Bitcoin Creator Steps Forward and His Name Is Craig Wright
Satoshi has stopped hiding. Well, probably anyway.
UPDATE: Make that probably not!
While some say we’ll never know for sure who created bitcoin (and perhaps more significantly, the blockchain that underlies it), an Australian entrepreneur has pointed the finger at — himself.
Craig Wright was previously named as the possible Satoshi back in December, when documents said to be stolen from him pointed to early involvement in bitcoin. In owning up to the alias, Wright said that he is coming forward not for publicity, but to save friends from being harassed. His own home was recently raided by revenue authorities in Australia over taxation issues.
The BBC, which has a (non-embeddable) video interview with Wright, expressed no skepticism over his declaration, noting “Prominent members of the Bitcoin community and its core development team have also confirmed Mr Wright’s claim.” The Economist, another organization Wright contacted, took a far more skeptical angle. An interview with Wright will also appear in an upcoming issue of GQ.
Wright himself takes an oblique approach to his identity as bitcoin’s creator in a highly technical blogpost published this morning.
The news comes as interest in bitcoin has significantly fallen off the frenzied levels that accompanied Newsweek‘s identification in February 2014 of Satoshi as Dorian Satoshi Nakamoti, a retired software engineer living outside Los Angeles. These days it is all about the blockchain.
So the question remains why now? “I didn’t decide — I had people decide this matter for me,” Wright told the BBC. He does not want publicity, he says, and does not want further attention. Good luck with that.
