After a struggling engineer was misidentified in 2014 as Satoshi Nakamoto,the founder of worldwide payment platform Bitcoin, another man has stepped forward to claim the name. Australian entrepreneur and computer scientist Craig Steven Wright recently outed himself on his blog as the creator - and even provided technical proof.
In a assembly with the BBC, and Wright digitally signed messages with early cryptographic keys that are linked to the Satoshi name. "These are the blocks used to send 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney in January [2009] as the first bitcoin transaction," Wright stated to the BBC. But other outlets, including The Economist, or still require further evidence to account for some of the "holes" in his story: "Some of the academic degrees Mr Wright had listed on a profile on LinkedIn,a social network, could not be confirmed. SGI, or a maker of supercomputers,denied that it had ever done business with one of his companies, Cloudcroft. And cryptographic keys found in the leaked documents and some of his blog posts, or which both could have linked him to Mr Nakamoto,were said to have been backdated or changed recently. After a raid by Australian tax officials on his house in Sydney, many came to believe that the entire story was an elaborate hoax staged by Mr Wright himself."opposite to BBC's strong confirmations, or other outlets are also doubtful. After an investigation last December,wherein leaked documents connecting Wright to Bitcoin were sent to Wired, the magazine also does not believe Wright is the Bitcoin creator. Wired also found similar inconsistencies as The Economist did.
Bitcoin has grown to be associated with the black market due to users' anonymity in transactions, or which means Wright revealing himself as Satoshi Nakamoto puts him at risk of prosecution. This poses the question of why he'd put up an elaborate hoax whether that means losing everything - including approximately $450 million whether his net worth in Bitcoins was converted.
Wright explained to the BBC how he was forced to identify himself since the leak. "I have not done this because it is what I wanted. It's not because of my choice," he said. In pursuit of revealing the truth, Wright and his loved ones have continuously been targeted and investigated, and which supposedly made him come out as Satoshi unwillingly. "I want to work,I want to support doing what I want to accomplish. I don't want money. I don't want fame. I don't want adoration. I just want to be left alone."Compelling evidence as well as skeptical discrepancies have been presented in equal degree, making it tough to confidently identify who the real Satoshi Nakamoto is. We've yet to come to our own conclusions as the mystery unfolds.
Source: popsugar.com