This article from VICE tells you who Satoshi Nakamoto is. We have been deceived again.

Author: ManjiMasha

An Australian entrepreneur has made a U- turn and claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious and anonymous creator of bitcoin, setting off an awkward debate over the virtual currency that has become increasingly popular among serious technologists and financiers.

After entrepreneur Craig Wright presented incomplete evidence to support his claims, he changed his mind and said he would not provide any more information because his promise to silence skeptics seemed like a bad lie.

"I believed I could do it, I believed I could leave behind years of anonymity and secrecy," Wright wrote in a blog titled "I'm Sorry." "But, given the developments this week and my readiness to publish the evidence ... I give up. I don't have the courage. I can't do it."

In a strange turn of events for many who thought this was the end of the matter, the search for Satoshi Nakamoto has not ended. Nakamoto published an academic paper in 2008 that laid the foundation for Bitcoin. Many news organizations, from Newsweek to the New Yorker, have been investigating the person who created the virtual currency, but they have not found anything. Wright has appeared in front of them as a possible candidate more than once.

Now, many Bitcoin enthusiasts are discussing why Wright retracted his statement after proposing that he was the founder, and whether he has damaged the image of Bitcoin.

“Will the real Satoshi come forward?” joked Mark Williams, an executive in residence at Boston University’s business school and a former Federal Reserve bank examiner.

Neither Williams nor anyone VICE News spoke to knew whether Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto. But Williams said Wright is a computer expert, writer and entrepreneur who has had a run-in with the Australian tax authorities and once held in contempt of court, and who has promoted his status around the world for potential gain. "This guy is now very well-known, and he has built a brand in a short period of time," Williams said.

But many people don't like Wright's hype.

“It’s unfortunate,” said Patrick Menkewen, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and co-founder of the Bitcoin Foundation. “It’s just another boring show designed to distract from what’s really important.”

This is not the first time that some negative comments have been made about Bitcoin.

In 2013, authorities shut down Silk Road, an online marketplace that used the dark web and bitcoin to trade not only legal goods but also illegal drugs and other contraband. Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht has since been sentenced to life in prison without parole. In 2014, Charlie Shermey, one of the founding members of the Bitcoin Foundation, pleaded guilty to money laundering. That same year, Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox collapsed after “losing” $460 million in user deposits, and a year later its CEO Mark Kepler was arrested on embezzlement charges.

“All of this continues to hurt the reputation of Bitcoin,” Williams said, pointing to Wright’s changing attitude. “It’s still a fringe technology, and I don’t mean the Bitcoin blockchain, but the use of Bitcoin as a currency.”

The Bitcoin blockchain is a public ledger that records all Bitcoin transactions and ensures that everyone has a record of how many Bitcoins they own. Bitcoin holders must have a key or password to transfer money to and from a Bitcoin address. Bitcoin addresses are like accounts, and these addresses are encrypted so that no one can know the identity of their users. In addition, Bitcoin holders can earn more Bitcoins by "mining", or helping to update the public ledger of the Bitcoin blockchain with their computers.

Many people believe that the invention of the Bitcoin blockchain was a stroke of genius - a secure way to record online transactions publicly but anonymously, with applications not only in finance but elsewhere.

Wright provided some news organizations with passwords that allowed them to connect to some early-mined Bitcoin addresses on the blockchain, and this evidence was enough to convince prominent Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen that Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto.

But skeptics have questioned the authenticity of the password Wright provided - they say Wright could have cut and pasted a password from publicly available online sources that would have allowed him to move bitcoins out of an earlier blockchain, thus proving absolutely that he had access to the first bitcoin address.

After Wright published his blog post, Andresen told WIRED: “Of course I could have been fooled.” But he also added that Wright had privately shown him some other evidence that implicated him as Satoshi.

Bitcoin advocates, such as David Berg, CEO of the Digital Currency Council (an association of professional Bitcoin traders), are only focused on the debate about Wright and ignore how Bitcoin finance and technology is now a legitimate industry. Whether Wright is Satoshi or not cannot really affect the work of the council, which has more than 1,500 members.

“I don’t understand why the Satoshi investigation is of such interest to journalists and Bitcoin observers,” Berger wrote in an email to VICE News. “But even so, the true identity of Satoshi is irrelevant to the future of the industry.”

JPM compiled from

VICE, Bitcoin Backers Debate Whether False Founding Claims Hurt the Virtual Currency, by John Dyer.