Craig Wright: The 2016 ‘London Proof Sessions’ Revisited
The roots of the Faketoshi fraud going public: Project X — press pack V8
Written by Arthur van Pelt
ABOUT EDITS AND UPDATES to this article: as more material may become available after the publication of this article, it could have edits and updates every now and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress, to become a reference piece for years to come.
Intro
Of course, the whole Faketoshi saga has come to an end. Affinity fraud project BSV is on its deathbed, desperately awaiting its coupe the grace with Teranode. Meanwhile, Craig Wright’s delusional pipe dream — while cosplaying as the inventor of Bitcoin — of fraudulently obtaining almost $1 trillion in Bitcoin, Bitcoin IP, Bitcoin copy- and other rights, and in imaginary passing off damages from over 200 parties operating in the Bitcoin arena (from cryptocurrency exchanges to Bitcoin developers) has been thoroughly destroyed in UK court rooms.
And Craig Wright himself? He is also not Satoshi Nakamoto, as it was rightfully determined in the UK courts early 2024 during the COPA v Wright trial, resulting in an extensive judgment by Justice Mellor of almost 400 pages long, dated May 20, 2024. That fairy tale, a mix of megalomania, delusions of grandeur and compulsive lying on top of an unstoppable narcissistic personality disorder, has reached its final chapter. In that final chapter it will be decided if Craig Wright should go to jail for unprecedented perjury and a series of mindboggling cases of fraud upon the court. Meanwhile Craig has put his tail between his legs, and quickly fled the UK in 2024, and he is apparently now hiding somewhere in Asia.
“Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person. However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.” — Justice Mellor, May 20, 2024
It’s the story of his life.
Part of the May 20, 2024 judgment was the obligation of Craig Wright to post a legal notice on several of his public social media. This legal notice is still online on his blog.
Ironically, this is the same blog that went live during the 2016 Signing Sessions where his first post on May 2, 2016 was dedicated to his “Big Satoshi Reveal”. More about that later.
And of course, I already wrote a “Farewell To Faketoshi” a year ago, in March 2024. And I already did a deep dive in the 2016 London proof sessions called “Signing Sessions Debacle”. That article from June 2021 was actually the kick off to my longform writing career.
But meanwhile, since about 3 years, I have been sitting on a 2016 document that screamed “publish me!” in my face, but given all the legal proceedings going on in and around 2022 with Craig Wright involved — and the risk of the undersigned becoming part of one of these cases — it was not wise to follow my heart, where my brain was told “don’t”.
A Quick Recap of the London Proof Sessions, by Justice Mellor
Taken from his May 20, 2024 judgment.
“876. The various articles arising out of the interviews described above were initially embargoed, then released on 2 May 2016. On the same day, a post on Dr Wright’s blog was released entitled “Jean-Paul Sartre, signing and significance”. The post began by acknowledging the significance of him signing messages as Satoshi. It then described a process of verifying cryptographic keys by signing a quotation from Sartre. The issuing of this blog post was a key part of the plan for the Big Reveal of Dr Wright as Satoshi. The articles by the Economist and GQ referred to the blog post and indicated that its purpose was to demonstrate possession of the private key linked to block 9 (a block associated with Satoshi because of the Hal Finney Bitcoin transfer).
877. Within hours of the Sartre blog post being issued, articles were published making the point that the post had not presented any proof at all, since the signature provided had been of 2009-era Bitcoin transaction that was publicly available on the blockchain (see for example a post by Dan Kaminsky. As is explained in the post, it required analytical work involving special software to search the public blockchain and establish the falsity of the “proof”). The Economist immediately published a piece saying that his proof had come under fire and that it had requested a corrected version. Dr Wright now accepts that the blog post did not prove his possession of any private key, but says that (contrary to what others plainly expected) it was not an attempt to prove he was Satoshi. Dr Wright also said that his version of the Sartre post was edited by Mr MacGregor and that the version posted differed from what he had intended. Dr Wright’s draft post (attached to an email of 29 April 2016) is available. Although the introduction is different, the technical content appears to be virtually identical.
878. When the blog post was issued, Dr Wright was on a brief trip to Paris, and he travelled back to London that day. Meanwhile, his own team went into a panic. In a series of communications, Mr MacGregor, Mr Matthews and Mr Ayre pressed him to provide a proper, verifiable proof that he controlled keys to addresses linked to Satoshi. The email traffic shows that Mr Matonis and Mr Andresen reacted with a sense of betrayal. In his evidence in the Kleiman litigation, Mr Andresen said: “He certainly deceived me about what kind of blog post he was going to publish, and that gobbledygook proof that he published was certainly deception, if not an outright lie.””
The Press Pack
Now that all Craig Wright’s cases and appeals are over, and now that this piece of evidence — a 23 pages press pack supplied to less than a handful press representatives by The Outside Organization in April 2016 — has run its course in the COPA v Wright case and has ended as a footnote in the final judgment of Justice Mellor, I thought it’s about time to let it see the day of light.
Because this 23 page press pack document is the culmination of the Satoshi Nakamoto identity theft scam that Craig Wright started in very small circles in 2014, followed by finding Calvin Ayre on his side in 2015 to pump substantial money in Craig his identity theft scam with hopes to become billionaire again, and after a little interruption end of 2015 (the Wired/Gizmodo self-dox of Craig Wright) the world was about to witness the “Big Satoshi Reveal” with all the ‘evidence’ that the world was supposed to believe.
This 2016 press pack contains all that evidence.
Without further ado, let’s dig into this April 2016 press pack that introduced Craig Wright’s claim to Satoshi Nakamoto fame — a scam that would become a massive $1 trillion fraud upon the courts in later years— under the regime of a fraud squad helmed by aforementioned Calvin Ayre, who was at that moment in time sided by Stefan Matthews (now referred to Crown Prosecution Service for criminal perjury) and Robert McGregor (left the fraud squad around 2017 after the signing sessions failed miserably), to a wider audience.
On a related sidenote, the interested reader will notice that traces of the material presented in this April 2016 press pack are still being used within the diminishing community of BSV fans and Craig Wright apologists.
Where necessary, the pages are provided with relevant commentary to highlight the utter incompetence of this cosplay scam that, in hindsight, has lasted way too long. In December 2015 we knew already for certain that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, and the 2016 London proof sessions should have cemented that judgment even for the most stubborn Craig Wright fans. We should give it to Craig Wright though: he certainly has the stamina to keep a lie alive, against all odds.
Project X — press pack V8, page 1
Aaand… We can start debunking on page 1 already.
Indeed. As we can find on Wikipedia:
“Cryptographer David Chaum first proposed a blockchain-like protocol in his 1982 dissertation “Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups”. Further work on a cryptographically secured chain of blocks was described in 1991 by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta.”
Fun Fact
Even camp Craig Wright doesn’t dare to spread this incompetent lie about who invented the blockchain anymore. On bsvblockchain.org we can find the following explanation, in an article called “The little-known history of blockchain, as told by its inventors”, an article that doesn’t even mention Craig Wright once anymore:
“Bitcoin and blockchain technology have, by sheer quirk of history, become synonymous with Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous developer credited with Bitcoin’s invention.
However, the fathers of the blockchain aren’t anonymous at all: Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber are credited with the invention of blockchain, having come to the idea of a time-linked chain as a solution to the problem of authenticating documents. They were even cited directly in the Bitcoin white paper.”
Project X — press pack V8, page 2
Project X — press pack V8, page 3
In one of Craig Wright’s lawsuits — the infamous Pineapple Hack case — we can find a defense document by the Bitcoin developers who thoroughly debunk the claim that Craig Wright is a (leading, or renowned) computer scientist.
