I first communicated with Dr. Wright in a series of interviews in early 2016… shortly after him being outed, and he was still at this point, very much out of the public eye. However, former lead Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen had already stated that he witnessed Craig sign with keys that only Satoshi Nakamoto could have possessed. I knew who I may have been dealing with…

I was cautioned prior to the interview… that Craig can be a little intense – (I don’t quite recall the word used but I think ‘intense’ is relevant enough).

Certainly at that time the VAST majority of Bitcoiners did not believe that Craig was the man behind, in my opinion, the greatest invention since the internet itself, and perhaps even bigger. But I kept a very open mind. He rejected putting out cryptographic evidence at a time where we told the world that he would, and instead posted the Sartre piece… choosing to reject the Satoshi title, which in retrospect he viewed as a bad decision. But the spectre of Satoshi loomed large and, as time went on, it became more difficult to separate Craig from the Satoshi saga, for reasons right or wrong.

When our interviews began, all I had known about Craig was that he at one point claimed to be Satoshi (but then seemingly retracted), and that this man was under incessant attacks.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into…

A little about me: I have a full time job working as a software engineer on a multi-billion dollar infrastructure project, and keep a number of Bitcoin-related projects going on the side. I never considered myself a journalist. I somehow became a bit of a voice (one of many) for the big-blocker party (to the newcomers, that basically means we wanted to scale Bitcoin), and my passion to see Bitcoin reach its potential led me to write a series of pieces in an attempt to get some minds thinking rationally, to see Bitcoin succeed. It was most definitely under threat from being choked to death with an artificial limit on transactional throughput.

This passion led me to Dr. Wright. I didn’t know his stance on the blocksize debate at this point… But I did know that Satoshi did want to scale Bitcoin. It was one of my first questions, to which he immediately responded with “we are going to make sure Bitcoin scales.” That was three years ago… and here we are Bitcoin SV is now looking at 2Gb blocks this year. In 2016, the idea of 2Gb blocks was inconceivable… not within a 3 year period…

After publishing articles based on a series of interviews, I suddenly found myself drowning in attacks. Death threats to my mailbox, countless anonymous accounts attempting to belittle, mock and claim that my own voice and judgement were amiss. Much of the social media trolling was an attempt to make my voice as irrelevant as possible. And believe me, it’s not without effect. You’d be surprised how many people read only half an article, only to quickly check the comments section to assess public opinion. And perceived public opinion does indeed sway things…

This has been Gregory Maxwell’s (former Blockstream CTO dedicated to making life hell for Craig and big blockers) modus operandi. There’s strong evidence now that ties a number of online accounts including the infamous ‘Contrarian’ to Maxwell. These accounts have been dedicated to undertaking an unprecedented, 24/7 social engineering effort in skewing the public perception of Dr. Wright to incredible consequence.

In fact, the seeds sown by ‘Contrarian’ played a significant role in the schism in the Bitcoin Cash community that led to the birth of Bitcoin SV. In perhaps one of the most ironic turn of events, kicking Dr. Wright out of BCH ended up making Dr. Wright’s position 100 times more powerful. We’ll get back to this point later.

In our interviews, Craig’s willingness to scale Bitcoin immediately brought my guard down. This man wants to see Bitcoin succeed like no other… and it was in one of the earliest memos where he actually mentioned that Bitcoin was Turing complete. This was a key point that made me prod further. Eventually he provided some information pertaining to a fundamental key decision in Bitcoin’s design which enabled Bitcoin to be Turing complete. It was admittedly a revelation. But the revelations kept coming… one after the other… For example, when everyone thought Bitcoin topology was a mesh, as noted in the Mastering Bitcoin book, Craig rightfully said it was a small world network.

This man undoubtedly had an intimate understanding of the design of the system. I asked about his academic record (which was also under attack), and he provided copies of his entire academic record, which myself and others then followed up to confirm. The impressive academic record, was real. To date now, the man has 17 degrees and is currently studying for his 3rd doctorate.

In the following weeks, I guess Dr. Wright began to trust me a little, and began sharing a large swathe of early research work which led to Bitcoin. This included research work pertaining to Bitcoin’s neural network capability, and even Blacknet (now known as metanet). Craig has no idea of this, but the large volume of his own research that he sent quite literally kept me up all hours of the night and I’d end up at work a zombie… Occasionally, I’d message him to say I really have to sleep, only to get more emails stating “more reading material”. It was a rough time.

