by Dave.

Craig forged a series of contracts that purported to transfer Dave's assets to Craig and/or companies controlled by him. Craig backdated these contracts and forged Dave's signature on them, Ira Kleiman said, according to the complaint.

The plaintiffs seek the return of the bitcoins, which would now be worth over $10 billion. The lawsuit said the uncertain state of those bitcoins was related to Wrights well-publicized tax issues, which caused his home to be raided by Australian police.

In an email exchange quoted in the complaint, Wright admitted to holding 300,000 bitcoin on Kleimans behalf. [Dave] mentioned that you had one million bitcoins in the trust and since you said he has 300,000 as his part. I was figuring the other 700,000 is yours, Ira Kleiman wrote shortly after his brothers death in 2013. Is that correct?

Around that, Wright replied, adding Minus what was needed for the companys use.

Ira Kleiman is also seeking compensation for the intellectual property his lawyers claim arose from the partnership between his deceased brother and Wright. [The] plaintiff demands judgment against [the] defendant for the value of the wrongfully retained bitcoin and IP, together with court costs, interest, and any other relief this court deems just and proper, said the complaint.

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Self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto sued for swindling $5 ...

DEFINITION of 'Satoshi Nakamoto'

The name used by the unknown creator of the protocol used in the bitcoin cryptocurrency. Satoshi Nakamoto is closely-associated with Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain technology.

Satoshi Nakamoto is arguably the biggest pioneer of cryptocurrency.

Satoshi Nakamoto is considered the most enigmatic character in cryptocurrency. To date it is unclear if he or she is a single person, or if the name is a moniker used by a group. What is known is that Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper in 2008 that jumpstarted the development of cryptocurrency.

The paper, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, described the use of a peer-to-peer network as a solution to the problem of double-spending. The problem that a digital currency or token can used in more than one transaction is not found in physical currencies since a physical bill or coin can, by its nature, only exist in one place at a single time. Since a digital currency does not exist in the physical space, using it in a transaction does not remove it from someones possession, at least not immediately.

Solutions to combating the double-spend problem had historically involved the use of trusted, third-party intermediaries that would verify whether a digital currency had already been spent by its holder. In most cases, third parties, such as banks, can effectively handle transactions without adding significant risk. However, this trust-based model still results in uncertainty. Removing the third-party could only be accomplished by building cryptography into transactions.

Nakamoto proposed a decentralized approach to transactions, ultimately culminating in the creation of blockchains. In a blockchain, timestamps for a transaction are added to the end of previous timestamps based on proof-of-work, creating a historical record that cannot be changed. As the blockchain increases in size as the number of transactions increase, it becomes more difficult for attackers to disrupt it. The blockchain records are kept secure because the amount of computational power required to reverse them discourages small scale attacks.

Satoshi Nakamoto was involved in the early days of bitcoin, working on the first version of the software in 2009. Communication to and from Nakamoto was conducted electronically, and the lack of personal and background details meant that it was impossible to find out the actual identity of Nakamoto. Nakamotos involvement with bitcoin tapered off in 2011.

The inability to put a face to the name has led to significant speculation as to Nakamotos identity, especially as cryptocurrencies increased in number, popularity, and notoriety. While his identity has not been uncovered, it is estimated that the value of bitcoins under his control may have exceeded $1 billion in 2013.

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Satoshi Nakamoto Definition | Investopedia