Know more? Email us Understandably, the true creator would want to keep their identity a secret to avoid being associated with the criminal activities bitcoin is often linked to, as well as to avoid the pressure of accountability and the risk of undermining the decentralised nature of the system. Further, whoever is behind Nakamoto has reportedly amassed more than a billion dollars worth of the cryptocurrency, giving him the power to make real economic waves. The alleged creator of bitcoin, Australian man Craig Steven Wright. Credit:soldierx.com Dr Wright has had a long career in academia and as the director of a string of tech-related companies, but Wired's research — which hinges on leaked emails, documents and web archives — makes a strong case for the idea that he has also lived a double life as Nakamoto. Technology news website Gizmodo, which has also been on the trail of the creator of bitcoin, also published just after Wired's article was published its own investigation. It also links Wright to bitcoin, as well as an associate who has since died.

The most explicit evidence, which Wired says comes from a leaked email Dr Wright sent to an associate during a tax dispute with the Australian government, is a draft letter written to New South Wales Senator Arthur Sinodinos and signed "Satoshi Nakamoto" that was never sent. In a leaked transcript of Dr Wright's talks with tax officials in 2014, Wired reports Dr Wright says: "I did my best to try and hide the fact that I've been running bitcoin since 2009. By the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know." Craig Wright speaking via Skype to an audience at the Bitcoin Investor Conference in Las Vegas in 2015. Credit:YouTube Also of note is an old blog post of Dr Wright's — published hours before the initial launch of bitcoin in 2009 — which has since been scrubbed from the internet. "Well.. e-gold is down the toilet. Good idea, but again central authority", the blog reads. "The Beta of bitcoin is live tomorrow. This is decentralized... We try until it works."

Another blog post includes a PGP encryption key — which Dr Wright was asking those looking to contact him to use — which is the same as one linked to the email address satoshin@vistomail.com, very similar to the satoshi@vistomail.com address known to be used by Nakamoto. These two emails are further tied together in that they both appear in the PGP's update logs on the same day. "This is a very strong indication to support the theory that Craig Steven Wright is either the creator, or very closely linked to, the creator of bitcoin," Australian computer security researcher Ty Miller told Fairfax Media. Leaked emails also appear to show Dr Wright reacting to attempts by websites to discover Nakamoto's identity. In Wired's report, Dr Wright appears variously angered by false reporting, distressed at attempts to breach his privacy and regretful that his Nakamoto persona is so much more publicly respected than his publicly known one. When news website Newsweek ran an expose on Nakamoto in 2014 (which "outed" him as a Japanese American named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, who denied all involvement), Dr Wright apparently wrote an email to a contact titled "please leak", in which he — as Nakamoto — panned the report. "I am not from the bloody USA! Nor am I called Dorien [sic]", the message reads.

"I do not want to be your posterboy. I am not found and I do not want to be," he apparently wrote in another message the same day. "Stop looking... Do you know what privacy means? A gift freely given is just that and no more!" In the time since the Newsweek article, Wired says, Dr Wright has appeared to drop public hints to his secret identity on Twitter. "Identity' is not your name. Where people go wrong is that they do not see it to be the set of shared experiences with other individuals," he apparently wrote in one recent tweet (Wright's tweets were, according to Wire, made private in early December, which now makes this difficult to confirm). When Nakamoto was nominated for a Nobel prize earlier this month — and was declared ineligible due to his mysterious identity — Dr Wright reportedly tweeted: "If Satoshi-chan was made for an ACM turing price [sic] or an Alfred Nobel in Economics he would let you bloody know that". "I never desired to be a leader but the choice is not mine," reads another apparent tweet from Dr Wright, interpreted by the Wired report as his showing resignation to the inevitability of his outing as Nakamoto. "We are a product of the things we create. They change us."

With Ben Grubb Follow Digital Life on Twitter