“It is denied that Dr Wright is a renowned computer scientist. In particular:
- Dr Wright does not have a computer science degree.
- Dr Wright does not have the ability to code C++ (alternatively, does not have anything beyond the ability of a beginner).
- Dr Wright failed his Theory of Computation course in his Information Systems Security programme at Charles Sturt University. The Theory of Computation course was the only true computer science course in the curriculum.
- Dr Wright does not have a significant publication history or impact factor in computer science journals.
- Dr Wright’s claims to renown are heavily disputed in the cryptocurrency and scientific communities.”
Project X — press pack V8, page 4
Jon Matonis… Yeah, good old Bitcoin OG Jon Matonis. Indeed, he was quite early involved with Bitcoin. But this is what Justice Mellor ultimately had to say about Jon Matonis in his May 20, 2024 judgment.
“854. In opening submissions, Dr Wright relied upon hearsay attributed to Mr Matonis in a press release of 28 April 2016 (i.e. before the debacle of the Sartre Blog post) suggesting that he was persuaded by the signing session he attended. This multiple hearsay statement was not even submitted under a CEA notice.
855. In the course of closing submissions, Dr Wright served a CEA notice dated 13 March 2024 relying on a blog post of Mr Matonis dated 2 May 2016 entitled ‘How I Met Satoshi’. In that blog post, Mr Matonis related his encounters with Dr Wright, culminating with ‘the London proof sessions’. Mr Matonis said ‘the proof is conclusive’. Although posted on 2 May 2016, that blog post must have been written in advance, so that it was released as part of the planned ‘Big Reveal’.
856. I am inclined to place very little weight on Mr Matonis’ blog post, not least because we have no idea whether subsequent events caused him to change his mind or dent his conviction. We do not know Mr Matonis’ reaction to the debacle of the Sartre blog. The dinner with Mr Hearn (see below) took place a couple of months later, at which time Mr Matonis seems to have been looking to Mr Hearn for confirmation of his view, something which indicates Mr Matonis was less sure of the position than when writing his blog. Equally, we do not know Mr Matonis’ reaction to what Mr Hearn said to him after the dinner. In any event, Mr Matonis has not given evidence. The agreed expert evidence is that his proof session could very easily have been faked. And it is telling that Mr Andresen was initially persuaded by the signing session he attended, but later came to believe that it could well have been spoofed.”
Project X — press pack V8, page 5
Project X — press pack V8, page 6
Oh, the irony. The blog mentioned here, drcraigwright.net is currently routed to craigwright.net, and this site contains only 1 page: the legal notice as shown earlier in this article as landing page.
Project X — press pack V8, page 7
Note that the paper/conference related to “Why do Cyber Attacks Against Mining Companies Occur?” (see line 5) is not to be found online. It is likely for somewhat obvious ‘mining’ reasons presented in bold between the rest of the titles (although the other few ‘mining’ titles are not presented in bold), but otherwise all the titles mentioned have literally nothing to do with Bitcoin or Bitcoin related fields. The word mining in these titles refer to “data mining”.
All in all, we can safely say that all the information presented here is related to the cybersecurity realm: Craig Wright was simply an IT security guy, and nothing else.
Project X — press pack V8, page 8
And the more we go back in time, so we arrive in the era (halfway 2011) where Craig Wright hadn’t even heard from Bitcoin yet, we still notice that all the information presented is only related to cybersecurity. As said before, Craig Wright is an IT security guy. And certainly not a blockchain/Bitcoin inventor.
Project X — press pack V8, page 9
See comments on page 7 and 8.
Project X — press pack V8, page 10
See comments on pages 7 and 8 again.
Project X — press pack V8, page 11
A snippet taken from my August 2022 article “Craig Wright: The Fraud That Didn’t Make It To The Court Rooms. Yet.” as I’m noticing a familiar title on top of this page 11 of the press pack.
July 4, 2008: The IT Regulatory and Standards Compliance Handbook
On this day, Craig published a book about his field of expertise. Note that this is the exact timeframe when Satoshi Nakamoto would obtain the bitcoin.org domain, had coded up most of Bitcoin and was writing the Bitcoin whitepaper.
3.5 years later, on January 7, 2012, we find an entry about Craig Wright’s book on the plagiarism section of attrition.org:
“The book “The IT Regulatory and Standards Compliance Handbook: How to Survive an Information Systems Audit and Assessments” by Craig Steven Wright (published July 4, 2008), tech edited by Brian Freedman and Dale Liu, contains plagiarized material. While the quantity of stolen text does not comprise a majority of the book, there is enough to demonstrate systematic plagiarism, typically in the frequent bulleted lists throughout the book.”
And it appears that the moderators of the attrition website are keeping an eye out for notorious plagiarizer Craig Wright, as we can find this paragraph mixed in the article. The Sam Williams article mentioned will be highlighted later.
“[Update: 4/21/2020 It has come to our attention that Mr. Wright has been accused of plagiarism several more times. You can read more about it in “Anatomy of a fraud — A deep dive into one of Craig Wright’s plagiarized papers” written by Sam Williams in 2019.]”
Project X — press pack V8, page 12
Same story here, none of these certifications are computer science related, let alone pointing to a possible Bitcoin inventor. This is from a CV of an average IT security guy (and then one who spends more time obtaining certificates than putting them to good use, looking at the dozens of times Craig Wright claims to have been hacked).
Project X — press pack V8, page 13
“In any event, Mr Matonis has not given evidence. The agreed expert evidence is that his proof session could very easily have been faked.” — Justice Mellor, May 20, 2024
And make no mistake meanwhile, it was Jon Matonis who dragged Gavin Andresen in March 2016 into this signing debacle that would follow in the months after.
the root of all Faketoshi evil:
“you are just going to have to trust me on this”
— Jon Matonis forgetting all Bitcoin ‘don’t trust, verify’ ethos while communicating with Gavin Andresen
Perhaps we will someday see Jon Matonis come clean about this ugly stain in his career: endorsing the false claim that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakomoto. Until then, his reputation has been seriously harmed by this dark episode in his professional life.
Project X — press pack V8, page 14
Before posting the actual page 14 of the press pack, first this. As said, Craig Wright tried to self-dox his self-proclaimed Satoshi-ness late 2015 and found Wired and Gizmodo gullible enough to spread this false claim on December 9, 2015. Both outlets came quickly to their senses though and retracted their initial enthousiasm.
One of the more technical debunks of Craig Wright’s evidence, that he had anonymously ‘leaked’ to these two media outlets in previous weeks when he was shopping around with his self-dox package, was posted on Motherboard (now Vice). To understand what’s going on, the whole Motherboard article has been taken from Wayback Machine and is copied here for the reader to relive and enjoy once more. Link to the article itself on Wayback Machine is provided in the title.
“Satoshi’s PGP Keys Are Probably Backdated and Point to a Hoax”
By Sarah Jeong, December 9, 2015, 2:48pm
On Tuesday, both Wired and Gizmodo dropped a big bombshell: According to “leaked” (Wired) or “hacked” (Gizmodo) documents, the real Satoshi Nakamoto is…. Craig Steven Wright.
Uh, who? one might ask. It’s a good question. Until now, Wright hasn’t pinged very many people’s radars as a potential Satoshi Nakamoto. On the other hand, Wright is indeed considered an expert on Bitcoin — in fact, he appeared on a panel with other possible-Satoshi Nick Szabo this year at the Bitcoin Investor Conference.
Both Wired and Gizmodo outline Wright’s qualifications and accomplishments in detail, aside from pointing to emails and other documents that seem to nail Wright as once-and-future Bitcoin king Satoshi Nakamoto.
