This time, is Satoshi Nakamoto real? Or is it a shocking scam?

Craig Steven Wright, the 44-year-old Australian, was a relatively unknown figure to most of the crypto and finance geeks in attendance at a bitcoin investor conference in Las Vegas.

Wright, wearing a black jacket and a rumpled shirt, his brown hair neatly parted, was not listed as a speaker at the conference. Even the moderator of the panel, a bitcoin blogger named Michele Seven, seemed concerned that the audience would be confused by Wright's presence. Wright introduced himself as "someone who does academic research that no one has ever heard of," Seven interrupted him.

"Wait a minute, who are you?" Seven interrupted, grinning. "Are you a computer scientist?"

“I’m a bit of everything,” White responded. “I have a masters in law…a master’s in statistics, a couple doctorates…”

“How did you learn about Bitcoin?” Seven interrupted again, still trying to determine what White meant.

White paused for about three seconds. "Um. I've been involved with all this for a long time," he stammered. "I—try and stay—I keep my head down. Um..." He seemed to be suppressing a smile. The panel's moderator moved on... White didn't comment on WIRED's coverage of him over the past few weeks, which might mean he wanted to speak up:

“I am Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.”

Regardless of whether Wright invented Bitcoin or this was all a brilliant prank, he wants everyone to believe that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.

In the past few weeks, Wired has claimed to have strong evidence of the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. These signs all point to Craig Steven Wright, an unknown figure who was not even included in the list of possible candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto.

Wired's evidence

The first evidence pointing to Wright came in mid-November when an anonymous source close to Wright leaked documents to Gwern Branwen (an anonymous, independent security researcher and dark web analyst). Branwen provided these documents to Wired, which then provided the publicly visible connection between Satoshi Nakamoto and Wright:

1. In a post on Wright’s blog in August 2008, three months before Satoshi Nakamoto posted the Bitcoin white paper to the cryptography mailing list in November 2008, the blog mentioned that Wright intended to publish a “cryptocurrency paper” and referenced “triple-entry accounting,” a 2005 paper by financial cryptographer Ian Grigg that pointed out several ideas similar to Bitcoin.

2. In November 2008, the blog was updated with another post that included a request that readers who wanted to access their information use a PGP public key that was clearly associated with Satoshi Nakamoto. A PGP public key is a unique string of characters that allows users of encryption software to receive encrypted messages. The blog post, which was stored in the MIT server database, was associated with an email address of [email protected], which is very similar to the email address Satoshi Nakamoto sent the Bitcoin white paper to: [email protected].

3. Wright deleted an archived copy of a blog post from January 10, 2009, which read: “The Beta of Bitcoin is live tomorrow. This is decentralized… We try until it works.” The post was dated January 10, 2009, one day after Bitcoin’s official launch on January 9. But if Wright lived in eastern Australia and posted the post after midnight on the 9th, it would still have been before 3pm EST on the 9th, Bitcoin’s launch date. The post was later replaced with very vague text that read “Bitcoin – AKA bloody nosey you be…It does always surprise me how at times the best place to hide [is] right in the open,” and was deleted entirely sometime in October.

In addition to the three blog posts, Wired has also received a number of leaked emails, transcripts, and accounting statements that confirm the correlation. In one leaked message from Wright to his lawyer, dated June 2008, Wright envisioned a "p2p distributed ledger," and the email also mentioned a paper titled "Electronic Cash Without the Requirement of a Trusted Third Party," which Wright said he expected to publish in 2009.

Another leaked email is from Wright to David Kleiman, a computer forensics analyst and close friend and confidant of Wright, discussing the paper just before Bitcoin went live in 2009. Wright talks about investing in hundreds of computers, and there’s a PDF signed by Kleiman, who died in 2013, who agreed to control a trust, codenamed “Tulip Trust,” containing 1.1 million bitcoins . The PDF is PGP-signed by Kleiman.

Another clue is that White's Bitcoin wealth was not disclosed to Wired, but he runs a website for a custodial corporate consulting firm called McGrathNicol: The liquidation report states that one of several companies founded by White, called Hotwire, wanted to try to create a Bitcoin bank. It also mentioned that by June 2013, the startup held Bitcoins worth $23 million. The total value of these Bitcoins is more than $60 million today. At the time of the company's establishment, White invested more than 1.5% of the total number of Bitcoins in existence in the company.

