With a claimed IQ of 183, 14 master’s degrees and at least two doctorates, Craig Wright certainly seemed to have enough intelligence to become the legendary founder of Bitcoin.
The computer scientist readily acknowledged that he was the real Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the trillion-dollar cryptocurrency, after he was exposed by journalists nearly a decade ago.
And over the years, he had produced a seemingly wealth of evidence supporting his claim, from contemporaneous notes indicating his intention to establish the digital currency to, most importantly, the private key that unlocked it.
But now, the 53-year-old’s claims have finally and definitively proven to be what many in the crypto community have believed for years; It’s nothing but complete nonsense.
After a five-week trial at the High Court, Judge James Mellor concluded that Wright had not only lied “extensively and repeatedly” but also committed forgery on a “massive scale”.
“Dr. “Wright presents himself as an extremely intelligent person,” the judge said dryly in his harsh 231-page decision. “However, in my opinion, he is not as smart as he thinks he is.”
The news was met with a huge sense of relief in the crypto community; Many have been highly skeptical of Wright’s claims since they first emerged in 2015.
The abrasive Australian has spent years targeting skeptics with expensive legal action, threatening to hunt them down personally “until they’re broke, bankrupt and alone”.
mysterious identity
But it was this “arrogance” that ultimately led to his downfall, according to the judge, who said the real Satoshi would never have filed suit.
The mysterious identity of Bitcoin’s founder has been confusing journalists and crypto enthusiasts since the cryptocurrency’s “white paper” was first published in 2008. The article describes Bitcoin as a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” “electronic money.” It will replace money transfers that are currently controlled by the financial system.
The white paper’s author, under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, exchanged hundreds of messages with collaborators before abruptly cutting off contact in 2011.
In the following years, many claims emerged that he was the real Nakamoto, but he was quickly discredited. Until the name of Wright, an obscure IT security consultant, came up.
Operating on the fringes of the crypto industry, the married father of three from Brisbane, Australia, was “uncovered” by tech publications wired And Gizmodo.
The evidence was based on leaked emails and transcripts, including one in which Wright said: “I did my best to hide the fact that I had been running Bitcoin since 2009.”
It may not be a coincidence that Wright, who denied being behind the leak, was self-promoting as Nakamoto at the time.
In financial trouble and in disputes with the Australian tax office, he had agreed to cede “exclusive rights” to his life story as the creator of Bitcoin to billionaire Canadian businessman Calvin Ayre.
In return, he was loaned around £1.3 million to sort out tax problems, which was his lifeline at the time, and became the chief scientist of a new crypto company that was set to make money for itself.
To prove that his claim was true, his sponsors devised a plan in which Wright would publicly release cryptographic evidence, ending the mystery once and for all. But the big reveal never came.
Instead, he published a jargon-heavy blog post that fell short of meeting the required burden of proof. Some of Bitcoin’s most trusted names, who had previously supported Wright, claimed that they had been deceived.
legal battles
However, in the face of widespread rejection from members of the crypto community, the stubborn Wright doubled down aggressively.
He said he would launch a “Jihad” against skeptics on social media and boasted: “I’m the godsend of cryptocurrency.” Expensive lawsuits supported by Ayre quickly became his weapon of choice.
In 2019, he registered a US copyright for both the Bitcoin white paper and its code, further fueling tensions within the crypto community, and his legal battles have taken him to multiple jurisdictions from the US to Norway.
By 2021, an influential group of industry leaders decided enough was enough and formed the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA). Its mission was to openly share technology and “stand up to bullies like Wright.”
They filed a lawsuit in the UK Supreme Court to “disprove Wright’s delusion of grandeur”, eventually proving once and for all that Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto.
For five weeks this spring, Dr. Wright was questioned in detail about nearly 100 documents that he claimed were proof that he wrote the white paper.
One key piece of “evidence” was a one-page note scribbled in a Quill notebook dated August 2007. The memo summarized a meeting between Wright and a colleague in which they discussed a new form of digital currency that would be transferred from person to person without intermediaries. Along with a list of follow-up steps that mention an “article” set to be published in 2008.
But an affidavit from Quill’s parent company, Hamelin Brands, revealed that the pad did not enter circulation until 2012, several years after Bitcoin was created.
Wright insisted in court that the company was at fault. COPA’s lawyer responded: “Dr Wright, you’re making this up as you go along.”
‘Lie and evasion’
To many who have studied Wright over the years, his capacity to exaggerate the truth comes as no surprise. Even his mother admitted that Wright, who was raised a Catholic, had a “long-standing habit of adding parts to the truth to magnify it.”
Scottish author Andrew O’Hagan, who spent nearly nine months with Dr Wright in 2016, saw a similar trait. He wrote: ‘What his mother said connected to something I noticed. He often went further than he needed to in what he said; He went further than he should have. ‘He seemed to start with the truth and then gradually inflate his part until the whole story suddenly seemed weak.’
Judge Mellor’s own assessment found: “As soon as a lie was exposed, Dr. Wright resorted to more lies and evasions.” He concluded that Wright took his lies and dishonesty to ever greater levels as he faced increasingly serious challenges to his claim.
Judge Mellor counted 47 forgeries in total and suggested that Wright’s attempts to explain them quickly devolved into “technoperversion”.
But Wright’s character was the subject of the harshest criticism, whose writings and correspondence he said were completely at odds with Nakomoto, who was “calm, knowledgeable, cooperative, with little or no arrogance”.
So where does this leave Wright? So will we find the real Satoshi Nakamoto?
Unsurprisingly, Wright said he intends to appeal the decision. But perhaps this chapter is closing for now in terms of the identity of Bitcoin’s creator.
The basis of Bitcoin is the idea that it is a decentralized currency that is not owned by anyone and cannot be corrupted by human influence. What right does Wright, or anyone else, have to demand that? However, it is still possible that the epic will not harm him.
As Gavin Andresen, an American software developer who played a key role in the creation of Bitcoin, put it: “Having a mysterious founder is a big creation myth. People love the creation myth. Knowing the real story might make Bitcoin less interesting to people.”