The Raid

Ten men raided​ a house in Gordon, a north shore suburb of Sydney, at 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 9 December 2015. Some of the federal agents wore shirts that said ‘Computer Forensics’; one carried a search warrant issued under the Australian Crimes Act 1914. They were looking for a man named Craig Steven Wright, who lived with his wife, Ramona, at 43 St Johns Avenue. The warrant was issued at the behest of the Australian Taxation Office. Wright, a computer scientist and businessman, headed a group of companies associated with cryptocurrency and online security. As one set of agents scoured his kitchen cupboards and emptied out his garage, another entered his main company headquarters at 32 Delhi Road in North Ryde. They were looking for ‘originals or copies’ of material held on hard drives and computers; they wanted bank statements, mobile phone records, research papers and photographs. The warrant listed dozens of companies whose papers were to be scrutinised, and 32 individuals, some with alternative names, or alternative spellings. The name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ appeared sixth from the bottom of the list.

Craig Wright in the Oxford Circus office.

Some of the neighbours say the Wrights were a little distant. She was friendly but he was weird – to one neighbour he was ‘Cold-Shoulder Craig’ – and their landlord wondered why they needed so much extra power: Wright had what appeared to be a whole room full of generators at the back of the property. This fed a rack of computers that he called his ‘toys’, but the real computer, on which he’d spent a lot of money, was nearly nine thousand miles away in Panama. He had already taken the computers away the day before the raid. A reporter had turned up at the house and Wright, alarmed, had phoned Stefan, the man advising them on what he and Ramona were calling ‘the deal’. Stefan immediately moved Wright and his wife into a luxury apartment at the Meriton World Tower in Sydney. They’d soon be moving to England anyway, and all parties agreed it was best to hide out for now.

At 32 Delhi Road, the palm trees were throwing summer shade onto the concrete walkways – ‘Tailor Made Office Solutions’, it said on a nearby billboard – and people were drinking coffee in Deli 32 on the ground floor. Wright’s office on level five was painted red, and looked down on the Macquarie Park Cemetery, known as a place of calm for the living as much as the dead. No one was sure what to do when the police entered. The staff were gathered in the middle of the room and told by the officers not to go near their computers or use their phones. ‘I tried to intervene,’ one senior staff member, a Dane called Allan Pedersen, remarked later, ‘and said we would have to call our lawyers.’

Ramona wasn’t keen to tell her family what was happening. The reporters were sniffing at a strange story – a story too complicated for her to explain – so she just told everyone that damp in the Gordon house had forced them to move out. The place they moved into, a tall apartment building, was right in the city and Wright felt as if he was on holiday. On 9 December, after their first night in the new apartment, Wright woke up to the news that two articles, one on the technology site Gizmodo, the other in the tech magazine Wired, had come out overnight fingering him as the person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who in 2008 published a white paper describing a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ – a technology Satoshi went on to develop as bitcoin. Reading the articles on his laptop, Wright knew his old life was over.

By this point, cameras and reporters were outside his former home and his office. They had long heard rumours, but the Gizmodo and Wired stories had sent the Australian media into a frenzy. It wasn’t clear why the police and the articles had appeared on the same day. At about five that same afternoon, a receptionist called from the lobby of Wright’s apartment building to say that the police had arrived. Ramona turned to Wright and told him to get the hell out. He looked at a desk in front of the window: there were two large laptop computers on it – they weighed a few kilos each, with 64 gigabytes of RAM – and he grabbed the one that wasn’t yet fully encrypted. He also took Ramona’s phone, which wasn’t encrypted either, and headed for the door. They were on the 63rd floor. It occurred to him that the police might be coming up in the elevator, so he went down to the 61st floor, where there were office suites and a swimming pool. He stood frozen for a minute before he realised he’d rushed out without his passport.

Ramona left the apartment shortly after Wright. She went straight down to the basement car park and was relieved to find the police weren’t guarding the exits. She jumped into her car, a hire vehicle, and, in her panic, crashed into the exit barrier. But she didn’t stop, and was soon on the motorway heading to north Sydney. She just wanted to be somewhere familiar where she would have time to think. She felt vulnerable without her phone, and decided to drive to a friend’s and borrow his. She went to his workplace and took his phone, telling him she couldn’t explain because she didn’t want to get him involved.

Meanwhile, Wright was still standing beside the swimming pool in his suit, with a laptop in his arms. He heard people coming up the stairs, sped down the corridor and ducked into the gents. A bunch of teenagers were standing around but seemed not to notice him. He went to the furthest cubicle and deliberately kept the door unlocked. (He figured the police would just look for an engaged sign.) He was standing on top of the toilet when he heard the officers come in. They asked the youngsters what they were doing, but they said ‘nothing’ and the police left. Wright stayed in the cubicle for a few minutes, then went out and used his apartment keycard to hide in the service stairwell. Eventually, a call came from Ramona on her friend’s phone. She was slightly horrified to discover he was still in the building and told him again to get out. He, too, had a rental car, and had the key in his pocket. He went down sixty flights of stairs to the car park in the basement, unlocked his car and opened the boot, where he lifted out the spare wheel and put his laptop in the wheel cavity. He drove towards the Harbour Bridge and got lost in the traffic.

Craig Wright in 2016.

As Ramona drove along she began texting the mysterious Stefan, who was at Sydney Airport, having already checked in for a flight to Manila, where he lived. Stefan had to make a fuss to get his bag removed from the plane and then he spoke to Ramona, telling her that Wright would have to get out of the country. She didn’t argue. She called the Flight Centre and asked what flights were leaving. ‘To where?’ asked the saleswoman.

‘Anywhere,’ Ramona said. Within ten minutes she had booked her husband on a flight to Auckland.

In the early evening, Wright, scared and lost, made his way to Chatswood. He texted Ramona to come and meet him, and she immediately texted back saying he should go straight to the airport. She’d booked him a flight. ‘But I don’t have my passport,’ he said. Ramona was afraid she’d be arrested if she returned to their apartment, but her friend said he’d go into the building and get the passport. They waited until the police left the building, then he went upstairs. A few minutes later he came back with the passport, along with the other computer and a power supply.

They met Wright in the airport car park. Ramona had never seen him so worried. ‘I was shocked,’ he later said. ‘I hadn’t expected to be outed like that in the media, and then to be chased down by the police. Normally, I’d be prepared. I’d have a bag packed.’ As Ramona gave him the one-way ticket to Auckland, she was anxious about when she would see him again. Wright said New Zealand was a bit too close and wondered what to do about money. Ramona went to an ATM and gave him $600. He bought a yellow bag from the airport shop in which to store his computers. He had no clothes. ‘It was awful saying goodbye to him,’ Ramona said.

In the queue for security, he felt nervous about his computers. His flight was about to close when the security staff flagged him down. He was being taken to an interview room when an Indian man behind him started going berserk. It was just after the Paris bombings; the man’s wife was wearing a sari and the security staff wanted to pat her down. The man objected. All the security staff ran over to deal with the situation and told Wright to go. He couldn’t believe his luck. He put his head down and scurried through the lounge.

Back at Wright’s office, Allan Pedersen was being interviewed by the police. He overheard one of them ask: ‘Have we got Wright yet?’

‘He’s just hopped a flight to New Zealand,’ his colleague said.

Wright was soon 30,000 feet above the Tasman Sea watching the programmer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) being chased by unknowable agents in The Matrix. Wright found the storyline strangely comforting; it was good to know he wasn’t alone.

At Auckland Airport, Wright kept his phone on flight mode, but turned it on to use the airport’s wifi to Skype with Stefan, using a new account. They had a discussion about how to get him to Manila. There was a big rock concert that night in Auckland, and all the hotels were full, but he crossed town in a cab and managed to get a small room at the Hilton. He booked two nights, using cash. He knew how to get more cash out of ATMs than the daily limit, so he worked several machines near the hotel, withdrawing $5000. He ordered room service that night and the next morning went to the Billabong store in Queen Street to buy some clothes. He felt agitated, out of his element: normally he would wear a suit and tie – he enjoys the notion that he is too well dressed to be a geek – but he bought a T-shirt, a pair of jeans and some socks. On the way back to the hotel he got a bunch of SIM cards, so that his calls wouldn’t be monitored. Back at the Hilton he was packing up his computers when the dependable Stefan came on Skype. He told Wright to go to the airport and pick up a ticket he’d left him for a flight to Manila. His picture was all over the papers, along with the story that he was trying to escape.

Within hours of Wright’s name appearing in the press, anonymous messages threatened to reveal his ‘actual history’. Some said he had been on Ashley Madison, the website that sets up extramarital affairs, others that he’d been seen on Grindr, the gay hook-up app. During a six-hour layover in Hong Kong, he killed his email accounts and tried to wipe his social media profile, which he knew would be heavy with information he wasn’t keen to publicise: ‘Mainly rants,’ he said later. When he got to Manila airport, Stefan picked him up. They went to Stefan’s apartment and the maid washed Wright’s clothes while he set up his laptops on the dining-room table. They spent the rest of Saturday wiping his remaining social media profile. Stefan didn’t want any contact to be possible: he wanted to cut Wright off from the world. The next day he put him on a plane to London.

Mayfair

Technology​ is constantly changing the lives of people who don’t really understand it – we drive our cars, and care nothing for internal combustion – but now and then a story will break from that frontier. I was one of the people who had never heard of Satoshi Nakamoto or the blockchain – the invention underlying bitcoin, which verifies transactions without the need for any central authority – or that it is the biggest thing in computer science. It was news to me that the banks were grabbing onto the blockchain as the foundation of a future ‘internet of value’. The story of a mythical computer scientist was an odd one to come my way. I’m not much detained by thoughts of new computer paradigms. (I’m still getting the hang of the first one.) But to those who are much more invested in the world of tomorrow, the Satoshi story has the lineaments of a modern morality tale quite independent of stock realities. There are things, there are always things, that others assume are at the centre of the universe but don’t make a scratch on your own sense of the everyday world. This story was like that for me, enclosing me in an enigma I couldn’t have named. A documentary is a fashioned thing, of course, as fashioned as fiction in its own ways, but I had to overcome my own bafflement – as will you – to enter this world.