There is also a leaked email from Wright and the Australian government about a tax dispute in January 2014. In it, Wright appears to consider using the name Satoshi Nakamoto to communicate with New South Wales federal senator Arthur Sinodinos. "Would friends from Japan want to re-enter the game?" Wright asked, and it also includes a draft email sent to the senator, signed "Satoshi Nakamoto." And a leaked transcript from a meeting between Wright and lawyers and tax officials in February 2014 quoted his frustration:

“I tried as hard as I could to hide the fact that I had been running Bitcoin since 2009. But by now, I think half the world would know.”

Why bread crumbs?

Despite the overwhelming fit, there is no solid evidence that Wright is Satoshi. All of this could be an elaborate hoax, perhaps orchestrated by Wright himself. The unverified leaked documents could be forged in whole or in part. Most puzzling of all are the three blog posts, assuming that the link between this PGP public key and Satoshi’s email address, as well as the subsequent references to “cryptocurrency papers” and “triplet accounting,” were added sometime after 2013. Even the blog posts pointing to a beta release of Bitcoin are questionable. One was posted in January 2009, then seemingly deleted and then undeleted, and even the actual date of the article was between October 2013 and June 2014.

Why Wright would drop these breadcrumbs remains a mystery, given his blog, his public records, his presence on mailing lists, etc. Is Wright trying to falsely steal the glory (or money) that was supposedly due to Satoshi Nakamoto? Or is he trying to quietly reveal himself as the creator of Bitcoin?

But one thing is clear: If Wright is seeking to fake his connection to Satoshi, his scam is almost as ambitious as Bitcoin itself. Some of his blog posts date back 20 months, and if it is indeed a scam, Wright would be a very patient man. His reference to Grieg’s “triplet bookkeeping” paper would be an amazing lie, representing Bitcoin as being inspired by a new and obscure source. And there is also the question of Wright’s status as a Bitcoin tycoon, whose $60 million stash of Bitcoin in McGrathNicol’s public audit records is also very suspicious.

Similarities to Satoshi Nakamoto aside, Wright is a very strange but extraordinary man: an almost paranoid autodidact who holds two doctorates and once boasted that he would obtain a new graduate degree in about a year.

White’s blog and leaked emails depict a man who is working on an unproven cryptocurrency idea, who has invested more than $1 million in computers, electricity, and another company called Tulip Trading, which has built two supercomputers that are officially Fortune 500, each of which seems to be related to his cryptocurrency project (White seems to enjoy the tulip reference). One of the supercomputers, he named Sukuriputo Okane, which means "script money" in Japanese. The other, Co1n, holds the title of the most powerful private supercomputer in the world. In addition, he is building an even more powerful supercomputer cluster in Iceland, where electricity is cheap.

Bitcoin observers have long wondered why a large number of bitcoins held by Satoshi Nakamoto have never moved on the Bitcoin blockchain. The 1.1 million bitcoins in Wright's "Tulip Fund" may be able to solve this mystery. This trust fund PDF signed by Wright's late friend David Kleiman holds these bitcoins and is locked until 2020. Or he may be waiting for January 1, 2020, the day when he can unlock this wealth.

Clear twitter information

In the leaked emails, Wright is like an irritated hedgehog if someone tries to claim that someone else is Satoshi Nakamoto. “ I am not from the bloody USA! Nor am I called Dorien [sic], ” Wright messaged one of his colleagues on March 6, 2014, the same day Newsweek reported that the inventor of Bitcoin was Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto from the United States.

Yet, at times, Wright has also seemed to envy Satoshi’s identity. “ People love my secret identity and hate me,” he complained to Kleiman in an email in 2011. “I have hundreds of papers. Satoshi has one. Nothing, just one bloody paper and I [can’t] associate myself with ME! ”

Over the past two years, Wright himself has begun to write more frequently about Bitcoin, even posting some on Twitter (which he has since deleted).

When a UCLA professor nominated Satoshi Nakamoto for a Nobel Prize (later declared ineligible by the prize committee due to Nakamoto’s mysterious identity), White blasted, “ 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 suffix “chan,” which denotes a familiar person or nickname.

"I never wished to be a leader, but the choice was not mine," White said in his third tweet recently. " We are a product of the things we create. They change us."

In a September blog post, White said:

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

Original article: http://www.wired.com/2015/12/bitcoins-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-this-unknown-australian-genius/
AUTHOR: ANDY GREENBERG AND GWERN BRANWEN
Compiled by: Satuoxi
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/satoshi-nakamoto-wright)