Australian academic and entrepreneur Craig Steven Wright has officially outed himself as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

Forty-four year-old Wright was first named as Nakamoto in December by Wired on the basis of a number of blog posts Wright wrote prior to the launch of Bitcoin, and an unverified trove of emails and documentation.

To prove that he was indeed Nakamoto, Wright provided proof to the BBC, the Economist, and GQ by signing an encrypted message with the cryptographic key that was associated with the first bitcoin transaction, a key that is inextricably linked to blocks of Bitcoins known to have been created by Satoshi Nakamoto.

“These are the blocks used to send 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney in January [2009] as the first bitcoin transaction,” Wright told a group of people at a “London proof session,” according to the BBC.

In a statement sent to SiliconANGLE, Jon Matonis, an economist and one of the founding directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, said he was present at the session, and now believes Wright was indeed Nakamoto.

“During the London proof sessions, I had the opportunity to review the relevant data along three distinct lines: cryptographic, social, and technical,” Matonis explained. “Based on what I witnessed, it is my firm belief that Craig Steven Wright satisfies all three categories.”

Matonis continued:

“For cryptographic proof in my presence, Craig signed and verified a message using the private key from block #1 newly-generated coins and from block #9 newly-generated coins (the first transaction to Hal Finney). The social evidence, including his unique personality, early emails that I received, and early drafts of the Bitcoin white paper, points to Craig as the creator.”

“I also received satisfactory explanations to my questions about registering the bitcoin.org domain and the various time-of-day postings to the BitcoinTalk forum. Additionally, Craig’s technical working knowledge of public key cryptography, Bitcoin’s addressing system, and proof-of-work consensus in a distributed peer-to-peer environment is very strong.”

Death threats

While some will continue to remain skeptical that Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, some will be deeply upset by the news that Wright has outed himself and that his claim has been backed by others, including a person who goes by the name of Ivan Ivanov who made subtle death threats to myself after publishing news of the fact that Wright had planned to out himself as Nakamoto.

In a series of emails, Ivanov claimed among other things:

Wright’s calculations are wrong, and the real Satoshi sends some bitcoins around parts of the world that are hungry for financing right now? What if that starts a world conflict (I’m sure the creator of Bitcoin doesn’t want that? But how far is Wright’s greed going to extend before someone executes him in a draconian style matter?

Think about this before you start pulling on the lion’s tail … because it might not turn out to be a fucking lion you faggots.

In a subsequent email:

Wright comes out as Satoshi, dipshits like you make it viral, real Satoshi dumps coins somewhere not so ‘humane’, also pays for Craig Wright’s head to be cut off and turns every writer’s head that wrote about satoshi into pineapple juice …

Wanna blog about that Duncan ?

Be really careful son

There was one final email that reads “theres a lot of ‘tulips’ for everyone in the end,” a reference to flowers at a funeral.

Ivanov doesn’t seem to understand how the media works: news is reported, and I make no claims of perfection as to whether Wright is actually Nakamoto or not, but many smart people, having seen the evidence, now believe he is, and this makes it newsworthy.

Whether this is a real threat or not, or indeed whether Ivanov is simply targeting myself and not others is not clear, but if you are in the tech news business and have been threatened by him, please don’t hesitate to contact me privately.

Image credit: Soldierx.com