A lot of this evidence isn’t authenticated, so there’s that. But there’s one really big problem with the case for Craig S. Wright as Satoshi: at least one of the key pieces of evidence appears to be fake. The “Satoshi” PGP keys associated with the Wired and Gizmodo stories were probably generated after 2009 and uploaded after 2011.
We say keys, because there are two entirely different keys implicated by Wired and by Gizmodo. And neither of them check out.
There is only one PGP key that is truly known to be associated with Satoshi Nakamoto. We’ll call this the Original Key.
Before we continue, we should note that the PGP keys are just one piece of the puzzle. When asked for comment, Gizmodo editor Katie Drummond said that the keys “are just one (relatively small) data point among many others, including in-person interviews and on-the-record corroboration.”
But the keys are important because they’re not just plain suspicious, there’s evidence of active, intentional deception with respect to the keys. (Wired’s Andy Greenberg pointed out that this was already in line with their article, which notes that Wright may have engaged in an elaborate, long-running deception).
Here’s the thing: There is only one PGP key that is truly known to be associated with Satoshi Nakamoto. We’ll call this the Original Key.
The Original Key has long been attributed to Satoshi. It’s currently hosted on bitcoin.org, and it was there even in 2009, when Satoshi was still associated with the site. So we do know that the Original Key belonged to Satoshi, if it is even epistemologically possible to know anything about Bitcoin at this point.
The Original Key was supposedly created in October 2008, using DSA-1024 encryption, which today is considered to be too weak for recommended use. At the time, DSA-1024 was the default in GnuPG, a free software implementation of Pretty Good Privacy that most people use to PGP-encrypt messages. The Original Key appears to have been generated on a Windows version of GnuPG that was already outdated at the time.
Both the Wired and Gizmodo keys were generated using RSA-3072, an unusual choice for 2008 — something that security expert Erinn Clark first flagged for us. (DSA-1024 was default at the time; RSA-2048 is the default today. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
Two of the keys attributed to Satoshi were likely created using technology that wasn’t available on the dates that they were supposedly made.
In both articles, keyserver entries are used to tie Craig Wright to Satoshi Nakamoto. A keyserver is a directory for PGP keys, with entries submitted by users. The one used here is maintained by MIT. There are other keyservers that sync to the MIT keyserver.
The Wired Key is tied to satoshin@vistomail.com, an email address that was not previously linked to Satoshi but is pretty similar to satoshi@vistomail.com which has been linked to Satoshi:
The Gizmodo Key is tied to satoshin@gmx.com, which is linked to Satoshi but thought to have been compromised by hackers in 2014:
According to the MIT keyserver, both of these were supposedly created in 2008, before Bitcoin even launched, suggesting they could only have been generated by the pseudonymous inventor himself. So case closed, right?
Not really, because it’s trivially easy to forge the creation date on a PGP key.
The age of a PGP key is tied to the date and time on the machine it was created on. All it would take to create a PGP key in 2015 that looked like it was created in 2008, would be to change the system settings on the local machine to the desired date.
In roughly 10 minutes, Motherboard staff writer Jordan Pearson created a PGP key for himself that by all accounts appears to have been created in 2008, but really wasn’t, and uploaded it to MIT’s public key server.
It’s also possible to create a PGP key with a fake date from an email account you don’t control. Motherboard cybersecurity reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai was able to create a PGP key for satoshin@gmx.com that appears as though it was created in 2004. It wasn’t. Franceschi-Bicchierai created it on December 8, 2015, while chatting with other reporters over Slack.
Franceschi-Bicchierai immediately revoked the key to prevent confusion.
Bitcoin core developer Greg Maxwell has posted on Reddit to that effect, adding that, “This key was also not on the keyservers in 2011 according to my logs; which doesn’t prove it was backdated, but there is basically no evidence that it wasn’t and non-trivial evidence that it was.”
We contacted him asking him to clarify what he meant by “my logs.” Maxwell said that he had a 2011 chatlog where he and others discussed “fake” Satoshi keys (keys tied to Satoshi’s emails that weren’t the Original Key) on the keyserver. They referenced other keys, but never linked to the ones implicated by Wired or Gizmodo. Maxwell thinks this is because the keys weren’t there in 2011.
We already noted that RSA-3072 is an odd form of encryption to use in 2008, but there is other metadata in these keys that seem to postdate 2008.
Maxwell found that the Wired Key and the Gizmodo Key have preferred hash algorithms “8,2,9,10,11.” The Original Key has a preferred hash algorithm list “2,8,3.” This refers to the cipher-suites, or encryption algorithms, used. The “8,2,9,10,11” list was added to the GnuPG code tree as a commit on July 9, 2009, and released in version 2.0.13 on September 4, 2009.
In other words, the Wired Key and the Gizmodo Key were likely created using technology that wasn’t available on the dates that they were supposedly made.
Maxwell also pointed out to us that it was especially odd that the metadata for the Wired Key and the Original Key didn’t match each other if they were supposedly created by the same person on the same day, October 30, 2008.
The keyserver entries for both the Wired and Gizmodo keys make it look like someone was trying very hard to deceive people. But the circumstances in which both these keys are implicated are also suspicious.
The Wired Key was posted on Craig Wright’s now-deleted blog, in an post dated November 1, 2008. But Andy Greenberg and Gwern Branwen, who wrote the Wired article naming Craig Wright as a possible Satoshi Nakamoto, say it was retroactively inserted sometime after 2013. Branwen used Google Reader caches and found that in 2013, the key had not been in that blogpost. This timing matches up with what we noticed about that key.
Given that PGP is a cryptographic method of authenticating your online identity, it’s interesting that there are so many inconsistencies and even indications of intentional deception.
The Wired Key was copy/pasted straight from the MIT keyserver into the November 2008 blogpost, rather than from a key file on someone’s computer. When you paste from the keyserver, a header will be included in the key that identifies a specific version of keyserver software. The version identified in the Wired Key (SKS 1.1.4) was in use between October 2012 and May 2014 — a long time after November 2008.
The Gizmodo Key comes from a list of four different keys in one of the documents. (Each key is listed as a “fingerprint,” which is a unique shorthand for the much-longer PGP key.) The list was contained in a draft of a contract for the “Tulip Trust,” supposedly a vehicle for around $460 million dollars in Bitcoin.
Gizmodo identified two of the four keys as belonging to Satoshi, one belonging to Wright, and one belonging to Wright’s friend, Dave Kleiman. Keyservers do link the keys with those people. But only one is well-attested (meaning, lots of other people have verified it) — the last one, the Original Key from 2009.
Not only is the Original Key the only one that’s been recognized by, well, anyone, it also sticks out like a sore thumb. It uses weaker encryption than the other three. The first three keys are technological sisters, all using RSA-3072 and having the same hash algorithms. The last is an outlier.
Weirdly, it’s the second key, the Gizmodo Key, that gets called out later in the document. In the document, Dave Kleiman is supposedly promising to never divulge “the identity of the Key with ID C941FE6D [the Gizmodo Key] nor of the origins of the satoshin@gmx.com email.” But while the GMX email account is well-known to be connected to Satoshi, until the Gizmodo article, the Gizmodo Key wasn’t known to anyone, let alone known to be connected to Satoshi.
Also, that cute little parenthetical next to the name? “In crypto we trust, in government we verify”? We didn’t add that, that’s in the keyserver. There’s a similar one in Craig Wright’s keyserver entry too — ”In algorithms we trust.” Almost like the keyserver entries were created by the same person, right?
There’s a similar one for Dave Kleiman as well, among the many many keys that are associated with him, though this one appears to be written by a drunk person:
That’s not the strangest Kleiman key, though. There’s also one that was generated for him a year after his death.