A few weeks before the raid on Craig Wright’s house, when his name still hadn’t ever been publicly associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, I got an email from a Los Angeles lawyer called Jimmy Nguyen, from the firm Davis Wright Tremaine (self-described as ‘a one-stop shop for companies in entertainment, technology, advertising, sports and other industries’). Nguyen told me that they were looking to contract me to write the life of Satoshi Nakamoto. ‘My client has acquired life story rights … from the true person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto – the creator of the bitcoin protocol,’ the lawyer wrote. ‘The story will be [of] great interest to the public and we expect the book project will generate significant publicity and media coverage once Satoshi’s true identity is revealed.’

Journalists, it turned out, had spent years looking for Nakamoto. His identity was one of the great mysteries of the internet, and a holy grail of investigative reporting, with writers who couldn’t dig up evidence simply growing their own. For the New Yorker’s Joshua Davis the need to find him seemed almost painful. ‘Nakamoto himself was a cipher,’ he wrote in October 2011:

Before the debut of bitcoin, there was no record of any coder with that name. He used an email address and a website that were untraceable. In 2009 and 2010, he wrote hundreds of posts in flawless English, and though he invited other software developers to help him improve the code, and corresponded with them, he never revealed a personal detail. Then, in April 2011, he sent a note to a developer saying that he had ‘moved on to other things’. He has not been heard from since.

Davis went on to examine Satoshi’s writing quite closely and concluded that he used British spelling and was fond of the word ‘bloody’. He then named a 23-year-old Trinity College Dublin graduate student, Michael Clear, who quickly denied it. The story went nowhere and Clear went back to his studies. Then Leah McGrath Goodman wrote a piece for Newsweek claiming Satoshi was a maths genius called Dorian Nakamoto, who lived in the Californian suburb of Temple City and didn’t actually know, it turned out, how to pronounce bitcoin. When Goodman’s article ran on the magazine’s cover reporters from all over the world arrived on Dorian’s doorstep. He said he would give an interview to the first person who would take him to lunch. It turned out that his hobby wasn’t alternative currencies but model trains. Someone calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto, and using Satoshi’s original email address, visited one of the forums Satoshi used to haunt and posted the message: ‘I am not Dorian Nakamoto.’ Other commentators, including Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times, named Nick Szabo, a cool cryptocurrency nut and the inventor of Bit Gold, but he denied it profusely. Forbes believed it was Hal Finney, who, the blockchain irrefutably showed, was the first person in the world to be sent bitcoin by Satoshi. Finney, a native Californian, was an expert cryptographer whose involvement in the development of bitcoin was vital. He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2009 and died in 2014. It came to seem that the holy grail would remain out of reach. ‘Many in the bitcoin community … in deference to the bitcoin creator’s clear desire for privacy … didn’t want to see the wizard unmasked,’ Popper wrote in the New York Times. ‘But even among those who said this, few could resist debating the clues the founder left behind.’

The ‘Stefan’ who was hovering during the raid on Craig Wright’s house and office is Stefan Matthews, an IT expert whom Wright had known for ten years, since they both worked for the online gambling site Centrebet. In those days, around 2007, Wright was often hired as a security analyst by such firms, deploying his skills as a computer scientist (and his experience as a hacker) to make life difficult for fraudsters. Wright was an eccentric guy, Stefan Matthews remembered, but known to be a reliable freelancer. Matthews said that Wright had given him a document to look at in 2008 written by someone called Satoshi Nakamoto, but Matthews had been busy at the time and didn’t read it for a while. He said that Wright was always trying to get him interested in this new venture called bitcoin. He tried to sell him 50,000 coin for next to nothing, but Matthews wasn’t interested, he told me, because Wright was weird and the whole thing seemed a bit cranky. A few years later, however, Matthews realised that the document he had been shown was, in fact, an original draft of the by now famous white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. (Like the governments they despise, bitcoiners deal – when it comes to ideas – in ‘white papers’, as if they were issuing laws.) Last year, when Wright was in financial trouble, he approached Matthews several times. By that time, Matthews had become friendly with Robert MacGregor, the founder and CEO of a Canada-based money-transfer firm called nTrust. Matthews encouraged MacGregor to come to Australia and assess Wright’s value as an investment opportunity. Wright had founded a number of businesses that were in trouble and he was deeply embedded in a dispute with the ATO. Nevertheless, Matthews told MacGregor, Wright was almost certainly the man behind bitcoin.

Matthews argued that since Satoshi’s disappearance in 2011, Wright had been working on new applications of the blockchain technology he had invented as Satoshi. He was, in other words, using the technology underlying bitcoin to create new versions of the formula that could, at a stroke, replace the systems of bookkeeping and registration and centralised authority that banks and governments depend on. Wright and his people were preparing dozens of patents, and each invention, in a specific way, looked to rework financial, social, legal or medical services, expanding on the basic idea of the ‘distributed public ledger’ that constitutes the blockchain. This is utopian thinking, even by normal geek standards, but it’s a hot topic in computer science and banking at the moment, and hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in such ideas. Thus: Matthews’s proposal.

After initial scepticism, and in spite of a slight aversion to Wright’s manner, MacGregor was persuaded, and struck a deal with Wright, signed on 29 June 2015. MacGregor says he felt sure that Wright was bitcoin’s legendary missing father, and he told me it was his idea, later in the drafting of the deal, to insist that Satoshi’s ‘life rights’ be included as part of the agreement. Wright’s companies were so deep in debt that the deal appeared to him like a rescue plan, so he agreed to everything, without, it seems, really examining what he would have to do. Within a few months, according to evidence later given to me by Matthews and MacGregor, the deal would cost MacGregor’s company $15 million. ‘That’s right,’ Matthews said in February this year. ‘When we signed the deal, $1.5 million was given to Wright’s lawyers. But my main job was to set up an engagement with the new lawyers … and transfer Wright’s intellectual property to nCrypt’ – a newly formed subsidiary of nTrust. ‘The deal had the following components: clear the outstanding debts that were preventing Wright’s business from getting back on its feet, and work with the new lawyers on getting the agreements in place for the transfer of any non-corporate intellectual property, and work with the lawyers to get Craig’s story rights.’ From that point on, the ‘Satoshi revelation’ would be part of the deal. ‘It was the cornerstone of the commercialisation plan,’ Matthews said, ‘with about ten million sunk into the Australian debts and setting up in London.’

The plan was always clear to the men behind nCrypt. They would bring Wright to London and set up a research and development centre for him, with around thirty staff working under him. They would complete the work on his inventions and patent applications – he appeared to have hundreds of them – and the whole lot would be sold as the work of Satoshi Nakamoto, who would be unmasked as part of the project. Once packaged, Matthews and MacGregor planned to sell the intellectual property for upwards of a billion dollars. MacGregor later told me he was speaking to Google and Uber, as well as to a number of Swiss banks. ‘The plan was to package it all up and sell it,’ Matthews told me. ‘The plan was never to operate it.’

Clockwise from top left: Hal Finney, Gavin Andresen, Robert MacGregor, Stefan Matthews

Since​ the time I worked with Julian Assange, my computers have been hacked several times. It isn’t unusual for me to find that material has been wiped, and I was careful to make sure the lawyer’s approach wasn’t part of a sting operation. But I was curious to see what these men had. I assumed MacGregor – or someone behind him – must be the ‘client’ referred to in the email I had received from California. On Thursday, 12 November, I turned up at MacGregor’s office near Oxford Circus, where I signed in under a pseudonym and made my way to a boardroom wallpapered with mathematical formulae. MacGregor came into the room wearing a tailored jacket and jeans, with a blue-edged pocket square in his breast pocket, a scarf and brown brogue boots. He was 47 but looked about 29. There was something studied about him – the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio – and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of money. When I asked him the point of the whole exercise he said it was simple: ‘Buy in, sell out, make some zeroes.’

MacGregor described Wright to me as ‘the goose that lays the golden egg’. He said that if I agreed to take part I would have exclusive access to the whole story, and to everyone around Wright, and that it would all end with Wright proving he was Satoshi by using cryptographic keys that only Satoshi had access to, those associated with the very first blocks in the blockchain. MacGregor told me this might happen at a public TED talk. He said it would be ‘game over’. Wright’s patents would then be sold and Wright could get on with his life, out of the public eye. ‘All he wants is peace to get on with his work,’ MacGregor told me at that first meeting. ‘And how this ends, for me, is with Craig working for, say, Google, with a research staff of four hundred.’

I told MacGregor that there would have to be a process of verification. We talked about money, and negotiated a little, but after several meetings I decided I wouldn’t accept any. I would write the story as I had every other story under my name, by observing and interviewing, taking notes and making recordings, and sifting the evidence. ‘It should be warts and all,’ MacGregor said. He said it several times, but I was never sure he understood what it meant. This was a changing story, and I was the only one keeping account of the changes. MacGregor and his co-workers were already convinced Wright was Satoshi, and they behaved, to my mind, as if that claim was the end of the story, rather than the beginning.

I don’t mean to imply anything sinister. The company was excited by the project and so was I. Very quickly we were working hand in hand: I reserved judgment (and independence) but I was very caught up in the thought of the story unfolding as planned. At this point, nobody knew who Craig Wright was, but he appeared, from the initial evidence, to have a better claim to being Satoshi Nakamoto than anyone else had. He seemed to have the technical ability. He also had the right social history, and the timeline worked. The big proof was up ahead, and how could it not be spectacular? I went slowly forward with the project, and said no to everything that would hamper my independence. This would become an issue later on with MacGregor and Matthews, or the men in black, as I’d taken to calling them, but for those first few months, nobody asked me to sign anything and nobody refused me access. Mysteries would open up, and some would remain, but there seemed no mystery about the fact that these people were confident that a supremely important thing was happening and that the entire process should be witnessed and recorded. My emails to MacGregor took it for granted that what would be good for my story, in terms of securing proof, would also be good for his deal, and that seemed perfectly true. Yet I feel bad that I didn’t warn him of the possibility that this might not be what happened, that my story wouldn’t die if the deal died, that human interest doesn’t stop at success.

It was at this point, four weeks after my first meeting with MacGregor, that Wired and Gizmodo reported that he might be Satoshi. The news unleashed a tsunami of responses from the cryptocurrency community, and most of it was bad for Wright’s credibility. Had he left artificial footprints to suggest his involvement with bitcoin had been earlier than it was? Had he exaggerated the number and nature of the degrees he’d accumulated from various universities? Why did the company that supplied the supercomputer he claimed to have bought with amassed bitcoin say it had never heard of him?

