By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 19th, 2024
However Mark Ferrier, Wright’s partner, now denies this information.
The story of Craig Wright accumulates more and more details every day. But the thing is that fewer people support the idea of Wright being Satoshi Nakamoto now.
The news has just appeared that in 2013 Wright entered a deal with former mining contractor Mark Ferrier to buy gold and software in the total amount of $85 million. Wright claimed that Ferrier had persuaded him to purchase gold as a good asset to have in case the price of ‘funny money’ Bitcoin crashed.
According to Wright, he paid Ferrier $38.8 million (245,103 bitcoins) in August 2013 and a further $20.3 million (135,000 bitcoins) next month. The deal failed and allegedly Wright sued Ferrier for $84.25 million in the Federal court. The claim was dropped in 2014.
Now Ferrier refutes all the information and states that he has ‘never met’ Wright before the legal action, and the latter did not paid him ‘one cent’.
We must say that everything connected with Wright’s transformation in bitcoin’s creator is wrapped in mystery. In the very beginning the evidence provided by Wired and Gizmodo seemed to be indisputable.
They mentioned a number of blog posts, leaked emails, transcripts, and accounting forms as a proof of bitcoin’s creator identity. Wright’s ex-wife Lynn said that her husband has been working on Bitcoin “many years ago,” but noted that he “didn’t call it Bitcoin” at first, but rather “digital money.”
She was also aware of Wright’s friendship with Dave Kleiman (allegedly Wright and Kleiman have been working on bitcoin development together): “I knew Dave…I knew they were friends and they talked about stuff, different things that were happening in the geek world…half the time he was taking I wouldn’t listen, hence the ex.” Nevertheless when asked point-blank if Wright was the inventor of Bitcoin, Lynn refused to make any comments.
After the first publications Wright held up his digital existence. He deleted his Facebook, Google+ and YouTube. His house was searched by the Australian Federal police. However the raids were not related to the bitcoin claims.
Wright has managed to stay a “true” bitcoin’s father no so long. A whole bunch of contradictions came to light as early as next day after Gizmodo and Wired had announced their investigations. It turned out that many of the blog posts pointing to Wright’s role in launching Bitcoin were edited as recently as 2014.
Wright once stated: “I did my best to try and hide the fact that I’ve been running bitcoin since 2009 but I think it’s getting – most – most – by the end of this half the world is going to bloody know.” Taking into account all facts that we have known for these days, the words are hard to believe.