In sum:
- Only one key, the Original Key, is actually known to be associated with Satoshi.
- The Wired and Gizmodo Keys that supposedly lead back to Satoshi weren’t previously known to be linked to Satoshi, and their 2008 creation date could have been faked.
- Both keys use a longer and less-common key size than the Original Key.
- Both keys use a list of cipher-suites that don’t match up to the Original Key, and weren’t added to GPG until 2009.
- The Wired key was retroactively added to a 2008 blogpost sometime between 2012 and 2014, as noted in its story.
- A core Bitcoin developer who’s been involved from nearly the beginning looked back at 2011 chatlogs referring to “fake” Satoshi keys on keyservers, and found no reference to either the Gizmodo or Wired keys. He thinks that those keys weren’t yet uploaded to the keyserver in 2011.
We asked both Wired and Gizmodo for comment. Both said this information about the PGP keys does not change anything about their stories. Wired reporter Andy Greenberg responded:
This is certainly interesting, but it just backs up something we already stated in our piece: It appears the three blog posts that most clearly connect Wright to Satoshi Nakamoto were edited to insert that evidence or possibly even created after the dates they appear to have. As we wrote, that could be part of an incredibly elaborate hoax, or it could show that Wright was conflicted about his pseudonymity and some part of him wanted to be found.
Gizmodo Editor in Chief Katie Drummond said:
The thrust of our article is that Craig Wright, over the course of many years, was involved in Bitcoin and told many people he was its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto. The PGP keys you mention are just one (relatively small) data point among many others, including in-person interviews and on-the-record corroboration. Our reference to the keys simply was that they corresponded to information in the public keybase.
It’s true that PGP keys are a single data point, but given that PGP is a cryptographic method of authenticating your online identity, it’s particularly interesting that there are so many inconsistencies with these keys, and even indications of intentional deception.
Listen, PGP is hard. Maybe the ingenious Craig-Satoshi-Nakamoto-Wright, like most ordinary people, can’t stop losing access to his PGP keys and keeps having to upload different keys to the keyserver. But the metadata, Greg Maxwell’s chatlogs, and the online trail just don’t really add up. And as Kashmir Hill pointed out at Fusion, “there are obvious incentives for an entrepreneur active in the blockchain and security space” — like Craig Wright — ”to be known as the talented developer behind Bitcoin.”
Whatever’s going on here, it’s pretty fishy.
Jordan Pearson contributed reporting and writing.”
So far for the Motherboard (now Vice) article. A name prominently mentioned in this article is Bitcoin developer Greg Maxwell, on Reddit known as ‘nullc’. Indeed, we are here witnessing Greg his career as one of Craig Wright’s most prolific Arch Nemesis-es kicking off.
So, Craig Wright was not amused. He was obviously very annoyed that his precious PGP keys, carefully crafted at home before his self-dox, were reported as fake and forged in the media in December 2015.
So in April 2016, he managed to get a summary of his paper called “Appeal to authority: A failure of trust” included in the London proof sessions press pack. This paper aimed to debunk Greg Maxwell’s deliberations about the fake PGP keys.
Read it and weep, dear reader.
Project X — press pack V8, page 15
And Craig Wright found First Response on his side to say something pretty irrelevant about the issue at hand too. See upcoming pages 16 and 17.
Project X — press pack V8, page 16
Project X — press pack V8, page 17
Of course, the fake and backdated PGP keys issue was not the only series of red flags during the inquiry of the Bitcoin community into Craig Wright’s self-dox material that popped up in December 2015. So Craig’s attempt with a paper to try give some legitimacy to the false PGP keys anyway didn’t get any traction whatsoever.
In September 2017, Medium user ‘Milburn’ explained why that was.
“TL;DR the “Appeal to authority” paper doesn’t address the evidence showing Wright’s keys were backdated”
Wright’s “Appeal to authority” paper disproved its own thesis
“By Milburn, September 16, 2017
Creation timestamps visible in screenshots in the “Appeal to authority” paper show how the process of editing a key inserts a newer timestamp into the key. The timestamps in Craig Wright’s keys indicate this never happened, so the “Appeal to authority” paper doesn’t address the evidence showing Wright’s keys were backdated.
Recap
- A key with a 2008 date can be forged by having your computer’s clock set to 2008 when you create the key.
- Wright was caught out because his keys purporting to be from 2008 contained a modern configuration setting which was not in software used to create keys until 2009 onward.
- In response he produced the “Appeal to authority” paper, which showed how a key created in 2008 can be edited to contain the configuration that wouldn’t appear until 2009.
- One of several problems with that paper is that Wright’s 2008 keys contained the modern configuration from the moment they were created — they were never updated the way his “Appeal to authority” paper suggests, and screenshots from that paper show this.
Editing the key updates the timestamp
In Figure 7 of the “Appeal to authority” paper (shown below), you can see that after creating the demonstration key, all timestamps listed in the key are identical: 1450535445.
Blue highlights have been added here to show the timestamps, and if you go to epochconverter.com you can enter in the number and see that 1450535445 is Saturday, December 19, 2015 2:30:45 PM (GMT)
The “Appeal to authority” paper demonstrates how a 2008 key’s configuration could be edited using — edit-key and knowledge from the future (the need for future-knowledge being something Wright’s paper didn’t dwell on), after which Figure 11 (below) shows the pref-hash-algos field of the key now looks the same as keys created with modern software (and Wright’s keys), but notice the creation timestamp was also updated.
Red highlighting has been added to the updated timestamp, which is now 1450536456, and if we use epochconverter.com we can see that this was 17 minutes after the key was created.
One of Wright’s purportedly 2008 keys is shown below, note that all timestamps are the same: 1200606827 (January 17, 2008)
Since all the timestamps are still identical, we know Wright never edited in the modern configuration that appears in the key, as alluded to by the “Appeal to authority” paper.
The “Wired Key” and “Gizmodo Key” mentioned in the Motherboard article are the same — all timestamps in the keys match their creation timestamp.
To confirm this for yourself, gpg instructions are provided in Wright’s “Appeal to authority” paper, one of Wright’s critics provides a guide on how to obtain and view one of Wright’s keys from a key server, and the Motherboard article provides links to the other keys.”
So far for the debunk. Thank you, Mildred.
Project X — press pack V8, page 18
Project X — press pack V8, page 19
There’s so much to say about why and how on earth Craig Wright approved the above definitions to be included in a press pack in 2016. I mean, he was once asked in June 2019: What is the point of bitcoin? What is Bitcoin really about? His answer:
“We’ve never had a single ledger for all our information everything. A network of trust where we can live in an augmented reality instead of replacing people outright.”
Okay (slapping my head).
He also claimed several times that Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency, it’s not cryptography and not a store of value.
“It’s not cryptography. It’s public, but a private ledger. Bitcoin is not a store of value: something you can pay a fixed amount of to someone without fear of it fluctuating. bitcoin is an intermediary. Bitcoin doesn’t help if the world falls apart as some sort of anarchist project. It’s about a stable protocol that nobody can change. No coin can be decentralized without preventing developers from ever have a say in what happens, and only allowing them to build atop the protocol (like bitcoinsv). If nobody can change the protocol, there is no power in money.”
Okay (slapping my head once more). Remember, in 2016 Craig Wright was still a relative noob in Bitcoin, as he had only touched his first bitcoin tokens on Mt Gox exactly 3 years earlier: April 2013. So in 2016 they simply took the common denominators from that moment, and Craig Wright was fine with it.
In later years he lost the plot completely though.