‘The smell,’ as one commentator said, ‘was a mile high.’ The nCrypt people were unfazed by this mudslinging, believing that every one of the charges made against Wright could be easily disproved. Wright produced an impressive paper showing that his ‘footprint’ wasn’t faked and that the ‘cryptographic’ evidence against him was bogus (people continue to argue on this point). He produced a letter from the supercomputer supplier acknowledging the order. Charles Sturt University provided a photocopy of his staff card, proving he had lectured there, and Wright sent me a copy of the thesis he’d submitted for a doctorate his critics claim he doesn’t have.

I had arrived​ five minutes early at 28-50 Degrees, a wine bar and restaurant in Mayfair. It was just before 1 p.m. on 16 December and the lunchtime crowd, men in blue suits and white shirts, were eating oysters and baby back ribs and drinking high-end wine by the glass. A jeroboam of Graham’s ten-year-old tawny port stood on the bar, and I was inspecting it when MacGregor arrived with Mr and Mrs Smith. That’s what he’d been calling them in his emails to me. Craig Wright, 45 years old, wearing a white shirt under a black jacket, a pair of blue chinos, a belt with a large Armani buckle and very green socks, wasn’t the kind of guy who seems comfortable in a swish restaurant. He sat across from me and lowered his head and at first he let MacGregor do the talking. Ramona was very friendly, chatting about their time in London as if they were a couple of holidaymakers who’d just blown into Mayfair. She wasn’t drinking, but the rest of us ordered a glass of Malbec each. When Wright lifted his head to laugh at something, I noticed he had a nice smile but uneven teeth, and a scar that climbed from the top of his nose to the area just above his left eyebrow. He hadn’t shaved since he’d left Sydney.

Wright told me he was rubbish at small talk. He too wanted what I wrote to be ‘warts and all’; he felt he was being misunderstood by everybody, and normally that wouldn’t bother him but he had to consider the respectability of his work, and his family’s rights. He appeared to ponder this for a moment, then he told me his old neighbours at the house in Gordon hadn’t been friendly.

‘They barely even knew your name,’ Ramona said.

‘They do now,’ he replied.

I found him easier to talk to than I’d expected. He said his father had worked for the NSA (he couldn’t explain this), but that, to this day, his mother thinks he worked for Nasa. ‘The few people I care about I care about a lot,’ he said, ‘and I care about the state of the world. But there’s not much in between.’ He said he was happy I was writing about him because he wanted ‘to step into history’, but mainly because he wanted to tell the story of the brilliant people he had collaborated with. He and Ramona were both jet-lagged and anxious about things back home. ‘We should have been having our company’s Christmas party today,’ Ramona said.

MacGregor asked Wright if being a libertarian had influenced his work, or if the work had turned him into a libertarian. ‘I was always libertarian,’ he replied, and then he told me his father had more or less kidnapped him after his parents got divorced. He hated being told what to do – that was one of his main motivations. He believed in freedom, and in what freedom would come to mean, and he said his work would guarantee a future in which privacy was protected. ‘Where we are,’ he said, ‘is a place where people can be private and part of that privacy is to be someone other than who they were. Computing will allow you to start again, if you want to. And that is freedom.’ In fact he never stopped imagining different lives for himself. That afternoon he seemed preoccupied by the case people were making against his being Satoshi. He shook his head a lot and said he wished he could just get on in silence with his work. ‘If you want to stay sane through this, ignore Reddit,’ his wife told him.

The next day, 17 December, we met again, in a private room in Claridge’s. You could see outside, over the rooftops, cranes garlanded in fairy lights. Ramona came in looking tired and totally fed up. From time to time, especially when exhausted, she would resent the hold these people had over them. ‘We have sold our souls,’ she said to me in a quiet moment.

MacGregor said he would spend the evening preparing paperwork to be signed by Wright the following day. This would effectively be the final signing over to nCrypt of the intellectual property held by Wright’s companies. This was the main plank in the deal. MacGregor was confident the work was ‘world historical’, that it would change the way we lived. He regularly described the blockchain as the greatest invention since the internet. He said that what the internet had done for communication, the blockchain would do for value.

MacGregor explained that Wright’s Australian companies were being signed over to nCrypt and that he’d extended an ‘olive branch’ to the ATO, which had responded quickly and positively. A lot of trouble with the ATO had to do with whether bitcoin was a commodity or a currency and how it should be taxed. It also had doubts about whether Wright’s companies had done as much research and development as they claimed, and whether they were therefore entitled to the tax rebates they had applied for. The ATO had said it couldn’t see where the spending was going. Some critics in the media claimed Wright’s companies had been set up only for the purpose of claiming rebates, though not even the ATO went that far.

Wright told me that thanks to the tax office they’d had to lay out all the research for their patents, which had been useful since the nCrypt team was in a hurry: the banks, now alert to cryptocurrencies and the effectiveness of the blockchain, are rushing to create their own versions. At that moment, Bank of America was patenting ten ideas for which Craig and his team told me they had a claim to ‘prior art’. Governments spent a long time denying the value of bitcoin – seeing it as unstable, or the currency of criminals – but now they celebrate the potential of the technology behind it.

‘They’re behaving like children,’ Wright said of the ATO.

MacGregor looked at his watch. He straightened his cuffs. ‘I see this as a pivotal moment in history … It’s like being able to go back in time and watch Bill Gates in the garage.’ He turned to Wright. ‘You released this thing into the wild. Some people got it right and some people got it wrong. But you’ve got a vision of where it’s going next and next and next.’

‘None of this would have worked without bitcoin,’ Wright said, ‘but it’s a wheel and I want to build a car.’

Ramona looked depressed. She was worried that her husband, as the person claiming to have invented bitcoin, might be held liable for the actions of those who’d used the currency for nefarious purposes. ‘He didn’t issue a currency,’ MacGregor assured her. ‘This is just technology – it is not money.’ Ramona was still anxious. ‘We’re talking about legal risk … I’m giving you the legal answer,’ MacGregor said. ‘I would stake my career on the fact that the creation of bitcoin is not a prosecutable event.’

Right to the end, the Wrights would express worries about things Craig did as a young computer forensics worker. Much of his professional past looked questionable, but in the meeting room at Claridge’s he simply batted the past away. ‘It’s what you’re doing now that matters. I’m not perfect. I never will be … All these different people arguing about what Satoshi should be at the moment, it’s crazy.’

Ninjutsu

Wright’s​ father, Frederick Page Wright, was a forward scout in Vietnam, serving with the 8th Battalion of the Australian army. ‘He lost all his friends,’ Wright told me, ‘every single one of them’ – and before long he was drinking and being violent towards Wright’s mother, who eventually left him. Both Wright and his mother, when I went to meet her in Brisbane in March, told me about his father’s anger at his own mother: he sent all his army pay cheques home to her and she spent them while he was away. He also dreamed of a football career that never happened. ‘I have a chip on my shoulder,’ Wright said, ‘but his was bigger.’

‘Did you admire him?’

‘He never admired me. I was never fucking good enough. We played chess from when I was three or four and if I made a wrong move he’d wallop me. We clashed right from the beginning.’

The boy had two great influences. The first was his grandfather Ronald Lyman, who his family claims received the first degree awarded by the Marconi School of Wireless in Australia, and who served in the army as a signals officer. They also say he later became a spy with the Australian security services. Craig’s favourite place was his grandfather’s basement, a paradise of early computing. ‘We’d sit there and look at these books of log tables,’ he told me. ‘I loved doing it.’ Captain Lyman had an old terminal and a Hayes 80-103A modem that they used to connect to the University of Melbourne’s network. To keep Craig quiet while he worked, Pop, as the children called him, would let him write code. ‘I found this community of hackers,’ Wright says, ‘and I worked out how to interact with them. I started building games and hacking other people’s games. In time, I’d be pulling apart hacker code, and eventually I did this for companies, to help them create defences against hackers.’

His mother told me he was sometimes picked on at school. ‘He struggled,’ she said, ‘but after a while I sent him to Padua College’ – a private Catholic college in Brisbane – ‘and he shone there. I mean, he was different. He used to dress up and he had an obsession with Japanese culture. He had big samurai swords.’

‘As a teenager?’

‘Dressed up in samurai clothes, with the odd wooden shoes and everything. Making all the noises. His sisters would complain about him embarrassing them: “We’re down the park, we’ve got friends down there, and he’s walking around with webbed feet.” He used to have this group of nerdy friends in the 1980s: they’d come around in horn-rimmed glasses and play Dungeons & Dragons for hours.’

He had a karate teacher called Mas who moved him quickly from karate through judo to Ninjutsu. Craig broke his knuckles over and over again and ‘became stronger’, he told me, because ‘the pain led to a “me” that could handle more.’ The thing that attracted him most to martial arts was the discipline. Learning to become a ninja involves 18 disciplines, including bōjutsu (tactics), hensōjutsu (disguise and impersonation), intonjutsu (escape and concealment) and shinobi-iri (stealth and infiltration). He walked home from his lessons feeling stronger, like another self.

When he was 18, Wright joined the air force. ‘They locked me in a bunker,’ he told me, ‘and I worked on a bombing system. Smart bombs. We needed fast code, and I did that.’ When he was in his twenties a melanoma appeared on his back and he had several skin grafts. ‘This was after he got out of the air force,’ his mother told me, ‘and when he recovered he was off to university, and it’s been degrees, degrees, degrees since then.’ He went to the University of Queensland to study computer systems engineering. And over the following 25 years he would finish, or not finish, or finish and not do the graduation paperwork for degrees in digital forensics, nuclear physics, theology, management, network security, international commercial law and statistics. After our first full interview, he went home to work on an assignment for a new course he was taking at the University of London, a masters in quantitative finance.

Over the months I spent with him, I noticed that he loved the idea of heroism and was strongly attracted to creation myths. One of the first things he emailed me was a copy of one of his dissertations, ‘Gnarled Roots of a Creation Mythos’. I noticed it was dedicated to Mas, his martial arts instructor. The text wasn’t merely an argument for self-invention, but a feminist exegesis that railed against patriarchal views of the Fall. Wright also speaks of the pilgrim-visitor in the ‘world garden’. ‘While in the garden, the pilgrim almost inevitably suffers deception. His or her senses, enchanted by illusory and transitory formal appearances, betray his or her soul and lead to sin.’

