Bitcoin’s Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Probably This Unknown …

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.