Project X — press pack V8, page 20
Project X — press pack V8, page 21
Project X — press pack V8, page 22
Project X — press pack V8, page 23
One of the very few receivers in 2016 of this “highly confidential and embargoed” press pack was GQ Magazine (Stuart McGurk). Other receivers of the press pack were the BBC (Rory Cellan-Jones) and The Economist (Ludwig Siegele). Stuart McGurk wrote, arguably, the most brilliant article about the 2016 London proof sessions for GQ UK in September 2016, which was mildly reworded for GQ Australia in November 2016. The latter version of his enjoyable report I will copy here in full to end this article.
Craig Wright: The Man Who Didn’t Invent Bitcoin
Stuart McGurk, November 18, 2016
Writer Stuart McGurk goes behind the mirky and mysterious lines of Bitcoin to discover if the Aussie man claiming to be its founder.
“Fuck off! Either validate or fuck off right now!”
Broad, 45-year-old Australian computer scientist [note: he isn’t], Craig Wright, stands up and displays backing it up (and clearing up any ambiguity) by shouting it repeatedly. He has TV hair and wears a boxy, dark grey business suit, wide gold tie and red socks that match the colour of his face. He claims to be the inventor of bitcoin, the first genuinely successful virtual currency in the world.
In total, it’s now worth more than $12bn, and he personally possesses a fortune of more than $761m of them — assuming his identity isn’t virtual as well. This is what we’re here to confirrm. It’s not going well.
“Fuck off!”
Until this point, the creator of bitcoin was known only by the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, ostensibly a 37-year-old man living in Japan.
Perhaps due to that, or perhaps due to his blog posts, which were precise, calm and erudite, Nakamoto was imagined to be a gentle, even shy, individual. It doesn’t seem to be the case.
The object of Wright’s fire is Dr Nicolas T. Courtois, a French-Polish expert in cryptology, code-breaking, virtual currencies and specifically bitcoin.
Here as GQ’s expert witness, he’s a big man who speaks in halting English, wears a smart shirt and boasts trousers so blue they could be part of a costume. The other people in the room are economist and Bitcoin Foundation founding director Jon Matonis, the expert witness for the PR agency brokering the interview, and its two representatives, attempting not to look too panicked.
We’ve been here for a grand total of eight minutes, and Wright’s already taken issue with Dr Courtois’ suggestion that his evidence isn’t conclusive.
“You’ve got this one thing,” says Wright. “If you don’t like it, then fuck off.”
There’s an audible groan from the PR side of the room.
“No more bullshit. Fuck off!” he shouts a few moments later, his idea of a defence against the suggestion that his evidence could have been compromised or stolen.
“It’s absolutely possible,” counters Dr Courtois.
“Fuck off. Fuck off.”
“I have over 100 papers in cryptography…” “Over. Fuck off.”
With that, Wright walks out.
We’d first been approached a month before about the interview. The deal was this: the fabled inventor of bitcoin would unveil himself to be Craig Wright.
The BBC and The Economist would do news stories; GQ would do the profile piece.
The search for Nakamoto has become the digital age’s hunt for the white whale — imagine if the inventor of Facebook was still unknown and you get the idea. Every so often a publication would dispatch another willing Captain Ahab, and each would return having spotted him, just rarely the same one.
Everyone from The New Yorker (which named a student) to Vice (which named the US government) had been on the hunt. The New York Times put an author of a book about bitcoin’s creation (Digital Gold’s Nathaniel Popper) on the case, who named cryptographer Nick Szabo, and cornered him in a kitchen at a tech gathering, putting it to him that he was both Satoshi (“I’m not Satoshi”) and a college professor (“And I’m not a college professor”).
Forbes tracked early bitcoin coder Hal Finney down to his home, only to find him incapacitated — Finney had to spend the best part of a day writing an email using the movement of his eyeball just to deny it (“I must be brief…”).
Newsweek got particularly excited last year after thinking it had finally cracked it when it found someone actually called Satoshi Nakamoto and ran it as a cover story. It turned out, however, his name was pretty much the only evidence, and the story was so widely discredited that Newsweek yanked it from its website.
Wright’s the latest name in the frame, identified by parallel stories in Wired and Gizmodo last December, after a hacker claimed to have retrieved data from Wright’s computer that proved he was Satoshi and leaked it to them. The documents — including a series of emails, minutes of meetings and legal documents — all clearly pointed to Wright as the creator of bitcoin.
The Wired story ran with the bet-hedging headline: “Bitcoin’s Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Probably This Unknown Australian Genius”.
Yet only days later they both got cold feet: evidence emerged that some of the material might have been doctored, more still that some may be false; even some of his degrees were called into question. The Australian tax authorities raided his house.
Soon, a remarkably strange alternative emerged: either Craig Wright was the mysterious creator of bitcoin — or he was the perpetrator of an incredibly detailed and elaborate hoax, all desperately aimed at making people think he was.
The door swings open again. Wright comes back in the room, sits back down, takes a glug from his water bottle and slams it down on the table like he’s trying to hammer a nail. He’s breathing heavily. Dr Courtois attempts to calm the mood.
“I’m not saying your evidence is invalid, but it’s just one thing, I’m saying there are other sorts of evidence that people could ask from you, because it’s just one thing…”
It’s not long until Wright’s screaming again, the argument between the two easy to understand but impossible to follow. Sentences like “Bloody regenerate things on a single… show me where” and “There are fucking thousands of transactions on bitcoin every fucking day signed with pissy fucking bloody number generators” and “If I hear one more bullshit comment about how I can do it with unknown nodes, you show me proof or you fuck off out” are common.
Occasionally, it looks dangerously close to spilling over into physical violence that’d make for a tricky explanation in the subsequent police report.
But the gist is clear: in his expert opinion, Dr Courtois doesn’t feel Wright’s evidence is conclusive. Wright, in turn, is not pleased about this.
“The other interviews were easy,” he exclaims. “This is bullshit!”
“You can validate,” adds Wright.
“Or you can fuck off.”
“You have to understand,” interjects Jon
Matonis, acting as peacemaker. “It’s taken us a long, long time for Craig to get to this point, you know.”
The decidedly indecisive proof session ends. With his interrogators gone, Wright calms, speaking expansively about bitcoin’s creation and the personal cost of it. The wife who left him, the friend’s death that made him quit it in 2011.
If this is all a show, he’s a convincing con man. Despite everything, this could be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Or perhaps not. Dr Courtois, after re-examining the evidence, writes in an email, “Craig has cheated us. It’s a hoax. I have proof.”
To explain what bitcoin is, it’s perhaps easier to start with what bitcoin isn’t.
It is not, strictly speaking, a currency. Whereas the value of a currency rises and falls at the mercy of interest rates, inflation, trade, global downturns, whims of government and, at the most extreme, simply how much of it there is in circulation (print too much, as Zimbabwe found at the turn of the century, and it becomes worthless), bitcoin is designed to be a finite resource, and is therefore classified by the American government as a commodity.
New bitcoins are created each day, but the rate at which they’re produced will continue to halve until, by the year 2140, 21 million have been created, at which point there will be no more. In this way, it’s more like gold.
It’s not the first ‘virtual’ currency, but it is the first successful one. There have been the likes of digicash, which used ‘cyberbucks’ (launched 1990, bankrupt 1998), beenz, which used a points system (launched 1998, defunct 2001), and e-gold, which used a digital currency redeemable for gold (launched 1996, everyone involved arrested by the American government in 2007).
All failed for different reasons, but the crucial one is trust. Digicash and beenz failed because not enough people used them. This is rarely a problem with dollars.
E-gold failed because hackers stealing money became widespread, plus it’s actually illegal to create your own currency in most countries, not least the US. This is something Hawaii resident Bernard von NotHaus also found to his cost in 2009, after he was arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiracy against the United States for creating and distributing his distinctly old-school ‘liberty dollars’ — he’d minted his own coins and printed his own notes.