Wright said he had never expected the myth of Satoshi to gather such force. ‘We were all used to using pseudonyms,’ he told me. ‘That’s the cypherpunk way. Now people want Satoshi to come down from the mountain like a messiah. I am not that. And we didn’t mean to set up a myth that way.’ Satoshi was loved by bitcoin fans for making a beautiful thing and then disappearing. They don’t want Satoshi to be wrong or contradictory, boastful or short-tempered, and they don’t really want him to be a 45-year-old Australian called Craig.

While reading Wright’s ideas on creation, I kept thinking of his karate teacher and the position he had in the young man’s life. An offhand remark Wright made had stayed with me. It was about storytelling and how a possible meaning of freedom might reside not only in martial arts, in the ability to defend oneself, but in the ability to make oneself. Mas ‘taught me a lot of Eastern philosophy and gave me the means to become myself’, Wright said. One day Mas told him about Tominaga Nakamoto. ‘He was a Japanese merchant philosopher,’ Wright told me. ‘I read translations of his stuff, material from the 1740s.’

Weeks later, I was in the kitchen of the house Wright was renting in London drinking tea with him when I noticed a book on the worktop called Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan. I’d done some mugging up by then and was keen to nail the name thing.

‘So that’s where you say you got the Nakamoto part?’ I asked. ‘From the 18th-century iconoclast who criticised all the beliefs of his time?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about Satoshi?’

‘It means “ash”,’ he said. ‘The philosophy of Nakamoto is the neutral central path in trade. Our current system needs to be burned down and remade. That is what cryptocurrency does – it is the phoenix …’

‘So satoshi is the ash from which the phoenix …’

‘Yes. And Ash is also the name of a silly Pokémon character. The guy with Pikachu.’ Wright smiled. ‘In Japan the name of Ash is Satoshi,’ he said.

‘So, basically, you named the father of bitcoin after Pikachu’s chum?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’ll annoy the buggery out of a few people.’ This was something he often said, as if annoying people was an art.

Wright’s generation, now in their mid to late forties, are seeing a world that enlarges on their teenage kicks. For Wright, as for Jeff Bezos, the rules of how to shop and how to think and how to live are extrapolations of dreams they had sitting in a box room somewhere. ‘The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in,’ Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, Wright’s favourite novel as a teenager. ‘Dune was really about people,’ Wright told me. ‘It was about the idea that we don’t want to leave things to machines and [should instead] develop as humans. But I see things a little differently from Mr Herbert. I see that it’s not one or the other – man or machines – it’s a symbiosis and a way of becoming something different together.’ This kind of cyberpunk energy – as opposed to cypherpunk, which came later – delivered Wright’s generation of would-be computer scientists into the brightness of the future.

After getting his first degree, Wright settled into IT roles in a number of companies. He became a well-known ‘go-to guy’ among startups and security firms: he always solved the problem and they always came back for more. ‘When I’ve characterised Craig to colleagues and friends,’ Rob Jenkins, who worked with Wright in this period and now holds a senior position in Australia’s Westpac Bank, told me, ‘I’ve always described him as the most qualified person I’ve ever known. I’ve worked with other smart people but Craig has such a strong desire to pursue knowledge. He has passion. And bitcoin was just another one of those bright things he was talking about.’

‘Sketch it out for me,’ I said to Wright. ‘Those years before bitcoin. What was happening that would later have an influence? I want to know about all the precursors, all the previous attempts to solve the problem.’

‘Back in 1997 there was Tim May’s BlackNet …’ May was a crypto-anarchist, who had been operating and agitating in the cypherpunk community since the mid-1980s. ‘Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner,’ he wrote in the Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto in 1988. BlackNet operated like a precursor to WikiLeaks, soliciting secret information with payments made by untraceable, digital money.

‘We all have a narcissistic hubris,’ Wright told me. He wanted to take May’s BlackNet idea further. He was also enthusiastic, in those early days, about Hashcash and B-money. The idea behind Hashcash, a ‘proof of work’ algorithm where each of a group of computers performs a small task that can be instantly verified (thus making life impossible for spammers, who depend on multiple emails going out with little to no work involved), was ‘totally necessary for the building of bitcoin’. Wright said that he spoke to Adam Back, who proposed Hashcash in 1997, ‘a few times in 2008, whilst setting up the first trials of the bitcoin protocol’.

B-Money was invented by a man called Wei Dai. At the time of its creation, Wei wrote a paper which assumed ‘the existence of an untraceable network, where senders and receivers are identified only by digital pseudonyms (public keys) and every message is signed by its sender and encrypted to its receiver’. The public key, or address, is matched, as John Lanchester handily described it in the LRB, to ‘a private key which provides access to that address’. A key is really just a string of numbers and digits: the public key demonstrates ownership of any given address; the private key can only be used by the owner of that address. Wei went on to suggest a system for the exchange and transfer of money. ‘Anyone can create money by broadcasting the solution to a previously unsolved computational problem,’ he wrote. The system had methods for rewarding work and keeping users honest. ‘I admired B-Money,’ Wright told me, ‘and he definitely gave me some of the cryptographic code that ended up in the first version of bitcoin.’ Wright was always careful to give credit to those early developers. ‘Wei was very helpful,’ he went on, but ‘to people like that bitcoin seems a bit of a fudge. It works, but it’s not mathematically elegant.’

‘Wei said that?’

‘Wei was very polite. But others said it: Adam Back, Nick Szabo. They would probably like to find a more elegant solution to the problem. Perhaps they see the mining system in bitcoin as wasteful: there’s wasted computation in my system – machines which are trying to solve problems and not winning. But that’s like society.’

‘Are these early cryptocurrency people in a state of rivalry?’

‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter.’

Kleiman

The flat​ in Marylebone where I interviewed Wright had wooden shutters and modern ornaments and pictures, mainly of crows. I set the flat up for work while Craig and Ramona were in the City signing over his intellectual property, and all his companies, to MacGregor. They arrived at the flat a couple of hours late. ‘When did you realise the whole Satoshi thing wasn’t going to be a secret for ever?’ I asked.

‘Very recently,’ Wright said. ‘I didn’t really believe it would need to come out. What we believed is that we could leave it in doubt – we wouldn’t have to sign using the Satoshi keys or anything else. We have hundreds of patents and papers in progress – research from the beginning – and in the next year we’re going to start releasing them. We thought people could suspect and people could query and we could leave it like that.’

‘And how did that change?’

Ramona said a single word: ‘Rob.’

The days in St Christopher Place were almost languorous. We would bring coffee back to the flat and spread out, and I’d try to build a picture of how he did what he said he did. We put up whiteboards and he bamboozled me with maths. Sometimes he would write at the board for hours, then tear open books and point to theories and proofs. I talked to the scientists he worked with, many of whom were better explainers than he was. One of the things I noticed was that Wright hated claiming outright to be Satoshi and would spend hours giving credit to everyone who had ever contributed. It was odd: we were in the room because he was coming out as Satoshi, yet the claim embarrassed him and I have many hours of tape in which he deflects it. I felt this unwillingness supported his claim because it showed a proper regard for the communal nature of the work. He was contradictory enough sometimes to enjoy the limelight and actively court it, and this would cause trouble for him, but the idea of speaking directly as Satoshi seemed to fill him with dread. ‘I’m afraid that they’re just going to look at my papers because I’ve got Satoshi after my name,’ he told me. ‘I’ve got my little Satoshi mask on, and people go “Aren’t you wonderful?” because you were Satoshi. I wanted the doubt. When I released future papers, I wanted people to go: “Oh, fuck, he could be, and these papers are so good he might be.”’

Dave Kleiman was to become the most important person in Wright’s professional life, the man he says helped him do Satoshi’s work. They met online: they visited the same cryptography forums and had interacted since 2003. Both men were interested in cyber security, digital forensics and the future of money, but Kleiman was a boy’s boy, an army veteran who loved contact sports and fast living. Five foot ten and weighing 200 pounds, he lived in Riviera Beach, Florida, and from 1986 to 1990 he was an army helicopter technician. When I looked into Kleiman’s life, I discovered he had also done computer forensics work for Homeland Security and the army. After active service he became a deputy in the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office. A motorcycle crash in 1995, when he was 28, left him in a wheelchair. Kleiman was a drug user and one source told me he was heavily into online gambling and various illicit activities; there is evidence he was associated with Silk Road, the online marketplace for all things illegal. After the accident he devoted himself to computers, and set up a company called Computer Forensics LLC.

Until Napster (the brainchild of a teenager called Shawn Fanning) came along in 1999, enabling users to share music files across the internet without a central server, the phrase ‘peer-to-peer sharing’ was familiar only to the early internet’s true believers. Napster, with its user-friendly interface, brought file-sharing to the masses. The old model of copyright and revenue generation became obsolete overnight: people stopped buying CDs; young people got music through the internet for free. The music industry had to reinvent itself or die. Wright told me that his earliest conversations with Kleiman were about file-sharing. In 2007 they wrote a study guide together on hacking. ‘I used to fire ideas off him,’ Wright said. ‘I’m pretty good at maths but I’m not very good at people.’ Kleiman, he said, could put up with his temper, which not everybody could. They began to speak of ways to use the Napster idea in other areas and solve some old problems in cryptography. Wright never, I have to say, made it fully clear how they had collaborated on building bitcoin. I kept returning to the subject, and my doubts would flare up when he failed to be explicit.

‘Give me a sense of how the idea of Satoshi formed,’ I said.

‘I guess,’ Wright replied, ‘the initial idea was having a pseudonymous head that wouldn’t be cut off.’

‘More your idea than his?’

‘Probably mine.’

‘And was there a point you realised you needed a figurehead?’ I asked.

‘We needed people to respond to us,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t really want people to respond to me. There are a couple of reasons for that. I don’t think I would really have sold the idea to anyone. If I’d come out originally as Satoshi without Dave, I don’t think it would have gone anywhere. I’ve had too many conversations with people who get annoyed because it’s me.’

