By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 20th, 2024
If Shkreli is right, it means that Le Roux most likely made Bitcoin as a money laundering instrument for backing his criminal conglomerate.
Martin Shkreli, the infamous entrepreneur who exponentially increased the rate of a life-saving drug by five thousand percent while becoming a notorious symbol of corporate Wall Street greed, has made it to the news yet again. This time, he has slipped out a name revealing the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym for an individual or a community who contributed to the development of the first Bitcoin software and launched the concept of cryptocurrency to the world in 2008. Nakamoto also stayed active in the design and expansion of bitcoin and the blockchain till 2010 but suddenly disappeared ever since. In his latest Substack post, Martin Shkreli says that Paul Le Roux, a former programmer, and criminal cartel boss, is the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
The disgraced biotech “pharma bro”, has seemingly decrypted the first transfer sent to the late Biotech pioneer Hal Finney. Le Roux was arrested previously in 2012 after the Drug Enforcement Authorities triumphantly enticed him into a trap.
In the famous sting operation designed by the DEA, a paid informant discreetly recorded the gangster. The drug lord and weapons trafficker were given a twenty-five-year prison sentence in June 2020. Le Roux would have spent his entire remaining life in prison, but his sentence was cut short as he had offered significant help to the DEA.
With Martin’s recent social media gimmick, Le Roux has also entered blockchain conversations as a top contender for the title of Satoshi Nakamoto. A Wired article also published in 2019 said that there is massive proof that Bitcoin was designed by a criminal mastermind. The Bitcoin community, however, did not give much heed to this rumor. Popular Bitcoin Core developer Peter Wuille said that the blog post only reasons out the fact that someone with access to Finney’s private key could have signed the claimed message.
Another famous developer, named Greg Maxwell also explained that Shkreli’s comments had no basis, as the signature type used by the conjectured Satoshi did not exist until after Finney’s was out of commission. Therefore, this only shows that someone supervised and looked after the private key of the late software developer. If Shkreli is right, it means that Le Roux most likely made Bitcoin as a money laundering instrument for backing his criminal conglomerate, authorizing the alerts of many cryptocurrency naysayers.
Martin Shkreli was released from community confinement two months back in September 2022. He was initially supposed to be released from prison in September 2023 but his prison time was reduced by one year.