As with all currencies, bitcoin is only valuable because people think it is. This is something bitcoin developers call a “collective hallucination”. The idea is that if everyone has the same hallucination, it is, for all intents and purposes, real.
We can be reasonably sure a dollar today is still a dollar tomorrow or next year. A bank may be robbed, but no one is going to rob all the banks. The worry with a digital currency is that a single hacker could crack the source code and take the lot.
But even here there’s a conundrum — steal it all and it becomes worthless. Imagine stealing all the money in the world and you start to appreciate the irony.
On all these fronts, bitcoin has proved remarkably resilient. Launched in 2009, it works using a distributed database known as the ‘blockchain’ — essentially a constantly updated record of every bitcoin transaction, shared across every computer on the bitcoin network. There’s no central hub, and so no office to raid (music and film piracy works in a similar way and is similarly tricky to squish). In a stroke, it solved a key problem of electronic money — the ‘double-spend’ dilemma.
With bits and bytes, what’s to stop you copying money several times over, rather than actually moving it? Banks solve this by acting as trusted middlemen who maintain an electronic ledger.
Now, everyone holds the ledger and everyone’s computers do the hard work (the reward for leaving your computer on is a chance of winning the newly created bitcoins — the process is called ‘mining’). Put another way: the internet is an exchange of information, some of it true, some of it not. Satoshi’s code harnessed it by ensuring an exchange of facts. The central code has also shown itself to be uncrackable. This is where Satoshi’s reputation was born.
Dan Kaminsky, an internet security expert who is notorious for once discovering a flaw in the internet that would have allowed a skilled hacker to shut it down, famously tried to crack bitcoin, but failed. He came to a simple conclusion: either Satoshi was actually a team of people or he was a genius. That was 2011. Today, it remains as bulletproof as ever.
The first ever real-world bitcoin transaction took place on May 22, 2010, when Florida programmer Laszlo Hanyecz made an offer on an internet forum: he would pay 10,000 bitcoins for someone to buy him two pizzas from local franchise, Papa John’s. He was taken up on the offer by a man in England who paid with his credit card: two Papa John’s pizzas duly arrived and Hanyecz sent the bitcoins over.
At the time, the 10,000 were worth around $25. Today, they would be worth $7.6m. Ever since, it’s been celebrated annually as ‘bitcoin pizza day’, where people raise a slice to the most expensive takeaway in history.
For quite some time, bitcoin effectively had no value, but two events were to change that. On June 1, 2011, Gawker published a story about the Silk Road — a dark web marketplace where drugs and firearms were sold. The story mentioned these items were being purchased using bitcoin, a digital currency they called “untraceable”.
This was not entirely accurate — the blockchain ledger is entirely transparent. The problem was, it didn’t link back to a person unless they were to convert their bitcoins back into regular currency, at which point, it did.
Regardless, the story put bitcoin on the map, and, within days, the value of a single bitcoin soared to $25. Later, the arrest of Silk Road’s founder — Ross Ulbricht, a 32-year- old from Austin, Texas who’d gone under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts — caused it to skyrocket. The FBI seized more than 144,000 bitcoins — worth $30m at the time and nearly $110m today — and subsequently told a US Senate committee hearing in November 2013 it was a “legitimate financial service”. Briefly, the price soared to $1360 for a single bitcoin, before levelling out in the high hundreds.
Still, there have been problems.
As bitcoins are essentially just data stored on your computer rather than in a bank, they’re remarkably easy to lose. Horror stories abound. Memory sticks worth thousands overwritten, computers worth fortunes junked. James Howells, an IT worker from Great Britain, lost 7500 bitcoins in 2013 when he accidentally threw out an old hard disk. It’s currently somewhere in a Welsh landfill and worth more than $5.7m.
Regardless, more than 100,000 companies now accept direct payment in bitcoin.
You can book a holiday (Expedia), sign up for dating (OkCupid), buy everything from a computer (Dell) to lingerie (Victoria’s Secret). You can even travel into space (Sir Richard Branson has said his company will accept bitcoin payment for Virgin Galactic). Japan has even declared it a legal currency. It could just be the start.
Cameron Winklevoss — one of the twins involved in the disputed foundation of Facebook and the subject of the 2010 film The Social Network — has, along with his twin, invested most of his fortune in bitcoin, the brothers currently estimated to own one per cent of all bitcoin in circulation. He’s suggested that, eventually, a single bitcoin could rise in value to more than $40,000, putting the cost of that 2010 pizza at slightly less than half a billion dollars (at which point you’d hope Hanyecz got his preferred toppings).
Economic pressures such as Donald Trump’s Republican nomination and the Brexit vote — events that weakened the dollar, pound and euro — have seen bitcoin’s value soar again, easily cresting $700 per coin.
Bitcoin was created by Nakamoto in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis to be free of such outside influences — and it was proving to be the case. Uber threatens to eliminate cab offices, but bitcoin is threatening to eliminate banks. It has, seemingly, become the most trusted form of money in the world.
Craig Wright is a computer scientist [note: he isn’t], serial entrepreneur (of many failing companies, at least one of which, Hotwire, has gone into administration) and serial collector of various degrees — even if he admits to exaggerating some on his LinkedIn profle. “It was all piss taken at myself,” he says, suggesting a curious sense of humour.
He apparently has qualifications in subjects ranging from theology to statistics, engineering to law. He is also under investigation by the Australian tax authorities — late last year, they raided his house over tax rebates his companies have claimed, of which Wright says, “We’ve been in negotiation with them for years — it’s not a criminal investigation.”
Dr Courtois says Wright could have been Satoshi. “He has the skills, he’s been at the crypto conferences.”
But he warns of two things.
One: “It’s quite possible it’s a collective creation.” And two: “You’d be a fool to claim you’re Satoshi. Not for a criminal connection, but a criminal responsibility connection. He could be prosecuted.”
Dr Courtois’ test is cryptographic.
The claim can be verified to be true or false — no shades of grey. The real Satoshi didn’t just create the code of bitcoin. He owns, according to a widely cited internet study by bitcoin security consultant Sergio Demian Lerner, around one million himself. At today’s value, that’s more than $761m.
Think of every bitcoin in existence as a Tetris stack — the earliest sit at the bottom. To prove he’s Satoshi, Wright has to spend, and therefore move, one of the earliest bitcoins in existence. Instead, he chooses to ‘sign’ one — essentially showing the note, rather than handing it over for inspection.
The evidence that Wright is Satoshi seems to be evenly balanced, if confusing and contradictory. Satoshi’s a native English speaker — his writing remarkably fluent in his many blog posts (tick). He uses terms like “bloody hard” and “flat” rather than “apartment”, suggesting an English, or at least a Commonwealth, origin (tick).
He embedded one of the first, unspendable, coins — known as the genesis block — with the Times headline from January 2009 about a second Gordon Brown bailout, suggesting a libertarian nature (Wright is a former subscriber to the Cypherpunks mailing list) and a British press reader (entirely possible). He wrote in a particular code (C++) and used a particular notation that was popular in the late ’80s and early ’90s, likely placing him in his forties (tick). And, finally, he packed up and left it all behind.
At 5:22am AEDT on December 13, 2010, seven days after a plea not to use bitcoin to donate to Wikileaks (“the heat it would bring would likely destroy us at this stage”), Satoshi Nakamoto posted his final message and disappeared.
The question remains: why come out now after six years away? “I don’t want to come out,” says Wright.
“But people in my organisation keep going, ‘We’ve got to do this.’”