‘The blockchain came about as an idea of a ledger,’ he said. ‘But there were a number of problems that needed to be solved. It needed to be distributed, but how do you make sure people don’t collude – it may seem awful but you don’t put trust in people, you incentivise people to act. And you incentivise people to act by giving them the opportunity to earn something. It’s as Adam Smith says: it’s not through the goodness of the heart, it’s not the baker caring about you, it’s not the butcher caring about you, it’s them caring about their own families. Together, as he put it, the invisible hand controls the way society works.’

I asked him to explain the distributed ledger in layman’s terms and he went into an algorithmic paroxysm of verbal ingenuity. Ignoring all that, a distributed ledger is a database that is shared between multiple users, with every contributor to the network having their own identical copy of the database. Any and all additions or alterations to the ledger are mirrored in every copy as soon as they’re made. No central authority is in charge of it, but no entry on it can be disputed. Adam Smith’s point about ‘incentive’ is embedded in the way bitcoin works: people do not just buy coins or use them; they ‘mine’ them. Miners use their computers to solve increasingly difficult mathematical problems, the reward for the solving of which can be paid in bitcoin. This keeps the currency honest and, ideally, stops it from being dominated by any single entity.

I had brought rolls of disposable whiteboard and stuck it up around the flat, and, while we were speaking, he would jump up and cover the walls in formulae, along with arrows, arcs and curves. His wife told me she sometimes goes into the shower room and finds him standing there, stark naked, writing on the steamed glass. ‘Was there a primary person doing the maths?’ I asked.

‘Me,’ he said. ‘Dave wasn’t really a mathematician. What he did was make me simplify it.’

‘How did he know how to make you simplify it?’

‘We got to a point in the writing of the Satoshi white paper where it was … People say that it was hard.’

‘He wanted you to bring the language down a little bit?’

‘A lot. It’s very simple. The elliptical curve stuff is not described in the paper at all, it’s just there. The crypto stuff isn’t described either.’ I asked him to show me the trail of ideas that led to their collaboration. ‘So all these things are there,’ he said, pointing to a 337-page thesis on his computer called ‘The Quantification of Information Systems Risk’, which he had recently submitted in partial fulfilment of a philosophy doctorate at Charles Sturt University. ‘Application to audits, how you analyse failures, deriving the mathematics behind it, simplifying the mathematics and there you go … The core of the bitcoin paper is a Poisson model based on binomial distribution. That’s how it got solved.’

In 2008 it was a ‘hodgepodge’, he said. I asked him if he felt the development of bitcoin was, at some level, a response to the financial crisis. ‘It was already in process. I saw [the crisis] coming though. It was a kind of perfect storm. During that year, I spoke to Wei Dai. So between him and Hal Finney there were a lot of really good ideas about making money work … [Finney] was the one who actually took what I said seriously. He received the first bitcoin.’

Craig started turning up to our interviews in a three-piece suit. His suits were unfashionable and his ties even more so – 1970s-style yellow, sometimes paisley – and he would ramble on a range of subjects. On his own subject, he could be brilliant, but he was wayward: he would side-track, miss the point and never come back to it. He was nothing like people imagine the mythical Satoshi to be – in fact, he was Satoshi’s comic opposite. He told stories against himself that weren’t really against himself. He was obsessed with his opponents’ views but had no skill at providing a straight answer to their questions. ‘I’m an arsehole,’ he said many times, as if saying so were a major concession. But he wasn’t really, he was actually pretty nice. He was arrogant about maths and computing, which wasn’t so surprising. He also had a habit of dissembling, of now and then lying about small things in a way that cast shade on larger things. At one point, I asked him to send me an email from the original Satoshi account.

‘Can you do that?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I’d need Rob’s permission.’ When I asked MacGregor he said that was absurd. He simply didn’t want to – or couldn’t – give too much away, and that was unfortunate in someone who’d agreed to sit down every day with a writer. He seemed to have full knowledge of that email account, in a way that made it seem unquestionably his. But somehow, it offended his sense of personal power to prove it. At first, I thought he was a man in existential crisis, like the hero of Bellow’s Dangling Man, brilliant but antisocial, waiting to be drafted. But as the months passed I began to think of him more as a Russian ‘superfluous’ man of the 1850s, a romantic hero out of Turgenev, constantly held back from self-realisation by some blinding secret, showing himself not by action but in speech. Wright talked all day and he scribbled on the board and he called me his friend. He cried and he shouted and he unloaded his childhood and spoke about his father. He claimed to be Satoshi and he spoke Satoshi’s thoughts and described what he did and gave an account of what people misunderstood about his invention and where bitcoin needed to go now. I moved to an office in Piccadilly – it was like something out of John le Carré, all those rooftops and fluttering Union Jacks – and we continued to do interviews. He talked without cease, without direction, and continued to find it difficult to land near the spot where my question was marked on the ground. When I asked to see the emails between him and Kleiman, he shrugged. He said he wasn’t getting on well with his first wife when he wrote them and I assumed that meant they were full of talk about her. ‘Just edit them down for me,’ I said.

‘I don’t know if I can find them,’ he said. But I wouldn’t let it go and eventually he sent me a selection and they certainly seem to be authentic. A few of the emails were obviously the same as those quoted in the Wired and Gizmodo stories before Christmas. Wright always said these stories had been provoked by a ‘leak’, the work of a disgruntled employee of his who had stolen a hard drive. In any case, the emails he sent me show a pair of men with shadowy habits – socially undernourished men, I’d say, with a high degree of intellectual ability – operating in a world where the line between inventing and scamming is not always clear. The first email Wright sent me was from 27 November 2007, when he was working for the Sydney accountancy firm BDO Kendalls and the two men were working on a paper on ‘Cookies in Internet Banking’. ‘Next year Dave, we come out with something big. I will tell you, but not now,’ he wrote to Kleiman on 22 December 2007. Kleiman’s reply told him what he was reading – ‘Sagan, Feynman, Einstein’ – and added: ‘I hope we make an event together this year so we can “break some bread” and have a casual conversation, instead of the brain dump middle of the night email exchanges we normally have.’ On 1 January 2008, Wright closed an email: ‘Nothing now, but I want your help on something big soon.’

The subject of bitcoin came up – quite starkly – in an email from Wright dated 12 March 2008. ‘I need your help editing a paper I am going to release later this year. I have been working on a new form of electronic money. Bit cash, bitcoin … you are always there for me Dave. I want you to be part of it all. I cannot release it as me. GMX, vistomail and Tor. I need your help and I need a version of me to make this work that is better than me.’ Wright told me that he did the coding and that Kleiman helped him to write the white paper and make the language ‘serene’. With a protocol as clever as the one underlying bitcoin, you would imagine the work was complex and endlessly discussed. But Wright says they mainly talked about it by direct message and by phone. Wright had been fired from his job at BDO (the crash was taking effect) and had retired with his then wife, Lynn, and many computers to a farm in Port Macquarie. It was there, Wright says, that he did the majority of the work on bitcoin and where he spoke to Kleiman most regularly. The Satoshi white paper, ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, was published on a cryptography mailing list on 31 October 2008.

On 27 December 2008, Wright wrote to Kleiman: ‘My wife will not be happy, but I am not going back to work. I need time to get my idea going … The presentation was good and the paper is out. I am already getting shit from people and attacks on what we did. The bloody bastards are wrong and I friken showed it, they should stick to the science and piss off with their politicised crap. I need your help. You edited my paper and now I need to have you aid me build this idea.’ Wright told me that it took several attempts to get the protocol up and running. He began to test it early in January 2009. ‘That was where the real money started rolling in,’ he told me. The originating block in the blockchain – the file that provably records every transaction ever made – is called the Genesis block. ‘There were actually a few versions of the Genesis block,’ Wright told me. ‘It fucked up a few times and we reviewed it a few times. The Genesis block is the one that didn’t crash.’ There from the beginning was Hal Finney, who would receive the first bitcoin transaction, on block 9. This was a key moment for the new cryptocurrency: block 9 for ever shows that Satoshi sent Finney ten bitcoin on 12 January 2009 – it is the first outgoing transaction we know to have come from Satoshi. Satoshi also sent four other transactions on the same day. I asked Wright who the recipients were – who the four addresses belonged to. ‘Hal, Dave, myself,’ he replied. ‘And another I cannot name as I have no right to do so.’ Wright told me that around this time he was in correspondence with Wei Dai, with Gavin Andresen, who would go on to lead the development of bitcoin, and Mike Hearn, a Google engineer who had ideas about the direction bitcoin should take. Yet when I asked for copies of the emails between Satoshi and these men he said they had been wiped when he was running from the ATO. It seemed odd, and still does, that some emails were lost while others were not. I think he believed it would be more interesting to play hide and seek than to be a man with a knowable past.

Wright’s emails to Kleiman suggest that by this point he was starting to mine the million or so bitcoins that are said to be owned by Satoshi Nakamoto. ‘I have a few potential clients in gaming and banking,’ he wrote to Kleiman. ‘I figure I can work ten to 15 hours a week and pretend to have a consultancy and use this to build and buy the machines I need. If I automate the code and monitoring, I can double the productivity and still offer more than others are doing … The racks are in place in Bagnoo and Lisarow. I figure we can have 100 cores a month setup and get to around 500.’ Kleiman replied the same day to affirm their vows.

‘Craig, you always know I am there for you. You changed the paradigm that was held for over a decade and destroyed the work of a couple [sic] academics. Do you really think they will just take this happily? I know you will not, but try not to take the comments to heart. Let the paper speak for itself. Next time you need to get me a copy of the conference proceedings as well. You know it is not easy for me to travel.’ A picture emerges of an ailing Kleiman sitting at his computer day and night in his small ranch-style house in Riviera Beach, Florida. After writing this last email, he spent a frighteningly long period in hospital. The two men agreed to meet up at a conference in Florida on 11 March 2009 and Kleiman wrote expressing his excitement at the prospect of a few beers with Wright. Craig and Lynn stayed at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort Hotel and Kleiman drove there in his customised van, rolling into the bar with a big smile: Kleiman was the brother and drinking buddy and like-minded computer nerd Wright had never had. Not even Lynn had a clue what they were talking about.

During my visit to Australia I met Lynn in Chatswood, on Sydney’s north shore, a busy commercial district that heaves with eager shoppers on a Saturday morning. She had met Wright on the internet while she was working as the nursing manager of the ICU in a military hospital in Ottawa. She told me Wright asked her to marry him about six weeks after they met online. When she eventually went to Sydney to visit him, he brought a ring to the airport. ‘He was 26 and I was 44,’ she said. Neither of them had been married before.

