Click to Open Overlay Gallery Tang Yau Hoong/Getty Images Four months have passed since the world learned the name of Craig Wright, a man who, as WIRED wrote in December , either created Bitcoin or very badly wants someone to believe he did.
Now rumors are swirling through the Bitcoin world that Wright himself is poised to publicly claim—and possibly offer some sort of proof—that he really is Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin. If he does, he’ll have to convince a highly skeptical cryptography community for whom “proof” is a serious word, and one that requires cryptographic levels of certainty.
The suggestion is that Wright, an Australian cryptographer and security professional, has arranged to perform a demonstration for media in London next week that’s intended to convince the world he’s bitcoin’s creator. Luckily for any legitimate claimant to the Satoshi throne—and for bitcoiners tired of the long succession of unproven candidates and speculation—there are some clear, almost incontrovertible ways for Satoshi Nakamoto to prove himself. When WIRED asked bitcoiners and cryptographers what it would take to convince them that Craig Wright is that long-lost Bitcoin founding father, they suggested a variety of methods, each with its own level of certainty. But there’s one form of proof that would be considered airtight for all but the most skeptical skeptics: what Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green describes as “show me the money.”
If Wright created Bitcoin, he should have access to the keys that control the earliest bitcoins mined on his computer or computers. Those coins have never moved in bitcoin’s seven-year history, despite at times being worth as much as a billion dollars based on Bitcoin’s exchange rate. (They’re valued today at closer to $400 million.) And that hoard of cryptographic treasure, held in a series of bitcoin addresses that each […]
