A new report has shed details on the story of Craig Wright, the Australian academic and businessman who earlier this year sought to prove he was Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin.
The mammoth 35,000-word piece by journalist and novelist Andrew O’Hagan captures the behind-the-scenes effort of Wright’s controversial reveal earlier this year, when he sat for interviews with The Economist , GQ and the BBC as part of an effort to bolster his claim. That move came months after tech publications Gizmodo and Wired published reports in December connecting Wright to the Satoshi identity.
The story contains a number of interesting facts and anecdotes, including the claim that Wright lost funds in the collapse of Costa Rican digital currency firm Liberty Reserve and once had a face-to-face meeting with Ross Ulbricht, the convicted operator of the Silk Road online dark market. It also offers new details on Dave Kleiman, who was reportedly an early force in the project before passing away in mid-2013.
One running theme of the story is Wright’s effort to patent aspects of the technology underlying bitcoin as part of a reported deal with a company called nTrust , which offers a money exchange app and, according to the LBR report, had struck the foundations of a deal that would see the filing of a number of patents related to the blockchain and digital currency under the auspices of a new firm, nCrypt.
The patent development process appears to have been driven by a desire to sell big – and soon. According to the LBR , "the hurry for the patents was to help with the giant sale to Google or whomever".
Work, the story outlines, had already begun at a new research center based in London, and movements toward meetings with Google and Uber had begun, nTrust executives […]