‘He was very mature for 26,’ Lynn told me. ‘He always has to be the best. And the hard part about that is he left bodies by the wayside. He stepped on people.’ She began working for him – ‘he was the geek and I was the gofer’ – and he got a lot of work in information security, working for the Australian Securities Exchange, and Centrebet, which is where he first got to know Stefan Matthews. Wright told me he was afraid some of the things he did for those online betting companies would come back to bite him, if and when he was outed as Satoshi. Other sources told me that he and Kleiman had had some involvement with illegal gambling. ‘I knew Dave Kleiman and he were working together,’ Lynn told me, ‘and I remember them saying that digital money was the way of the future. I’ve never said this to anybody, but I knew he was working on it and I didn’t ask, because I knew he would bite my head off if I didn’t understand it. He’s got a very sociopathic personality.’

Lynn said her husband had admired Kleiman. And she admired him too: ‘He loved life,’ she said, ‘and he had a brilliant mind, like Craig, but he had a gentler soul.’ She remembered the Orlando conference. ‘We stayed in a hotel that looked like a giant cartoon,’ she told me. ‘We met in one of the bars. He was a young guy, in his thirties or early forties, brown hair and moustache, average-looking. And boy, he loved to have a good time. It might have been his birthday. I went into the Disney store and bought some hats – Craig had Pluto, and Dave had one in the shape of a giant birthday cake.’ Wright stepped out of himself for Kleiman: ‘I’d never seen him like that with anybody. It was like, “I wanna grow up to be just like him.” Dave softened Craig. A lot of what they wrote together was in his voice. I’d never seen Craig react like that to anybody. When he felt unsure of himself he went and talked to Dave. I think he wanted to be like Dave, but he knew he couldn’t be.’

‘In terms of having that kind of temperament?’

‘Yeah. Dave was good for him. It made him realise that life doesn’t go your way all of the time.’

I asked her if she thought he was a flawed person. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s starting to realise it. He knows he’s done well in his work but he hasn’t done well as a human being.’ She stared into her cup. ‘When we were at the farm,’ she said, ‘I was interested in finding four-leaf clovers. I would never find any, but Craig would just step out of the house and find three.’

In mid-2011 Satoshi suddenly disappeared from view. Apart from one or two emails denouncing fake Satoshis, he wasn’t heard from again. Control of the network alert key is said to have been passed at this time to Andresen – possession of this key makes its holder the closest thing bitcoin has to a chief. Wright sent Kleiman an email on 10 September 2011: ‘It is recorded. I cannot do the Satoshi bit any more. They no longer listen. I am better as a myth. Back to my lectures and rants that everyone ignores as me. I hate this Dave, my pseudonym is more popular than I can ever hope to be.’

For some reason – possibly fear of the ATO – Wright set up a trust fund called the Tulip Trust in June 2011, and asked Kleiman to sign an agreement stating that he, Kleiman, would hold 1,100,111 bitcoin (then valued at £100,000, currently worth around $800 million). For clarity: there is no evidence that Kleiman ever took custody of that amount. However, there was a separate agreement that Kleiman would receive 350,000 bitcoin and this transaction was made. ‘All bitcoin will be returned to Dr Wright on 1 January 2020,’ it says in the trust document.

No record of this arrangement will be made public at any time … Dr Wright MAY request a loan of bitcoin for the following reasons (and no others): Furthering research into peer to peer systems … commercial activities that enhance the value and position of bitcoin. In all events, all transactions in loaned funds will be concluded outside of Australia and the USA until and unless a clear and acceptable path to the recognition of bitcoin as currency has occurred … I lastly acknowledge that I will not divulge the identity of the Key with ID C941FE6D nor of the origins of the satoshin@gmx.com email.

Kleiman signed it. ‘I think you are mad and this is risky,’ he wrote in an email to Wright on 24 June 2011, perhaps spying a possible illegality. ‘But I believe in what we are trying to do.’ Wright meanwhile seemed to get more and more frustrated. He both wanted fame and repudiated it, craving the recognition he felt was his due while claiming his only wish was to get back to his desk. ‘I have people who love my secret identity and hate me,’ he wrote to Kleiman on 23 October that year. ‘I have hundreds of papers. Satoshi has one. Nothing, just one bloody paper and I cannot associate myself with ME! I am tired of all these dicks Dave. Tired of academic attacks. Tired of tax fuckwits. Tired of having to do shenanigans like moving stuff overseas IN CASE it works.’

I came to feel that there were secrets between Wright and Kleiman that might never be revealed. Wright usually clammed up when asked about Kleiman and money. One day, in a fit of high spirits, he showed me a piece of software he said that US Homeland Security had ripped off from him and Kleiman. He smiled when I asked if they’d done government security work. The first thing most people ask about when you mention Satoshi is his alleged hoard of bitcoin: he invented the thing, and created the Genesis block, and mined bitcoin from the start, so where was Wright’s money and where was Kleiman’s? The emails, when I got them, seemed to clear this up slightly, but, during many dozens of hours of conversation with Wright, he never properly told me how many bitcoin he mined. I was aware – and he knew I was aware, because I told him several times – that he wasn’t giving me a full account of everything that had occurred between him and Kleiman. He said it was complicated.

Somewhat more helpful are minutes taken during a meeting between the ATO and representatives from Wright’s Australian companies in Sydney on 26 February 2014. According to the minutes, Wright’s representative John Cheshire went into detail about the financial collaboration between Wright and Kleiman. This was a story that Wright, for some reason, didn’t want to tell me. Cheshire said that Wright and Kleiman had set up a company called W&K Info Defense LLC (W&K), ‘an entity created for the purpose of mining bitcoins’. Some of these bitcoins were put into a Seychelles trust and some into one in Singapore. Wright, according to Cheshire, ‘had gotten approximately 1.1 million bitcoins. There was a point in time when he had around 10 per cent of all the bitcoins out there. Mr Kleiman would have had a similar amount.’

I asked Wright about this and he told me it was true that his and Kleiman’s mining activity had led to a complicated trust. The trust question was persistently vague: not only how many trusts but the names of the trustees, and the dates of their formation. The only consistent thing is the amount of bitcoin Wright is said to have had at one time, 1.1 million. He said that his bitcoin could not now be moved without the agreement of the (several) trustees. He also said that Kleiman had been given 350,000 bitcoin but had not moved them. He kept them on a personal hard drive.

Wright also set up a shell company in the UK. ‘I know what you want and I know how impatient you can be,’ Kleiman wrote on 10 December 2012, ‘but really, we need to do this right. If you fail you can start again. That is the real beauty of what you have.’ It’s possible Kleiman was referring to their ability to mine bitcoins and then squirrel them away. But he was evidently worried about Wright’s ability to cope with all the flak, and about Wright’s kamikaze attitude to the tax authorities. ‘I love you like a brother Craig,’ he added, ‘but you are a really difficult person to be close to. You need people. Stop pushing them away. You have over one million bitcoin now in the trust. Start doing something for yourself and this family you have.’

Around this time, an 18-year-old IT enthusiast called Uyen Nguyen began working with them. Very quickly, Kleiman made her a co-director of their company and she later became a powerful figure in the trust. It’s unclear how such a young and inexperienced person came to have so much influence. Wright told me she was ‘volatile, capricious and beyond control’ and added that Kleiman liked young women and that she was loyal and trusted – but that ‘she wants to help and this always leads to trouble.’ While I was preparing this story, Wright began to seem worried about Nguyen. I always felt he was in the middle of a very complicated lie when he talked about her. ‘My way of lying,’ he told me one day, ‘is to let you believe something. If you stop questioning and then you go off, and I don’t correct you – that’s my lie.’

Towards the end of 2012, Dave began to fail. ‘Paraplegics get sick a lot,’ Lynn Wright had told me, speaking as a nurse. ‘The bedsores get bad and they can’t fight infections. Dave was in and out of hospital a lot and I don’t know what his life was really like.’ Wright told me that Kleiman had girlfriends, but admitted he didn’t really know much about his life. Like Wright and his first wife, they had met in a chatroom. They met in the flesh no more than half a dozen times. Kleiman seems to have lived in front of his computer day and night, and the sicker he got the more isolated he seemed to be. Just after 6 p.m. on 27 April 2013 he was found dead by a friend who’d been trying to contact him for several days. He was sitting in his wheelchair and leaning to the left with his head resting on his hand. Lying next to him on the bed was a 0.45 calibre semi-automatic handgun, a bottle of whisky and a loaded magazine of bullets. In the mattress a few feet from where he sat, a bullet hole was found, but Kleiman had died from coronary heart disease. There were prescription medicines in his bloodstream and a modest amount of cocaine.

‘We never really thought that “we made Satoshi,”’ Wright told me once. ‘It was good. It was done. It was cool. But I don’t think we realised how big it would be.’

‘There was no conversation between you about how it was going over? That Satoshi was becoming a guru?’

‘We thought it was funny.’

Wright paused, shook his head, and broke down. ‘I loved Dave,’ he said. ‘I would have seen him more. I would have talked to him more. I would’ve made sure he had some fucking money to go to a decent hospital. I don’t think he had the right to choose not to tell me.’

‘What was happening to him?’

‘Neither of us had any money, physical money. We had money in Liberty, an exchange in Costa Rica, but the Americans closed it down as a money-laundering operation. Dave had a number of bitcoins on the hard drive he carried with him. Probably about 350,000.’

‘Hoping it would …’

‘As I said, it wasn’t worth that much then. Dave died a week before the value went up by 25 times.’ Wright kept wiping his eyes and shaking his head. He emphasised something he said the commentators never understood: for a long time, bitcoin wasn’t worth anything, and they constantly needed money to keep the whole operation going. They feared that dumping their bitcoin hoard would have flooded the market and devalued the currency. One of the things Wright and Kleiman had in common is that they had a problem turning their ideas into cash and were always being chased by creditors. Kleiman died feeling like a failure. No one in his family has the passwords to release the bitcoins on his computer. After he died, his family didn’t open probate on his estate because they believed it had no value. Kleiman’s supposed personal bitcoin holdings are worth $260 million at today’s prices.

