We are all Satoshi Nakamoto

The real Satoshi Nakamoto was a man with obvious motives. We know from many of his statements on forums in 2009, and the first message stamped on the blockchain that year, that he appreciates Libertarianism and created Bitcoin in response to the financial crisis that was engulfing the world. We know that he saw decentralized, open source code like TOR as something that could hold up against government scrutiny.

We know that he studied Austrian Economics, and the body of work that he built Bitcoin on top of indicates that he followed the Cypherpunks, who were already working on a decentralized currency solution to help wrest power away from governments and the global banking elite.

Cypherpunks have a stated goal of using code to fight against any oppressive government or corporation that tries to remove anyone’s privacy. The creation of Bitcoin, some argue, is the largest step ever taken towards that goal.

Satoshi vanished without any warning immediately after developer Gavin Andresen told him that he gave a presentation on Bitcoin to the CIA.

Yet today we keep seeing claims that Satoshi has returned. If Satoshi wanted to prove his identity without any doubts, all he’d really have to do is spend any small amount of his stash. We can see many addresses that mined bitcoins back in the beginning that have never spent any of their considerable income. Most or perhaps all of these belong to Satoshi, holding over 1.1 million coins, and all it would take is sending any tiny amount from any of these addresses to any other address while writing a small message on the transaction like “See I told you I was Satoshi.” That would be instant proof that the claimant is in control of Satoshi’s private keys.

Still, the attempts to find Satoshi are constant. This week’s outing is Craig Wright, an Australian who recently spoke at a bitcoin conference, and until now has been a lesser-known, but respectable figure in the bitcoin community.

The trouble all started with a pair of articles on Tuesday, one from tech magazine WIRED and then a few hours later, a second from tech blog Gizmodo.

"Bitcoin’s Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Probably This Unknown Australian Genius"
— – WIRED

Both had been tipped off, by an unnamed source, that Wright was the “true” identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, although they did, to their credit, leave room for the possibility that it could be some sort of hoax or fraud. Within hours, the Guardian reported that the Australian Tax authority (ATO) had raided Wright’s home too.

Among the evidence given that Wright was Satoshi was “the tulip document,” dated 2011, which shows what appears to be Wright giving his now-deceased partner Dave Kleiman all of Satoshi’s 1.1 Million bitcoins, and valuing them for tax purposes. Of course, this was not an actual transfer of bitcoins, it was just a document that looks like an official, old-world, finance asset transfer. It says right on the page that “No record of this transaction will be filed in the US or Australia,” so if it’s not an official record from the state, which begs the question; why not just send Dave the coins in the way bitcoin was intended?

After much speculation in the bitcoin community, it soon came out that Wright’s company owed the ATO AUD$1.7 million, and Wright had been trying to claim much more than that in recent years, for which he was under investigation.

By the time of the ATO raid, Wright and his family had loaded the car and disappeared, rumored to be on their way to England. Wright had also very quickly scrubbed almost everything from his digital life off the face of the web.

Around the time he allegedly fled, a myriad of other reasons that Wright couldn’t be Satoshi had surfaced. His Feb 2014 announcement that he was starting up Denariuz bank sounded suspicious to everyone who knew that Satoshi was trying to create a world without banks.

Neither of the two PGP public keys referenced in the tulip document were previously used by Satoshi. His writing style also appears distinctly different, spelling atrociously at times, while Satoshi wrote meticulously and accurately in his forum posts and emails.

Julian Assange, a noted Cypherpunk who has said on occasion that he used to speak to Satoshi, quickly took to twitter to say it was unlikely to be the real Satoshi.

"We assess that Craig S Wright is unlikely to be the principal coder behind Bitcoin. e.g during 2011 CSW authored"
— – WikiLeaks

Even more details have started to unravel, especially in the online profile and electronic signature of the new supposed Satoshi. The email address used for posting to the newsgroup wasn’t quite right, being ‘[email protected],’ instead of the original ‘[email protected]’ used in 2008.

Perhaps that clue was the one that prompted bitcoin core developer Greg Maxwell to look deeper into the other evidence that WIRED and Gizmodo posted. He remembered a conversation had with other developers in 2011, where they all looked at Satoshi’s private key on a public keyserver. According to Maxwell, the two private keys that Craig Wright claims are his today did not exist at that time.

This sent the bitcoin developer into a deep exploration of all the technical tidbits he could find about these key signatures, and by all accounts, his findings were that of an elaborate hoax.

No one can say for certain, but the math-based evidence supports the theory that Wright faked being Satoshi in order to avoid the tax bill, at least AU$1.7 million, and suddenly the ATO raid on his house made a bit more sense.

The latest twist on the story is that Wright and his family are supposedly being extorted by a hacker, the very same anonymous source that turned in the information on Wright to Gizmodo, WIRED, and the ATO.

Of course this latest news appears to come from the mouths of Wright, or his family, and supports the case that the tulip document and e-signatures were genuine, which Greg Maxwell’s findings disproved quite convincingly.

Other than tax reasons, what possible reason could anyone have for impersonating Satoshi? Thieves, hackers, mobsters, and possibly even governments will be looking for Satoshi for the rest of his life, especially if the price of bitcoin keeps rising.

Although thieves or the mafia may find Satoshi first, given that bitcoins are so valuable and portable, there is a strong case to be made for Bitcoin’s creator wanting to hide from governments too.

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is the world’s most popular email encryption software, released in 1991 by cryptographer Phil Zimmermann. Upon releasing PGP into the wild, Zimmermann was harassed by the US govt for five whole years, with ongoing criminal court cases where he was accused of treason, a charge punishable by hanging. In the end they realized that the genie can’t be stuffed back into the bottle, which is true of bitcoin as well.

Last year’s ‘false-positive Satoshi,’ Dorian Nakamoto, found the unwarranted attention extremely difficult to deal with. He was recovering from a stroke at the time, and the mass media frenzy resulted in him seeking legal counsel.

Following a Newsweek cover story, Dorian Nakamoto was named as real Satoshi. After repeated denial, and a possible lawsuit, the “real” Satoshi spoke up, posting to his P2P foundation profile that he was not Dorian Nakamoto.

In the end, the bitcoin community took pity on Dorian and donated more than 67 bitcoins, or over US$28,000 at today’s prices, to Dorian as a gesture of apology. Thankfully, no one outside of the Newsweek newsroom seriously believed that he was the creator of bitcoin.

In another short message posted on the bitcoin developer forum at the Linux foundation website today,  simply titled “Not this again,” it appears that the “real” Satoshi has anonymously spoken up once more. We may never know for sure if this was Satoshi’s voice or not, but the sentiment speaks for itself.

“I am not Craig Wright. We are all Satoshi.”
— – Satoshi?

It may seem like journalism couldn’t get any less responsible, but this week’s entry surely gives Dorian’s story a run for the title. This problem seems to pop up annually, however, so perhaps next year’s Satoshi du jour will be even more of a train wreck somehow.