Photo Mark Harrison LONDON — The mystery behind who created the online currency Bitcoin deepened on Thursday.
Craig Steven Wright, an Australian entrepreneur and computer programmer who earlier this week said he was that person, on Thursday withdrew an offer to prove his assertion, removing the contents of his blog and replacing it with a post simply titled, “I’m sorry.”
“I believed that I could do this,” Mr. Wright wrote on his blog. “I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me. But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot.”
Mr. Wright was first identified as Bitcoin’s founder in December 2015 by Wired magazine and the technology website Gizmodo, but he did not come forward then. This week that changed, and he said in interviews with the BBC, The Economist and GQ that he was the digital currency’s creator , known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
Almost as soon as Mr. Wright announced he was the creator of Bitcoin on Monday, skepticism surfaced in the Bitcoin community about the authenticity of his claims.
In a news release on Monday, Mr. Wright said that he had decided to make his identity public to “dispel any negative myths and fears about Bitcoin.”
“I cannot allow the misinformation that has been spread to impact the future of Bitcoin” and the blockchain, the currency’s communal digital ledger, he said at the time. “I’m now able to build on what I have previously completed by releasing my research and academic work and help people understand just how powerful this can really be.”
Outside Organization, a public relations company that distributed his release on Monday, verified that the comments on the blog were from […]