The London Office

In January​ this year, on a rainy London afternoon, Wright took me to see the large office that was being set up for him as part of the deal with nCrypt. It hadn’t taken long for the world to forget that they’d once thought Wright was Satoshi. One or two of the media organisations that had ‘outed’ him in December had taken down the original articles from their websites, stung by the cries of fraud. After only a few days’ interest in the notion, most people had made up their minds that Wright had nothing to do with Satoshi. Wright – under strict advisement – had said nothing in response to the media reports accusing him of perpetrating a hoax, but when we were alone, which was most of the time, he would launch into point-by-point rebuttals of what his critics had been saying. In the end he would shrug, as if the most obscure things were actually obvious.

The press coverage of Wright and Wright himself had something in common: they succeeded in making him seem less plausible than he actually was, and, to me, that is a general truth about computer geeks. They are content to know what they know and not to explain it. They will answer a straightforward slur with an algorithm, or fail to claim credit for something big then spend all night trying to claim credit for something small. Many of the accusations of lying that were thrown at Wright last December were thrown by other coders. And that’s what they’re like – see Reddit, or any of the bitcoin forums. Much of what these people do they do in the dark, beyond scrutiny, and, just as it’s against their nature to incriminate themselves, it is equally unnatural for them, even under pressure, to de-incriminate themselves. They just shrug.

Coders call one another liars, when all they really mean is that they disagree about how software should work. During the time I was working with Wright in secret, I would text my colleague John Lanchester, who I knew I could trust to keep the secret but also to understand what was at stake in the story. ‘Imagine a situation,’ I wrote to John, ‘where novelists were strangely invested in denying the plausibility of each other’s books. There’s no “proof” as such that one is right and the other is wrong, but they could argue fiercely and accuse each other of all sorts of things while not really settling the problem.’

‘Edmund Wilson says somewhere that the reason poets dislike each other’s books is because they seem wrong, false – a kind of lie,’ John replied. ‘If you were telling the truth you would be writing the same poems as me.’

So the world that Wright knew best thought he was a liar. And the day we visited his new offices he seemed resigned to the fact. Much later, he told me that these months were the high-point of his career in computer science: he was working in secret on material that seemed to be coming together beautifully and profitably. It irked him that people called him a fraud and it irked him, just as much, that his deal with nCrypt would require him to prove that he was Satoshi. He hated being accused of being a fraud and he hated having to prove that he wasn’t a fraud. Having it both ways is a life, a life that requires a certain courage as well as shamelessness, and Wright was living his double life to the hilt.

Wright introduced me to Allan Pedersen, who’d been his project manager in Sydney. We were in the Workshop – a floor above MacGregor’s office near Oxford Circus – standing at a glass workbench beside a whiteboard covered in writing. The opposite wall was stencilled with a quote from Henry Ford: ‘Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right.’ Pedersen told me he had been brought over to direct a group preparing an initial batch of 32 patent applications, to be completed by April. (This was in January.) Beyond that there were ‘upwards of four hundred patents’, ideas to do with using the blockchain to set up contracts that would come into action on specified dates years ahead, or using the blockchain to allow cars to tell their owners when they needed petrol and to debit the cost when they refuelled. At this point, and for several minutes afterwards, Wright spoke of himself in the third person. ‘Craig has been given a big kick up the bum,’ he said, ‘because Craig, instead of doing tons of research and sticking it on a shelf, has to complete it and turn it into something.’

‘How do you organise him?’ I asked Pedersen.

‘I’m the organised type,’ he said. ‘When Craig comes into the office he’s always in the middle of a sentence. And I’m trying to work out what this sentence is and manage things around what he’s saying. I’m sort of grounding his latest thoughts, placing them in what we’re trying to do. I’m the glue between Craig and the developers.’

It had become obvious, mainly from things Wright himself had said, that he often found it difficult to get on with people who worked for him. He got rattled when they said things couldn’t be done, or were too conventional in their thinking, or too stupid, as he saw it. Ramona told me that 40 per cent of his staff in Sydney had been in a state of rebellion. ‘I’m an arsehole,’ Craig said to me once again, ‘and I know that.’ Pedersen had the job of keeping things cool with the developers, whose job it was to turn Wright’s ideas into a form in which they could be patented and eventually licensed. ‘I’m making sure the ideas get executed,’ he said. ‘Craig’s not that interested in that part. He’s always moving on.’

‘Craig’s great at research,’ Wright said, ‘but his development and commercialisation sucks. I build it, and then it works, and then I walk off.’

‘You’re losing interest?’

‘I’ve lost interest. I’ve proved it, and off I go.’

‘It’s getting easier,’ Pedersen said, with a smile. ‘It was quite complex in the beginning.’ Wright had strong views about how the technology should develop, and how it could ‘scale’ to meet greater demand. ‘It can go to any size,’ Wright said that day. I’ve tested up to 340 gigabyte blocks, which is hundreds of thousands of times greater than it is now. It’s every stock exchange, it’s every registry rolled into one … Ultimately bitcoin is a 1980s program, because that’s what I was trained in … The idea is good, the code is robust, it runs and does the job, but it’s slow and cumbersome. There were some things early on that needed to be fixed and were, but it wasn’t as perfect as everyone thinks. At the end of the day, it needs to be turned into professional code. It needs to move away from the home user network and into a server network environment. And then it can do much more and be faster.’ There are those who feel it should remain small, and that making it bigger is a betrayal of its first principles.

‘This is the future of the blockchain,’ Pedersen said.

‘People are saying, “It’s not really something we can run yet,”’ Wright said, ‘but it’s time that we grew up and that bitcoin becomes professional.’

Pedersen shook his head. ‘We’re not working in a world where we know exactly what we’re doing,’ he said. ‘It’s coming from Craig. And then I start establishing the ground rules and we begin rolling it out. I’m putting people on a certain track and I keep going back to Craig, saying, “We need to sort this or that out,” and I’m constantly keeping them and him in the loop. The good thing about Craig is that he wants me to task him, so it’s a very strange relationship we’ve got. I’m reporting to him but I’m tasking him at the same time and it seems to work beautifully.’ He was tired, and so was the whole team, but they felt confident the patent applications would be filed on time.

When Craig left the room to take a phone call, Pedersen took pains to close the door properly. ‘He’s a really nice person,’ he said, ‘but he’s a fucking nightmare. Every single morning he comes in and I think, “What is he talking about?”’ Pedersen told me how he handled him, how he made him focus, and how he worked hard to keep him on track. ‘When I’ve got new people here,’ he said, and there were many new people, ‘I have to train them how to talk to Craig. That’s what I have to do. Sometimes, he can’t explain things and this is where the anger comes from. It’s the interesting part. You can’t be in the same room with him. He’s constantly telling you something. He’s like Steve Jobs, you know – only worse.’

As we made our way to the new office – it was a building site that day, but would be up and running four weeks later – Wright presented himself as a man who was ready for anything. In a pinstripe suit and ruby tie, he looked like a hellbent 1980s bond dealer, except the cypherpunk glint in the eye suggested he was getting away with something. He wasn’t the king of all he surveyed, he was the joker, and, crossing Oxford Street, he joked that he might be Moses. The traffic parted and he made his way to the promised land, a brand new suite of offices down a side street.

Pedersen​ had come along. ‘This is how it works in this company,’ he said. ‘You’re sitting in Vancouver in October’ – Vancouver is where nTrust, the parent company, is based – ‘and suddenly Rob MacGregor says: “We need these thirty-odd patents by April and when can you go to London?”’ The hurry for the patents was to help with the giant sale to Google or whomever. The men behind the deal were very keen to beat other blockchain developers to the punch, especially the R3 consortium of banks and financial institutions which late last year started spending a fortune trying to deploy the technology. We were accompanied by a young Irish woman who had been put in charge of designing the new office. MacGregor’s firm had invested millions in Wright. The new company, nCrypt, had pretty much been built around him, and its offices showed it. He was to have the enormous corner office with a view all the way along Oxford Street. MacGregor clearly believed in Wright, however obnoxious he could be, but I never understood why he wasn’t interrogating his uncertainties before spending his money. He was a lawyer, but he put trust in front of diligence, which is unusual in someone so intelligent. MacGregor never, incidentally, used the words ‘off the record’ with me – only once, later on, did he imply it, when he said something and then said he’d deny saying it if I quoted him – and he was a generous source of information. At no point, however, did he tell me where the money for this project was coming from.

The designer was waving a colour swatch. ‘We’ve gone for a kind of Scandi look,’ she said.

‘This place will work,’ Wright said, striding through the open space, ‘mainly when it comes to protecting me from myself.’ Amid the hammering and drilling, Wright stood in an office about 20 feet by 20 feet, with floor to ceiling windows and a view down into the heart of Soho.

‘You remember J.R. Ewing in Dallas?’ I asked.

Wright laughed. What he most enjoyed, he said, was that all this was going on in secret while the world outside had written him off as a mug and a fantasist. ‘If Satoshi has to come out, he’ll come out in style.’ He turned back to the designer to tell her how the frosted glass should work in the meeting room. ‘We do a lot of work on whiteboards,’ he said. He pursed his lips, then smiled. ‘Will the interactive whiteboards be set up so that I can contact the guys in Sydney?’

We spent an hour at the new office. ‘And they say nothing is going on,’ Wright said as we stepped back into the elevator. ‘It’s all a figment of our imagination. I’m not Satoshi, and none of this is real.’ Out on the street again, he told me he had all the money he would ever need. ‘And I’ll have the monkeys off my back for ever and just get on with the one thing I’m good at, not business, not managing people, but doing research and honouring this thing we made.’ Wright was enjoying himself, but nCrypt was already, as MacGregor told me repeatedly, negotiating the sale of the whole package to the highest bidder: ‘Buy in, sell out, make some zeroes,’ as he had said, and he’d always been honest about that goal. Wright wasn’t facing up to this. The next time I visited his corner office it was finished and decked out with claret-red leather armchairs and sofas flown in from Sydney. It looked, as I’d joked earlier, like the office of a Texan oil magnate. A host of management certificates were framed on the wall next to a signed photograph of Muhammad Ali.

