Craig Steven Wright claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto

If you're using a given key daily, yeah, it's not a big hoop. But I imagine Satoshi having his key hidden on an offline computer right now, hidden securely. Taking it out of vault must be a lot of effort.

So either Gavin knew or didn't. As a core dev I am not sure which is worse.

Here is the full document: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/12/17/sartre-on-the-nob...

but since getting a single piece of whitespace wrong would throw the hash off completely, that isn't terribly useful. Though it seems that it should be possible to brute force every reasonable permutation of formatting for the article and find one whose hash matches the one he provided, if it's the real source. The search space of "documents within a string edit distance of N" is probably not too large.

I don't believe this for a second - and i'm more interested in figuring out how he duped two Bitcoin developers and some of the most notable news outlets in the world.

When the link to Wright was first reported in Wired[0] and Gizmodo[1], after letting the news sink in for a day it was apparent that the evidence trail was an elaborate ruse. I don't know if Wright leaked the hack to the media (I think it was more likely to be a disgruntled former employee who bought into the story), but there were many journalists who turned down that story while it was being shopped widely because it didn't smell right (this is no slight on gwern, Andy Greenburg and Sam Biddle who could bring to the story more than what most ordinary journalists could, and mention that it could be a hoax)

Consider that Wright faked old blog posts, allowed them to be found, and then deleted them. Consider that he added a new Satoshi Nakomoto PGP key to keyservers with an email he controlled (which was different, obviously) in 2013, three years after the real Satoshi disappeared. Consider that Wright claimed to have a super computer and produced a reference letter from SGI, but that SGI claimed no knowledge of the computer or letter and it turned out to be fake (in some parts of the world - this is known as fraud)[2]. Consider his LinkedIn said he earned a Phd. from Bathurst University but the University knew nothing about it[3]. Consider the only people Wright revealed he was Satoshi to were a few select employees and people he was trying to raise money from (he said he was a billionaire but the funds were locked up - it is a modern digital version of a 419 scam).

Consider, also, that he says he "tried to keep his head down" but shows up at a Bitcoin panel as an unknown and suggestively describes himself vaguely - with a smirk and a wink. Consider that he says he doesn't want the fame or attention, but shopped an exclusive deal around the media for a month and went with the BBC, The Economist and GQ - and is currently on every TV channel. Consider that Wright, despite being quasi-published, has never produced anything approaching the complexity, clarity, succinctness and humble nature of the Bitcoin paper, but is the complete opposite of all of these characteristics (rambles and talks down to people, explaining detail not so that the reader learns it - but so that you know that he knows this shit).

From what I know about him, it seems Wright is experienced with barely getting along with big pie-in-the-sky ideas that convince a lot of people around him, but that definitely are in the grey area between legitimate and fraud. He is able to drown people in quasi-technical talk and on big ideas and is very personable (we also have a word for people who take fraudulent action via their charms).

He avoids people who are actual experts in the areas he himself professes to be an expert in, and when he is in relevant forums or other online communities he downplays his achievements.

Some examples: He claimed to be published in infosec, but rather than writing for the usual outlets he wrote for political blogs on infosec topics[4] (often poorly). He added his two supercomputers to the top 500 index (which is self reported) but never participated in the online communities, but he did brag about it in investment material. He didn't interact with professors or students at universities, but did teach a remote webinar course on supercomputing at a pay-for school[4] and finally, with Bitcoin - in investment material and to employees he was a domain expert and the founder but he was never a regular in online communities or conferences (although it seems he got to a point of even convincing Bitcoin experts that he knew what he was talking about)

He is currently being pursued in Australia by tax authorities not because, as was commonly reported, not paying taxes on the Satoshi coins (you don't pay tax in Australia until gains are realized) but because he was one of the largest claimants of R&D tax concessions in Australia (larger than Google and Atlassian) and this is a common area of fraud (create a fake company, say you employe 50 people, claim that 'R&D spend' back - similar to sales tax fraud).

One more point of doubt - but I leave it because it is a bit ad hominem - it turns out that you can't work for long in Sydney without knowing someone who worked for Wright in one of his schemes or knowing someone who knew someone. Turns out I had 2 friends who worked with him at various points. Both offered characterizations of Wright as being crazy and deceiving. He is very convincing in the short term, but things start to unwind over time. One is still, despite being mildly burnt by him, partly convinced he may have had something to do with Bitcoin because "he is just that crazy, you learn not to be surprised by stuff" - but then snapped out of it.

Is this really Satoshi? It isn't - i'm going to start from the perspective that Wright has pulled off (another) impressive fraud. I'm more interested in figuring out how the hell he did this.

edit: that didn't take long. It appears there is evidence in this thread, on reddit and on Twitter that the 'verification' falls short and is just an old bitcoin transaction[6]

edit: I just got this from another former employee of Wright's - "best conman i've ever met"

[0] https://www.wired.com/2015/12/bitcoins-creator-satoshi-nakam...

[1] http://gizmodo.com/this-australian-says-he-and-his-dead-frie...

[2] https://www.wired.com/2015/12/new-clues-suggest-satoshi-susp...

[3] http://gizmodo.com/the-mystery-of-craig-wright-and-bitcoin-i...

[4] https://theconversation.com/lulzsec-anonymous-freedom-fighte...

[5] https://www.itmasters.edu.au/free-short-course-programming-s...

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hf4s2/craig_wrigh...

This is absolutely fake and already debunked, as mentioned on the bitcointalk forums: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1457039.msg14728531#...

The signature Wright posted is a signature from a transaction on the blockchain (and therefore cannot be a signature of a Nobel prize refusal speech or whatever other message he claims): https://blockchain.info/tx/828ef3b079f9c23829c56fe86e85b4a69...

The above tx's scriptSig: 3045022100c12a7d54972f26d14cb311339b5122f8c187417dde1e8efb6841f55c34220ae0022066632c5cd4161efa3a2837764eee9eb84975dd54c2de2865e9752585c53e7cce01

The signature Wright posted:

    $ echo 'MEUCIQDBKn1Uly8m0UyzETObUSL4wYdBfd4ejvtoQfVcNCIK4AIgZmMsXNQWHvo6KDd2Tu6euEl13VTC3ihl6XUlhcU+fM4=' | base64 -d | xxd -p
    3045022100c12a7d54972f26d14cb311339b5122f8c187417dde1e8efb68
    41f55c34220ae0022066632c5cd4161efa3a2837764eee9eb84975dd54c2
    de2865e9752585c53e7cce