The price of Bitcoin was getting a little wonky again, which meant that the media must be covering some story about it. This time around the media has learned the real identify of Satoshi Nakamoto!
Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright has publicly identified himself as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
His admission follows years of speculation about who came up with the original ideas underlying the digital cash system.
Mr Wright has provided technical proof to back up his claim using coins known to be owned by Bitcoin’s creator.
Prominent members of the Bitcoin community and its core development team say they have confirmed his claims.
Mystery sovled, everybody go home! What’s that? Wright provided a technical proof? It’s based on a cryptographic signature? In that case I’m sure the experts are looking into his claim:
SUMMARY:
- Yes, this is a scam. Not maybe. Not possibly.
- Wright is pretending he has Satoshi’s signature on Sartre’s writing. That would mean he has the private key, and is likely to be Satoshi. What he actually has is Satoshi’s signature on parts of the public Blockchain, which of course means he doesn’t need the private key and he doesn’t need to be Satoshi. He just needs to make you think Satoshi signed something else besides the Blockchain — like Sartre. He doesn’t publish Sartre. He publishes 14% of one document. He then shows you a hash that’s supposed to summarize the entire document. This is a lie. It’s a hash extracted from the Blockchain itself. Ryan Castellucci (my engineer at White Ops and master of Bitcoin Fu) put an extractor here. Of course the Blockchain is totally public and of course has signatures from Satoshi, so Wright being able to lift a signature from here isn’t surprising at all.
- He probably would have gotten away with it if the signature itself wasn’t googlable by Redditors.
- I think Gavin et al are victims of another scam, and Wright’s done classic misdirection by generating different scams for different audiences.
Some congratulations should go to Wright — who will almost certainly claim this was a clever attempt to troll people so he doesn’t feel luck a schmuck for being too stupid to properly pull off a scam — for trolling so many people. Not only did the media get suckered but even members of the Bitcoin community fell for his scam hook, line, and sinker.