Satoshi Nakamoto

Nobody has ever knowingly met Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, but many techies in recent years have claimed to be him. Nakamoto-san (if he were then really Japanese and a person rather than quite possibly a group of people), is rumoured to hold some 1.1 million Bitcoins, now worth a staggering $50 billion. But this blog is not actually about Mr. Nakamoto – or is it?

Maybe the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity has now been solved: Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist who has been for many years claiming to be the famous inventor has just been told by a U.S. jury in the Miami federal court to pay $100 million in damages over claims that he cheated a deceased friend over intellectual property for the cryptocurrency. The brother of Dave Kleiman, a computer security expert who died in 2013, alleged that the late Florida man worked with Wright to create and mine Bitcoin in its early years. The jury, however, rejected most of the claims against Mr Wright, an outcome which would have forced him to produce the famous Bitcoin stash. The estate claimed that in addition to the Bitcoin mining the friends did together, Kleiman helped Wright create the intellectual property behind the early blockchain technology worth $252 billion.

Dr. Wright, who has been diagnosed with autism and high intellect., has previously stated that he would prove that he was the pseudonymous creator of the first cryptocurrency if he was to win his case, which he now has, as most of the claims of the Kleiman estate have been thrown out. Wright, however, also claimed, that he and Dave Kleiman were merely friends and not business partners and that his friend had no part in creating Bitcoin or the origins of blockchain. Proving that he was indeed Satoshi Nakamoto (Nakamoto in Japanese loosely translated apparently means ‘at the centre of it’) would actually be simple: The founder’s Bitcoins are supposedly stored in a large number of wallets, which have not been touched or changed since the early days of the cryptocurrency in 2008 and 2009. It would therefore be easy for the legitimate holder of these coins to transfer just say one single coin from one of the original wallets to a new one. The fact that he hasn’t done so at least seems to indicate that Dr. Wright maybe after all doesn’t hold the signatures needed to access these wallets – and hence isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto. Due to its structure, all transactions of Bitcoin are public and the 1.1 million Bitcoin in question have remained untouched since their creation. Moreover, in May 2020 some 145 addresses of such wallets created in 2009 were published online: All had been changed by their initial creator, stating now that “Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud. He doesn’t have the keys used to sign this message.”

Dr. Wright, and in particular if he isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto, is in a spot of bother now: He may have won his court case, but he still has to pay the $100 million in damages, which by any standard is a tidy sum. And since he has said that he won’t appeal the judgement, he will have to cough up the dough: His estimated net worth as of September 2021 was in the region of $80 to $100 million according to some sources. So, once he’s paid up, he won’t have much of his fortune left. That’s one heck of a gamble he took!

And as far as the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is concerned, we are quite possibly none the wiser. But at least the award of damages in favour of the Kleiman estate seems to indicate that Dr. Wright is likely to have had some involvement in the creation of Bitcoin and thus the birth of cryptocurrencies in general.