The Bitcoin community has gotten used to an almost annual turn of discoveries and revelations attempting to unmask the mysterious inventor of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the enigma otherwise known as Satoshi Nakamoto. The most recent contender for the title of Satoshi is once again Craig Steven Wright, an Australian academic and businessman, who was first “outed” by both Wired and Gizmodo six months ago.

The technology behind Bitcoin has been in operation since 2009 when Satoshi started the peer-to-peer cryptographic ledger network called a blockchain and invited others to join in. Shortly after getting everything up and running Satoshi disappeared leaving his or her identity unknown. As a result of Bitcoin’s popularity the identity of Satoshi has come under massive speculation leading to numerous “unmaskings” including Michael Clear in 2011 and Dorian Nakamoto in 2014 (among others).

Now it’s Craig Wright (yet again).

Craig Steven Wright (above). Image credit: Soldierx.com

The evidence that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto

This week was the Bitcoin conference Consensus 2016 hosted by CoinDesk in New York and Craig Wright published a blog post to coincide with the first day, in May 2, entitled “Jean-Paul Sartre, Signing and Significance.” In the blog post Wright claims to be Satoshi and describes the cryptographic method he used to prove his claim (although the blog post itself contains no evidence).

At the same time several news outlets published articles (including the BBC, The Economist and GQ Magazine) stating that Wright had proven that he had access to parts of the Bitcoin blockchain that Satoshi would likely also have access to.

“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.

At the same time several prominent members of the Bitcoin community came forward to state that they believed Wright to be Satoshi. Amid those who came forward were Bitcoin Foundation Chief Scientist Gavin Andresen, Founding Director of the Bticoin Foundation Jon Matonis and cryptocurrency researcher Ian Grigg,

As proof, Gavin Andresen describes a meeting with Wright and his entourage in London where Wright used a cryptographic signature linked to the blockchain.

The Bitcoin blockchain is a distributed ledger made up of connected “blocks” each of which contain a number of bitcoin transactions done on the network and every bitcoin transaction sends coins to a bitcoin address, which is secured with cryptographic keys. One key is private (known only to the owner) and the other is public (published for everyone). As a result it is possible to verify that someone has access to the private key as the key owner can move the coins attached or can also sign messages with the private key which can be verified with the public key.

According to Andresen on Reddit and Wired, Wright signed the private key from Block 1 (the first block in the chain generated after the “Genesis Block” or Block 0) in his presence. The Wired article states that Wright used this same test for Matonis and various reporters but also signed with Block 9 as well as Block 1.

Block 9 is particularly interesting as evidence because early on in Bitcoin’s history, Satoshi sent some of the coins in that block to Hal Finney. Now deceased, Finney was a developer for PGP Corporation and was an early bitcoin user, and in fact is the first person to receive a bitcoin transaction.

Wright’s legal team also approached Bitcoin evangelist Andreas Antonopoulos to provide security advice for a project under NDA (Non-Discolsure Agreement) but he declined. Antonopoulos says, “Once I received the NDA however, it became obvious that the project was related to verifying the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. I immediately declined the offer, declined to participate and declined to sign the NDA.”

Criticisms of Craig Wright’s reveal surface

Critics of Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto take many forms but the strongest would probably be that he has failed to present public cryptographic evidence to support his claim. Instead his reveal relies entirely on non-controlled tests presented to Bitcoin community members and the press initially under NDA.

This criticism highlights that because Bitcoin uses public-private key encryption it would be trivial for Wright to sign a known message with the private key of a Bitcoin block commonly agreed to be under Satoshi’s control–preferably a message with today’s date such as “I, Craig Wright, am Satoshi Nakamoto. May 4, 2016.” With the exact text of that message, the signature and the public key (which is publicly available) anyone with the right software could verify the authenticity.

If Wright has access to the private keys to Blocks 1 and 9 this would make for a very simple blog post providing proof.

Furthermore, as many critics have also called for, Wright could also sign something using the Genesis Block (Block 0) private key.

Image credit: Screenshot of Blockchain.info displaying the Genesis Block.

While it’s true signing Blocks 0, 1 and 9 would not conclusively prove that Wright is indeed Satoshi; it would set aside the doubt that he has any actual access to the keys for those blocks.

