> Wright claimed in 2016 that he was Nakamoto, which was a pseudonym. The claim has been disputed.<p>It's beyond disputed; the man can literally sign a message at any point in time that he likes that would definitively prove his claim, and he refuses. This to me is proof positive that he is lying. Someone who built a cryptosystem for artificial digital scarcity, who relied entirely on digital signatures to prove pseudonymous identity would absolutely 100% prove their claim using these methods. Craig Wright is an obvious fraud.<p>The article is not very informative about the case, I'd love to know more about why some bitcoin mined by satoshi nakamoto, supposedly owned by a man claiming to be satoshi nakamoto, was under the possession of someone else and needed a trial to return possession to him.
I recently read The Greatest Hoax on Earth and my takeaway was the incredible extent to which bumbling pathological liars like Frank Abagnale or CW can build credibility through sheer persistence.
I wonder if we'll ever figure out who Satoshi is/was. I'd love to know.<p>On the other hand, I do want to respect their wish to stay anonymous.<p>Whomever that person is, it must feel very weird. They either still have access to the private keys and are, on paper at least, in the top 10 richest people in the world. Or they no longer have access to the keys and must feel some form of "loss".<p>Or it was never a person and always an organisation. So many unknowns :-)<p>There must have been countless investigations into this. Journalists, governments, shady organisations. It's hard to imagine no-one has uncovered Satoshi yet.
Here we have someone claiming to be the creator of a cryptocurrency and the owner of a large balance in a distributed ledger in a court of law (!), in front of a judge and a jury., while journalists at a reputable organization reporting on the trial are trying to figure out whether this person is being truthful or not. And of course, there isn't even a single mention of "private key" in the article.<p>Yikes.<p>We live in a world in which the vast majority of people -- including the vast majority of judges and journalists -- <i>lack the education necessary for understanding the fundamental building blocks of modern computer security</i>. They do not understand, cannot explain, and cannot reason about public-key cryptography. The notion of "proving ownership publicly by signing a sequence of bits with a private key" is utterly foreign to them. Our hopelessly outdated educational system deserves the blame for this widespread lack of education.
Can someone with a bit more background or understanding give me an ELI5 as to what Wright is doing / gets from this? I'm assuming the 1.1m bitcoin refers to whatever Satoshi was meant to have mined? Which I assumed was 'lost'?<p>Not really a crypto person, just very curious and the article is lacking detail! Thanks!
I wonder if we never find the original keys for this crypto, if he is declared the legal owner he will be able to somehow force ownership of this crypto via some type of forced code change in the Bitcoin blockchain?<p>Given that $50B are at stake, I could see things getting weird.
What a tosser - I feel bad for the software developers being dragged into this and having to put up a legal defence because he's let his ego trump truth
What a complete and total fraud. This guy has so many Bitcoin-related publications wrapped around his finger that it's frankly dizzying. I have no idea what he did to get this far, but the fact that he actually got them to settle in his favor is another testament to how utterly broken the US legal system is.