Wired and Gizmodo Say That Suspected Bitcoin Creator Craig Wright is a Hoaxer

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by Tatsiana Yablonskaya · 3 min read
Wired and Gizmodo Say That Suspected Bitcoin Creator Craig Wright is a Hoaxer
Photo: BitCoin Opp/Flickr

Giizmodo and Wired continue to reveal inconsistencies in Wright’s story.

Who is Craig Wright – a genius invented bitcoin or equally talented hoaxer who created this astonishing story and made us believe it? Day after day we waver between these two options.

In the very beginning, when Wired and Gizmodo published their investigations, the reliability of arguments seemed to be indisputable. Both sources have managed to collect some evidence proving the identity of bitcoin’s creator.

It included a number of blog posts, leaked emails, transcripts, and accounting forms. Soon after the exposure, the house of Wright was searched by the Australian Federal police. The officials however denied the assumption that the raids were related to the bitcoin claims.

Mr. Wright in his turn went into hiding. His digital existence has almost completely disappeared. Several of his public accounts, including Facebook, YouTube and Google+, have been completely deleted.

Soon after the shocking news experts looked at the situation rationally and at once found a whole bunch of contradictions. It turned out that the evidence provided by Wired and Gizmodo was sent to at least three other outlets (Newsweek, Yahoo News and Nathaniel Popper at The New York Times). Thus someone wanted the story to get out as soon as possible. Many of the blog posts pointing to Wright’s role in launching Bitcoin were edited as recently as 2014.

Emin Gün Sirer, an associate professor at Cornell University, knows Craig Wright and insists that the whole story of him being Satoshi Nakamoto is a plot. “Craig Wright is not Satoshi. Could not have been.

And before him, Dorian was not Satoshi, either — or rather, he was very much Satoshi Nakamoto, the model railroad enthusiast, not the fellow behind Bitcoin,” he says. Ian Grigg echoes the opinion of Sirer that Wright was the target of an extortion plot, which culminated in both the reports and Wright’s arrest.

Wired has discovered three more arguments for “hoaxer” version:

  • According to Wright his company Cloudcroft owns two supercomputers, one of which is said to have been built by computer-maker SGI. But SGI said to WIRED that “Cloudcroft has never been an SGI customer and SGI has no relationship with Cloudcroft CEO Craig Steven Wright.”
  • Wright had mentioned two PhDs on his LinkedIn page (now deleted), one from Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia, in computer science. But that university denies that it has given Wright any PhDs. It granted him only three master’s degrees in related fields: Networking and Systems Administration, Management (Information Technology), and Information Systems Security.
  • An analysis of two PGP public keys attributed to Wright but also linked to Satoshi Nakamoto—one in our story and one in Gizmodo’s — show that they were likely created more recently than the documents in which we found them.

Gizmodo adds that only two days after the initial investigations had been published, an email appearing to originate from a known Satoshi account was posted to the bitcoin-dev mailing list. “I am not Craig Wright,” it read. “We are all Satoshi.” However it’s necessary to mention that the email might have been forged.

All of the above are great reasons to question and dig further into Wright’s apparent link to Satoshi Nakamoto. The evidence must have been carefully forged with the intent of making it seem like he was.

Bitcoin News, Cryptocurrency News, News
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