With Dr Courtois in the room, Wright says it’s due to his family — “so they don’t get painted with this shit.” This is new. What organisation? There’s a pause. “I have a nice big organisation. We have offices in different locations, including London. No one knows who the fuck we are, and I like that.”
There are rumours of a supercomputer in Iceland. “Yes… I don’t want to talk about where it is… it’s not in Australia.”
But is it in Iceland? “If I answer that question I get in big trouble,” he says. “People are going to go, ‘Craig, you’re not supposed to talk about those things.’”
He looks over at the PRs. “At the end of the day, there is a company, people working for me. There are about 30 people in London. They don’t want to be known. Not because they don’t want to be seen with me, but because… because this is what they do.”
He won’t say exactly what that is.
Far from coming clean, every reply only opens up further questions — ones he then refuses to answer. He is curt in a half-smiling way that suggests he knows more, but won’t share it. In some ways, he’s almost childlike. He often leans back and straightens his tie, like a bank manager conducting an appraisal. With Dr Courtois out of the room, he bristles at how unfairly he’s been treated.
He says he doesn’t need to spend any bitcoins to prove who he is, because simply signing one shows he has access, and so, “It would be like I’ve stolen the Mona Lisa, put it on my wall, took a couple of pictures, then put it back.” It barely needs pointing out that a Polaroid of the Mona Lisa would not confirm one owned it.
Early bitcoin developer Gregory Maxwell claims that the documents leaked to Wired had been edited to make it look like he was Satoshi. “Bullshit from Maxwell that we had to get disproven — the codes are fucking out there.”
The person behind the leak, he says, is a former employee attempting to extort him. “I have my suspicions, but I don’t have proof, so I can’t say.” Curiously, it’s only when he speaks about his private life, about how much bitcoin’s creation had cost him, that he relaxes and calms. Stroking his tie once more, finally the words begin to flow.
This is how bitcoin started — at least, as far as he tells it. He’d been working on bitcoin, on and off, he says, for a decade. Tinkering here and there. He’d initially got into computers through his grandfather, who let him use his terminal in the basement.
His father, says Wright, openly disliked him. “We didn’t get on. I haven’t spoken to my father in a long time. He never liked what I did, never liked my life.”
He collected degrees for fun, and soon developed a reputation as the go-to guy for a range of computing consultancy roles at start-ups. It was only when he was let go, he says, from his role at accountancy firm BDO in January 2008, when the financial crisis started to hit, that he fully devoted himself to it. “They gave me this whack of money, enough not to work, not forever, but from then on, I could dedicate my time.”
Wright hunkered down at his house in a remote farm in Port Macquarie, surrounded by screens, and set to work. He had help, he says, notably from a friend called Dave Kleiman.
As a former army officer and Palm Beach County Sheriff, Kleiman was not your usual computer geek. After suffering a motorcycle accident in 1995, which left him wheelchair-bound, he became a computer autodidact. CNN and ABC called on him regularly to dish out advice on security and passwords. He had so many three-letter qualifications after his name that his nickname became Dave Mississippi.
“He helped a lot,” says Wright.
“He knew who I was.”
The leaked documents, if accurate, reflect this. An email sent from Wright to Kleiman on March 12, 2008 brings it up abruptly:
“I need your help editing a paper…”
By October 2008, the now-famous white paper was published: “Bitcoin: A Peer-To- Peer Electronic Cash System”. By January 2009, the free software was released online.
He says it consumed him. He didn’t look for a job. Soon, his marriage started failing.
“It wasn’t the best way to maintain a marriage,” he says. His wife would ask, ‘Craig, what the fuck are you going to do to pay the rent?’ He would simply reply, ‘We’re fine.’ He wasn’t. The value of bitcoin was still on the floor. He remortgaged his house to keep going.
By 2011, Wright says, everything fell apart. His wife decided to leave him (“Some of that was bitcoin’s fault”). Kleiman had fallen in the shower in late 2010, and was subsequently in and out of hospital (“Dave was my best friend. He kept me sane… That was hard”).
The burden of being Satoshi, he says, became too great. He left it all behind.
The search for Satoshi has been difficult precisely because of his brilliance. He would have to be an expert in many fields — a deep understanding of coding, economics, financial markets and advanced cryptology.
Hardly anyone fits the bill. A team — or a genius.
“I know people want me to be something else,” he says. “People want me to be an academic. I’m not. I’m an applied scientist and an applied engineer. I take different ideas and stick them together. Edison didn’t invent new theory. And Ben Franklin didn’t invent new theory. Tesla didn’t. Steve Jobs didn’t.”
While studying advanced economics for one of his many qualifications, Wright came across the famous essay, ‘I, Pencil’, written in 1958 by Leonard Read. It contains a proposition — the pencil may seem like a simple object, yet “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”
From the wood to the tools to chop the wood, to the tools to make those tools, to the graphite, the rubber and the metal, a single pencil is a cooperation of thousands of experts in dozens of fields, stretching back in time, from across the world. But Wright took this as a challenge. He wanted to make a pencil from scratch.
“And I couldn’t cheat. You can’t go out and buy a chisel. You have to build the tools. And you can’t start by building iron tools. To make them you need copper tools. And for copper tools you need stone tools.” He spent years on it, even building his own kiln to make the graphite. In he end, he made five pencils that cost him more than $1200 each. “That’s probably another reason I got divorced.”
After a story like that, it’s easy to believe Wright could well be Satoshi. Despite him not moving early bitcoins. Despite the unconvincing answers about his reasons for coming out (what was this company?). Despite the unauthored paper Wright produced to disprove Maxwell’s claims about the origin of the leaked documents (“It doesn’t say ‘By Craig Wright’ on the piece as such,” says Wright’s PR firm, “but as the whole pack is called ‘Craig Wright’ and relates to him, it seems clear it’s his piece”). Despite a source, who asked not to be named, seemingly confirming a company had forced Wright to say he’s Satoshi:
“They’re big players, but they want him to come out as Satoshi Nakamoto, basically in order to get more gravitas.” Also, for a man who supposedly has that many coins (“I’m not spending them,” he says. “They’re going nowhere”), he’s weirdly boastful about what car he drives (“I own an i8, a BMW, a nice fast car. I get speeding tickets but I pay them”) or the restaurants he eats at (“I’ve been to three of Gordon Ramsay’s so far”).
Because doesn’t that pencil anecdote just sum him up? The genius who’d have to master so many skills and the man who’d have to put them all together.
When the judgement comes, it’s swift and unforgiving. This tends to happen on the internet: damnation goes viral. Reddit forums light up. He’s lying. The world quickly realises what Dr Courtois has already discovered: Wright, and his cryptographic proof, are full of shit — his early bitcoin transaction was one that had already been signed by Satoshi years ago. Anyone could have done it. To use his own Mona Lisa metaphor, he didn’t present a Polaroid of the painting on his wall — he presented someone else’s old Polaroid.
From the BBC to The New York Times to The Guardian, claims of a hoax proliferated. Wright counters — he’ll provide “extraordinary proof” to match his “extraordinary claim”. It never comes.
Days later, Wright releases a statement on his website: “I know now that I am not strong enough for this. I’m sorry.”
Various experts working on bitcoin-related projects chime in. “If he is who he claims to be, there’s an easy way to prove it,” says Pavel Matveev, of bitcoin start-up Wirex, which is working on a bitcoin debit card.
“It seems like he’s Satoshi Nakamoto,” says Frank Schuil, of bitcoin spending platform start-up Safello, “but he has one hell of a reason not to reveal it.”
“It’s a strange play either way,” says Dr James Smith of Elliptic, a bitcoin company that identifies illicit activity for financial institutions and law enforcement agencies. “I think he’d be nuts if it isn’t him, but I think he’d be nuts if it is as well.”
