Opinion The thrill is gone

Australian Craig Wright, has publicly identified himself as Bitcoins creator Satoshi Nakamoto. (BBC News via AP)

When Bitcoin released seven years ago, the internet sang with a sharp intake of breath, an expression of the thrill of millions of far out libertarians, survivalists, conspiracy theorists and electronic frontiersmen who finally had the currency of their dreams. It brooked no central bank or regulator. It traded peer to peer, cutting out the very concept of the middleman (but it flourished in black market escrow). Created from calculations made by computers on a distributed global network which no one owned, its underlying value was the difficulty of computation. Invigoratingly, it was open source and its creator was unknown.

Ever since he published the concept of the Bitcoin e-cash system on a mailing list in 2008, the mystique of its creator, self-styled Satoshi Nakamoto, has grown. Media sleuths unmasked him everywhere, from crypto bulletin boards to Cambridge dorms. His spoor was divined from the time zone from which he posted, his ease with English slang and his ignorance of Japanese.

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But last year, Wired identified Australian businessman and former academic Craig Steven Wright as the real thing, or a spectacularly talented fraud. Now, credible voices agree that he’s it. The creator of the preferred currency for money laundering and the purchase of drugs, guns and illicit services is a white guy in a check shirt and conservative haircut who seems to laugh a lot. This shockingly straitlaced avatar of Satoshi Nakamoto has the oldest Bitcoin keys, which were used for the first peer to peer transaction in the currency. For the online libertarians and digital cowboys out there, it couldn’t possibly get more depressing.