The next problem that people have with Wright’s claim is that his initial blog post “Jean-Paul Sartre, Signing and Significance” that introduced his claim is misleading. He starts the post claiming to be Satoshi and then leads into a poorly written tutorial on how to sign a message using a Bitcoin private key and verify that signature. Without careful reading, some people mistook his initial post to be the cryptographic proof that he has access to one of the above private keys.

This fact led enterprising members of the Bitcoin community, who expected the public proof mentioned above, to go through his blog post expecting it. Not discovering it, Wright’s blog post was decried as false and misleading. This has led The Economist to publish an article that put the burden of proof back on Wright to back up his claim.

Gavin Andresen, who Wright convinced with a signing test in his presence, himself has said he expected Wright to publish public proof. He went on to say in an e-mail to security researcher Dan Kaminsky, “It was a mistake to agree to publish my post before I saw his–I assumed his post would simply be a signed message anybody could easily verify.”

Others have shown a disbelief in the validity of the demonstration by Wright and have gone seeking a better description of the nature of the verification test from Andresen and others, such as this series of questions posted on Reddit. Since Wright did not go the route that can be publicly verified, he has rested his claims on the credibility and expertise of Andresen, Matonis and Grigg as well as the reporters who witnessed the proof in private.

Wikileaks is still not a fan of Wright (having previously posted on Twitter that Wright is not likely the “principal coder” for Bitcoin):

We'd like to thank #Satoshi hoaxer Dr Craig Wright for showing how bankrupt the fact-checking standards are at the BBC, LRB & Economist.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 3, 2016

There is also the problem of Wright’s history of apparent duplicity. As previously mentioned, this is the second time that Wright has been in the media for being connected to Satoshi Nakamoto. In December 2015, documents surfaced that appeared to out Wright as Satoshi. However, shortly after these revelations the proof began to unravel: the best evidence for the claim, PGP cryptographic keys, were discovered to be backdated.

Wright’s “slow reveal” unfolds

It’s been three days since Wright’s blog post and the publication of his claims in news outlets. In the face of growing criticism about the nature of his private-only reveal, Wright has published yet another blog post yesterday on May 3, 2016, “Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof.”

In this post, Wright says that he will be posting further proof on his blog.

“So, over the coming days, I will be posting a series of pieces that will lay the foundations for this extraordinary claim,” Wright posts, “which will include posting independently-verifiable documents and evidence addressing some of the false allegations that have been levelled, and transferring bitcoin from an early block.”

The latter would be as good as signing against a given early block (as it proves access).

Artwork from Spells of Genesis, “Satoshi”, copyright EverdreamSoft

Why does this matter?

As with anything that becomes extremely popular, the impact of Bitcoin on so many lives has led to a sense of celebrity for its apparent inventor: the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. His disappearance early in the life of Bitcoin also makes Satoshi a legend, which his anonymity and competence in inventing Bitcoin only amplifies.

Nothing makes people curious as much as a mystery and at the end of this mystery is a celebrity in his own right.

We have also seen the damage that this search can do with the case of Dorian Nakamoto when Newsweek outed him as possibly Satoshi in 2014. This certainly does not apply to Wright, who has prepared himself for the potential onslaught and is currently inviting it wholeheartedly by seeking and handling media attention.

Although Satoshi is no longer part of Bitcoin development and has no control over the community, his opinion could still be meaningful to some. Or at least it would be interesting to know what the creator of Bitcoin thinks about what’s happened to his invention and with the community that resulted.

Others, such as Andreas Antonopoulos, do not find Satoshi’s identity important at all.

“As I have expressed many times in the past, I think the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto does not matter,” he wrote on Reddit. “More importantly I think it serves to distract from the fact that bitcoin is not controlled by anyone and is not a system of Appeal-to-Authority. Identifying the creator only serves to feed the appeal-to-authority crowd, as if SN is some kind of infallible prophet, or has any say over bitcoin’s future.”

Wright’s future, on the other hand, will be revealed slowly over a series of blog posts and, he claims, public proof that he has access to bitcoins that Satoshi should have access to. He has worked hard to point the Satoshi “unmasking” at himself and now the spotlight is on him.

Is he Satoshi Nakamoto? The community still doesn’t know.

Featured image credit: Bitcoin Logo, https://www.flickr.com/photos/thelastminute/12350379324.