Another writer, Andrew O’Hagan, has been chronicling Wright’s story from the inside, after an offer by mysterious company nCrypt. The people behind nCrypt, it turns out, rescued Wright. His businesses were failing, he was in trouble with the Australian tax authorities and he owed his lawyers millions. They offered an out — they’d buy up his companies and settle his debts.
In return, he’d work on patents linked to the underlying blockchain technology behind bitcoin. And he would publicly out himself as Satoshi. The package, they felt, was worth billions. They planned to sell to Google.
Coincidence or not, while O’Hagan’s writing his article, documents linking Wright to Satoshi are leaked to Wired and Gizmodo, explaining why a man worth more than three quarters of a billion should need such a bailout — most of his bitcoins are held in a trust, a document suggests. Wright can’t sell them until 2020. It’s one of many ‘facts’ that don’t quite add up. The patent story is true enough — nCrypt’s company director is a Mr Robert MacGregor.
He, in turn, is linked to an umbrella company called EITC Holdings Limited. Between February 23 and April 29 this year, they held 51 patents, all linked to blockchain technology. They are, in essence, trying to corner the market in the new internet of fact exchange.
That said, experts are sceptical that the patents will be successful — nCrypt’s really selling Satoshi. The documents show plans to use the technology for everything from voting to payroll, from money lending to music and film software to eradicate piracy. But many other claims by Wright don’t stand up to scrutiny. Take his tragic story about his friend Dave Kleiman. After the fall in the shower that December day — which saw Wright, so he says, leave the mantle of Satoshi behind him — Kleiman’s condition worsened.
He developed sores, which became infected with golden staph; he was in and out of hospital and had multiple operations. Yet every time, he’d get right back to his computer, holding up for days at a time, rarely going out. After dismissing himself from hospital for a final time, he was found dead in his wheelchair on April 27, 2013.
According to the Palm Beach County Medical Examiner Office, his body was decomposing; there was blood and faecal matter; an empty bottle of alcohol and a loaded handgun next to him. Apparently, he died penniless — his Palm Beach home was in foreclosure. It’s been suggested, however, that as one of the founders of bitcoin, he actually passed away with some 350,000 bitcoins sitting on an encrypted USB drive that he kept on him at all times.
“Yes, that’s accurate, based on the information that I have,” says Jon Matonis. But the question remains: why didn’t he cash out to get private health care?
Speaking to O’Hagan, Wright confirms Kleiman did indeed have 350,000 bitcoins. Yet in explaining why he didn’t sell, Wright says, “It wasn’t worth much then. Dave died a week before the value went up by 25 times.”
O’Hagan then adds, “He [Wright] emphasised something he said the commentators never understood — for a long time, bitcoin wasn’t worth anything and they constantly needed money.”
But it’s not remotely true. At the time of Dave Kleiman’s death, on April 26, 2013, bitcoin’s value was at $124.50, making his stash of 350,000 worth more than $43.5m. The next week, meanwhile, rather than having gone up in value 25 times as Wright claims, it went down to $95.60. In fact, it wasn’t until weeks later that it had even reached the same level.
It was baffling. Why lie? What was being hidden here? One of the few solid things that came from the real Satoshi are his blog posts, now archived at satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org. He writes about the task at hand — personal details are virtually non-existent.
Yet the most telling thing isn’t what the posts are about, but when they were posted. In more than 500 posts, Satoshi almost never published between the hours of 3pm and 9pm AEST, suggesting that’s when he slept. Wright says: “I was up at all times always doing stuff, as people have seen I was around the clock… ”
Yet those publishing hours would suggest that Wright had a truly bizarre sleeping pattern of 3pm to 9pm. Transpose those same timings to Florida, however, where Kleiman lived, and it becomes 1am to 7am.
Kleiman is rumoured to have died without giving anyone, not least his family, the drive’s encryption keys, meaning no one can access them. At today’s prices, the bitcoin on it would be worth $266m. If Kleiman — and not Wright — was the real Satoshi, it would explain why Wright didn’t move them.
Maybe no one could. It would also mean he stepped away from being Satoshi after first being admitted to hospital, as his health began to fail. Kleiman’s former colleague at Computer Forensics LLC, Patrick Paige, contacted for his input, asks after Craig Wright: “Is he on suicide watch yet?”
His tone doesn’t suggest concern.
Perhaps most bizarrely, the reason Wright finally gives for not wanting to move the early bitcoins, thereby proving beyond all doubt he’s Satoshi, is an article with the headline: “UK Law Enforcement Sources Hint At Impending Craig Wright Arrest”. He sobs about this. He says, “The Brits have got their own version of Guantanamo Bay.” He says he’s damned if he does, he’s damned if he doesn’t. He’ll be seen as a fraud, or he’ll go to jail.
Yet it turns out this isn’t true either. The story he’s referring to appeared on specialist bitcoin website bitcoinist.net.
Yet go to that link now and it starts with an editor’s note: “The SiliconAngle piece cited in this article was produced by an impostor site posing as the real SiliconAngle.”
Someone had gone to the effort of creating a fake website to create that story, the only difference being an extra “L” in the name. Senior editor at Bitcoinist, Evan Faggart, details the amount of time the Wright story was on their website before the editor’s note was added.
“No more than 24 hours.”
Twenty-four hours. Is it feasible that Wright clicked on this link once then never again? A man sobbing at the prospect of being locked up in whatever he assumes the British Guantanamo Bay to be? Would he not check back? One thing the editor at both sites agree on — the fake site, which has since been taken down, was an uncanny replica of the real thing. It would have taken substantial computer skills, and no small effort.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Faggart. One line in O’Hagan’s piece, then, feels particularly pertinent, when the act seems to slip. When Wright seems to admit he was actually Satoshi’s sidekick. Wright makes the point that he wrote all the new patents himself and “not just Dave”.
As Wright’s claims unravel, New York plays host to a United Nations conference called ID2020 and 400 people from NGOs, tech firms and nearly every bank in the world. It’s the brainchild of John Edge, a former investment banker who, on May 4, 2013, was set up on a blind date with a girl who asked him, “All this money stuff, fine, but what are you doing to make a difference?” He didn’t have an answer, but he did have an idea.
He knew how money flowed through computer systems. Specifically, how the FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol radically changed trading when it was introduced in 1992, all but eliminating human errors. “What it did was turn a telecommunications network into a transactions network.”
He realised Satoshi Nakamato, with the shared ledger that underpinned bitcoin, had done the same for the internet. But how to use it? He’d had meetings with global telecommunications players, with major banks, but the reaction was always the same: don’t be stupid.
Isn’t bitcoin that thing for drug dealers? Only now, he had his lightbulb moment. What if there was an altruistic use for it? The bitcoin technology, the shared ledger, was incorruptible. It sat with no single government. He knew 1.5 billion people around the world didn’t have identities on paper — and without birth certificates, they could have no bank account, and were at greater risk of kidnap, trafficking and abuse.
Edge is a likeable, plain-speaking man. He’s also not a shy one. On his second date, he said to the girl, “I think this system can get a billion people a bank account.”
Bitcoin may change banking, but it’s the underlying technology that may truly end up changing the world.
Even here, of course, there’s a final irony. That a man who sat in his house and invented the future, who never wanted his identity known and whose real name we’ll likely never know — perhaps Kleiman, who died alone — may end up providing identities for billions.
When Satoshi first went missing, a popular tagline among bitcoin’s early adopters suggested they knew it was for the best; that perhaps one man would be too small for it, the invention was too big. It’s a line repeated again and again at the United Nations.
“We are all Satoshi now.”
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The End. Thanks for reading again, cheers!
