An Australian man named Craig Wright told the world today he is "Satoshi Nakamoto," the man who created Bitcoin. Yet despite Wright's stunning declaration and the fact that it's backed by some of the most famous names in Bitcoin, others continue to cry foul.
Wright gave interviews and demonstrations to the BBC, GQ magazine, and The Economist, and he published his own blog post claiming the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. He has convinced Gavin Andresen, former lead Bitcoin developer, as well as former Bitcoin Foundation Director Jon Matonis.
Wright was first identified as the possible creator of bitcoin in December, but he hid from public view at that time."Either Wright invented Bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did," concluded Wired's Andy Greenberg. Three days after the evidence was published, Greenberg and others were leaning toward the "hoax" conclusion.
Hours after publication by all three outlets, Wright's proof has been seriously called into question by outside experts. The Australian man's key offer was the publication, on his blog, of what says is a cryptographic signature proving he is Nakamoto, because it's related to "block 9." That's an early chunk of bitcoins associated with Nakamoto, known to have been transferred to computer scientist Hal Finney, who died in 2014. Within hours, experts in the field called this signature into question.
"Satoshi signed a transaction in 2009," Dan Kaminsky, chief scientist at White Ops, explained on Twitter. "Wright copied that specific signature and tried to pass it off as new. OpenSSL bugs interfered."
A poster on Hacker News took a similar path to debunking, finding that the cryptographic signature on Wright's post was pulled from the blockchain, the database that serves as a kind of public ledger of bitcoin transactions.
UC Berkeley computer scientist Nicholas Weaver called Wright's method "provably fraudulent, passing off an old signature as new."
Wright also provided verification for block 1 during a demonstration with observers, but he wouldn't make that proof public.
There are other ways someone could prove they are Satoshi Nakamoto. First of all, Nakamoto is believed to have about 1 million bitcoins, now worth more than $400 million. Proving control over that chunk of digital cash would be meaningful. But as Wright told The Economist, he can't send any bitcoins "because they are now owned by a trust."
Asked for additional proof, he became defensive. "I'm not going to keep jumping through hoops," he told The Economist.
"Look, I’m doing this, then I’m disappearing," he told GQ. "I’m not doing this to try and get in the media. This will never happen again. You’ve got this one thing. If you don’t like it, fuck off."
The defensiveness and lack of public proof all suggest a hoax. But the most confounding element of today's drama continues to be the support Wright has from Andresen and Matonis.
Matonis' blog post, "How I Met Satoshi," suggests he witnessed the same proof as The Economist journalists—the signing and verifying of messages using private keys from blocks 1 and 9. Matonis continues:
The social evidence, including his unique personality, early emails that I received, and early drafts of the Bitcoin white paper, points to Craig as the creator. I also received satisfactory explanations to my questions about registering the bitcoin.org domain and the various time-of-day postings to the BitcoinTalk forum. Additionally, Craig's technical working knowledge of public key cryptography, Bitcoin's addressing system, and proof-of-work consensus in a distributed peer-to-peer environment is very strong.
Andresen speaks in similarly stark terms, saying he is "convinced beyond a reasonable doubt" that "Craig Wright is Satoshi." He describes their meeting:
Part of that time was spent on a careful cryptographic verification of messages signed with keys that only Satoshi should possess. But even before I witnessed the keys signed and then verified on a clean computer that could not have been tampered with, I was reasonably certain I was sitting next to the Father of Bitcoin.
During our meeting, I saw the brilliant, opinionated, focused, generous—and privacy-seeking—person that matches the Satoshi I worked with six years ago. And he cleared up a lot of mysteries, including why he disappeared when he did and what he’s been busy with since 2011.
Again this morning, Andresen confirmed to Bitcoin News that he believes Wright is Satoshi.
The hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto has been going on for years. In 2014, Newsweek published a story pointing to a California man named Dorian Nakamoto, but the story didn't hold up.