I told Pedersen I thought Wright was struggling with the fine print of the deal – coming out. ‘He’s sold his soul,’ Pedersen said. ‘That’s how simple this is. And the combination of Craig and Ramona is dangerous here. They can’t just sign all these [legal] papers and think it’s going to be all right, that they’ll sort something out. It doesn’t work that way. They now have to go to the end and live with it. But they’re doing it on first class. When this Satoshi thing comes out I can see a lot of bad things happening, and they are not geared up for this, any of them.’

‘I’m concerned for him,’ I said.

‘There’s not really a happy ending here,’ Pedersen said.

‘Was it the same in Australia?’

‘It was the exact same,’ he said, ‘except in Australia you could say he was in control. He’s learned absolutely nothing. He’s now in this box, he can’t move, he can’t do anything, and this box is getting smaller and smaller.’

‘Do you think he wants to be outed as Satoshi?’

‘Yes I do. It’s in in his personality. He wants to be recognised. He says too much. After two weeks of working with him, I knew.’

‘He and Ramona tell me they had a pact never to come out.’

‘My feeling is that she doesn’t want him to come out, but he does. He’s been pushing for this to happen.’

I spoke to one of the scientists, a shy, unexcitable man in his late fifties, who has been working on this technology for several years. He and Pedersen are old-school IT people, quiet-spoken and completely uninterested in the limelight. Both of them thought Wright was working at a different level from everybody else. The scientist, who spoke to me from the beginning on condition that he wouldn’t be named, worried about Wright’s attention to detail and about his conspiratorial nature, but he had no doubts about Wright’s command of the big picture. The scientist was helping to oversee all the white papers and patent applications and managing a large team of IT specialists and mathematicians. I asked him if he was worried about the R3 consortium’s work on blockchain technology. ‘They are going to fail,’ he said. ‘They don’t have Satoshi. There is a panic out there, a misunderstanding about how the blockchain and bitcoin works. They hire people who know about bitcoin and are attempting to buy into it rather than being left behind. I’ve read some patent applications that are pending, applied for by the Bank of America. What I saw was ultimately unimpressive in comparison to what Craig is trying to do with the blockchain.’

The scientist described how the staff try to get the ideas out of Wright’s head. ‘You can’t say: “Explain this to me.” If you ask a question like that, he’ll just go off on giant tangents. First, he’ll have difficulty explaining what’s in his head. Often he’s just coming up with ideas on the spot that he’ll throw into conversation. You want to try to get yes and no answers from him. We film him at the whiteboard and someone will type out the text.’

He described moments when everyone in the research team thought what Wright was saying was impossible. It couldn’t be done, the software wasn’t up to it, the blockchain couldn’t scale to the task, and then suddenly everyone would understand what he was saying and appreciate its originality. ‘I need to be able to go over what he’s said,’ the scientist told me, ‘to find the pearls of wisdom and find out what the hell he means. If I don’t get it then I might have to make some guesses. I had to train my team to work in that mode. They have to be good researchers. They have to understand the technology as well as be able to work with it.’

Often, the scientist said, the staff were amazed by an unexpected turn in Wright’s thinking. But he admitted to being amazed, too, by certain gaps in Wright’s technical knowledge. It was bizarre. Wright had what the scientist and the team regarded as vast experience and command of the blockchain, which he spoke of as his invention and appeared to know inside out, but then he would file a piece of maths that didn’t work. Or he would show a lack of detailed knowledge of something the team took for granted. Nobody I spoke to could explain this discrepancy. ‘One of the problems with him is that he’s a terrible communicator,’ the scientist said. ‘He’s invented this beautiful thing – the internet of value. But sometimes he’ll just talk in equations but can’t or is unwilling to explain their content and application.’ His mistakes could also, he implied, be a result of laziness and lack of attention to detail.

I knew this for myself, but I was, to some extent, vexed that the technologists had the same experience. At the same time, I was impressed that people like the scientist and Pedersen could live with such a high degree of ambivalence about their boss. When I asked Pedersen if he thought the work was truly revolutionary, a non-native weariness came into his blue eyes. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think he’ll get the Nobel Prize because he’s too political. He’s coming out as a street fighter and could end up in prison or whatever.’

The main players​ in this story were keen to help me, to talk about what they knew and to show me the documents, but, in every case, there were topics they would avoid, and that were never cleared up. One of the most helpful individuals was Stefan Matthews. He pointed me in the direction of people from Wright’s personal life, and sent me a typed history of his association with the man who would be Satoshi. Matthews noted that, when he signed the deal with MacGregor, Wright didn’t have a feasible business plan for any of his companies. The Wrights’ financial situation was dire. They couldn’t pay their staff and a number had already left. Pedersen and some others had stayed on without pay; Wright owed his lawyers $1 million. Superannuation remittances were overdue and loan repayments unpaid; the companies needed £200,000 just to make it to next week. Craig and Ramona had sold their cars. One of the companies was already in administration and, with the ATO closing in, ‘all related entities were on the brink of collapse.’ Before signing the deal, MacGregor, sources say, tried to assess the value of Wright’s research, commissioning a ‘high-level overview’ of the companies. MacGregor instructed Matthews to be in Sydney on 24 June 2015, when a final appraisal of the businesses was undertaken and a draft arrangement negotiated for nTrust ‘to acquire the intellectual property and the companies themselves’.

One night I went to have dinner with Matthews on my own. We met in the restaurant at the back of Fortnum & Mason, 92 Jermyn Street, and he seemed incongruous among the red banquettes – a large, bald Australian with a rough laugh and wearing a plaid shirt, keen to tell me everything he thought useful. Matthews seemed a much more affable character than MacGregor, both upfront and very loyal, without perhaps seeing how the two might cancel each other out. One of the tasks of the eager businessman is to make himself more sure of his own position, and Matthews spent a lot of time, as did MacGregor, selling the idea of Wright as Satoshi rather than investigating it. They drafted me into telling the world who Wright was, but they didn’t really know for sure themselves, and at one point their seeming haste threatened to drive a wedge between us. It seemed odd that they would ask a writer to celebrate a truth without first providing overwhelming evidence that the truth was true. I took it in my stride, most of the time, and enjoyed the doubts, while hoping for clarity.

Matthews drank a little wine but not much. He was talking about the night in Sydney when they signed the deal. ‘We pulled up outside Rob’s hotel. He said: “Do you realise what you have just done? You have just done the deal of a career. This is a billion dollar deal. Fucking more. Billion dollars plus.”’

‘Why is Rob so convinced?’

‘Don’t know, don’t know.’ (MacGregor later told me he was convinced because Wright had shown Matthews the draft Satoshi white paper. ‘I always had that,’ MacGregor said.) ‘If it turns out that he’s a fraud, I don’t know how he’s managed to do it because you couldn’t make this up.’

Matthews told me about a meeting at the Bondi Iceberg Club in Sydney that Wright had with Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, now serving two life sentences. Silk Road used bitcoin to trade all kinds of contraband items because the transactions could be made anonymously. Wright later confirmed that this meeting took place, but said only that Ulbricht was full of himself and they didn’t discuss bitcoin. Matthews seemed to think this was unlikely. He wondered whether Kleiman had had more to do with Ulbricht; other sources suggested the same.

‘Wright signed a deal to come out as Satoshi,’ I said to Matthews. ‘Does he realise everything that involves?’

‘You’re gonna have criminal groups that paid him lots of money and there are people who know about that,’ Matthews alleged. ‘If they quack? You’ve got Ross Ulbricht who’s in prison and apparently going to appeal trial this year or next. What happens when Ross sees Satoshi’s name splashed everywhere and Craig’s name everywhere? Is he going to say “I had lunch with that guy. We made a deal”? I’m not worried about what Craig has done, I worry about people who have associated with him.’ It was very strange to do an interview with someone who would come out with this stuff, given that he was also trying to market the guy. In fairness to Wright, Matthews might just have been running his mouth off, and I’ve left out the worst of what he said, now and later.

We talked about some of the difficulties that had arisen between Wright and MacGregor. ‘Craig and Ramona are in a state about the keys leaving the room,’ I said. ‘He feels it is an act of self-annihilation to let them go. Rob has a Hollywood ending in mind and it’s looking incredibly unlikely. You can’t go into a marketplace claiming full legitimacy when the proof hasn’t been produced.’ I told Matthews that there were emails still missing between Wright and Kleiman, emails that the public would want to see before accepting him as Satoshi, because the correspondence would presumably go into the kind of detail about the invention that only the inventors could know. Wright had told me he would produce the missing emails by the following Wednesday, but he never did.

‘I know what’s in there,’ Matthews told me. ‘It will be chatter to do with illegal stuff that he and Dave were doing in Costa Rica – particularly around Costa Rican casinos where they got $23 million of income. And you don’t get paid that amount just for doing a security review … He mined all those bitcoins himself using equipment that he bought with money that he got from Costa Rica.’ Again: why was Matthews saying this? It was obvious to me that Wright was going to have a problem telling the full story, whatever it was. I wasn’t even sure he’d told the full story to his wife, but perhaps he had, because she referred, several times, to the fact that there were things that she just couldn’t tell me. ‘They’ll come after us,’ she said, in a state of high emotion. ‘They’ll destroy us.’ Matthews said he didn’t know what that was about. He did tell me something he said he had told MacGregor when MacGregor asked him what he was getting out of the deal. ‘Absolutely nothing,’ Matthews said. ‘I get what I get paid by Calvin. Calvin is the only allegiance I have, then and now.’

Calvin Ayre is one of the topics the team routinely went dark on. When I first met Wright, he called him ‘the man in Antigua’. MacGregor never mentioned him at all during our early meetings. When I later told him that Ramona had mentioned a big man in Antigua, he said he didn’t mind talking about him, but didn’t bring his name up again. When, in February this year, they took Wright to Antigua for a pep talk, I emailed Matthews to ask if I could come too, and he didn’t reply. Wright, in a low moment, later asked me if I’d told MacGregor they were the ones who let the cat out of the bag about Ayre. I said it wasn’t them: Ayre’s name had first been mentioned to me by Matthews. The Antigua meeting was being arranged when I went out for dinner with Matthews, and he referred to Ayre freely without ever asking that it be off the record. MacGregor never went into detail about Ayre’s involvement but both men’s regular visits to Antigua made me wonder about the extent of the connection. Matthews, explicit as usual, always spoke about Ayre as if he was the capo di tutti capi of the entire affair, though I have no other evi