If you approach in good will and without any ill-intention to the original Bitcoin design, Craig will most certainly be open to sharing with you. Just don’t expect an outright extrovert.

With the bulk of intimate knowledge possessed by Craig, and with the recent signings to Matonis and Andresen, I was confident that this was the main man behind the world’s greatest invention. Why is it the world’s greatest invention? Because the problem of money has been solved. Finally. And contrary to what you may read or hear, the protocol must absolutely be locked if you want to prevent any future government, company or developer group from hijacking the protocol again for self interests.

Particularly in those days, if you said you thought Craig was Satoshi, you would be flamed, cast aside into oblivion. This happened to Gavin Andresen… he got knifed, not by Craig, but by Core devs who were so threatened by his admission that Craig was Satoshi that they couldn’t bear to allow him to retain commit access and potentially reintroduce the creator who would steer the ship back to its original course. So not only was Gavin kicked off the project, he was mauled by savages and forced into exile.

I met Roger Ver in 2017, when we were all on the same side. We may not be on the same side today, but I do not think Roger to be a bad person at all. In fact, he’s quite humble for a multi-millionaire. But I do think he’s been given some shocking advice that’s placed him in a difficult trajectory… that’s my opinion and he would disagree, that’s fine. He offered me a lift to the airport – and, I’m a nobody — but he was nice enough to do that. During the ride, he shared that he had met Dr. Wright a week prior and that Wright had offered to sign with Satoshi keys as evidence. Roger responded that he believed him and that signing was unnecessary. Roger then joked “of course I’m not prepared to go public about it.” We all knew what ‘going public’ meant. It meant suicide… look what happened to Gavin, to Matonis…

We generally kept quiet, but even my mere assertion that Craig understood Bitcoin and knew what he was talking about was met with heavy gunfire.

In fact even a recent post by Ryan X. Charles (CEO of Moneybutton) which painted Dr. Wright positively was met with incredible criticism, – mostly by anonymous accounts.

https://twitter.com/ryanxcharles/status/1123662373900910592

And while his supporters deal with a lot of shit-flinging, it pales heavily in comparison to what Craig deals with.

Granted, Craig now has a much bigger support base, is much better structured and is now on the offensive. And with Craig’s move to openly state that he created Bitcoin as well, it has become much easier to say the same these days. And this is the point that was raised earlier… the fightback is only just starting.

Craig has been dealing with credible death threats, family threats, sexual abuse threats, smear campaigns and dirty tactics that would make a presidential election race look coy. That’s not an exaggeration. This has been happening from people seeking to silence and destroy Craig from years before he was outed… the information is out there if you look beyond the prevailing rhetoric.

These individuals attempting to silence Craig now find themselves dealing with a monster forged of their own actions. When criminals choose to attack from the shadows and threaten family members and attempt to subdue people, don’t be surprised when the campaign is returned ten-fold. And in attaining legitimacy for his actions and his proofs, Craig is seeking the courts.

Astonishingly, people are actually crying foul play. There is no institution in the world that is without issue or controversy, true. But compare the legitimate standing of the court of law to underground criminal organisations and you have chalk and cheese.

Admittedly, there are times where I have felt I needed to apologise for Craig’s behaviour – and I was wrong to even contemplate that. With everything he has dealt with, you cannot expect a compliant individual. If he was a pushover, Bitcoin would’ve died already. Jimmy Nguyen was right when he said “I make no apologies for Craig Wright… otherwise he wouldn’t be who he is today”.

And who is Craig Wright? Based on everything I have personally seen and witnessed, he is the genius behind Bitcoin and the Metanet. To the doubters, the evidence is coming (from numerous fronts, including some I am personally digging out myself, and even culminating in a signing), but NOT on your terms. A man capable of over 17+ degrees, including multiple doctorates, operating numerous businesses, with countless inventions, papers, and heading for thousands of patents… well that should be an inspiration to anyone wanting to attain anything in life… As Ryan X. Charles voiced “I thought it was humanly impossible to achieve so much”…

Instead, this editorial will be ridiculed (mostly by anonymous trolls), and every outlet that has any investment or allegiance with competing digital assets will trash it.

Eli Afram

@justicemate

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