Some experts have doubted his claims, but Australian businessman Craig Wright says he plans to prove, once and for all, that he is “Satoshi Nakomoto,” the pseudonymous founder of the virtual currency bitcoin.
Wright, a computer scientist and former tech CEO who came forward earlier this week with the assertion that he is bitcoin’s mysterious founder, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday that he soon will provide “extraordinary proof” to back up his claims. Such proof, if it exists, could put to rest a question that scientists and the tech world have been debating since the digital currency was introduced, in 2009. Wright wrote in his post that he will be providing multiple pieces of evidence supporting his claims “over the coming days.”
“I will be posting a series of pieces that will lay the foundations for this extraordinary claim, which will include posting independently-verifiable documents and evidence addressing some of the false allegations that have been leveled, and transferring bitcoin from an early block,” Wright wrote.
By moving around bitcoin that has been in existence since the virtual currency’s earliest days, Wright plans to show that he was involved in bitcoin’s founding. However, various skeptics who doubt Wright’s claims (some have called it a “scam”) have said that the best way for Wright to prove that he birthed bitcoin is to sign a message using a private key—a sort of password used to verify bitcoin users—that can be traced back to the original introduction of bitcoin, the so-called Genesis block, rather than simply moving bitcoin from the early days when the first transactions were recorded.
“For some there is no burden of proof high enough, no evidence that cannot be dismissed as fabrication or manipulation. This is the nature of belief and swimming against this current would be futile,” Wright wrote in his blog post.
The identity of bitcoin’s founder has been a source of debate for some time, with a 2014 Newsweek article putting forth a California man who was never proved to be the pseudonymous bitcoin founder, while a New York Times reporter took his own stab at identifying the virtual currency’s creator last year. And, Wired and Gizmodo investigations published last year included claims that Wright was bitcoin’s founder, but evidence supporting those claims was later called into question.