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Journalism of Courage
The creator of online digital currency Bitcoin, till now known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, has come forward to reveal his real identity. Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright has revealed himself as Bitcoin’s creator to the BBC, The Economist and GQ magazine.
This is not the first time that Craig Wright’s name has been linked to Satoshi Nakamoto. In December 2015 Wired had put out a piece claiming that Wright was probably the creator of bitcoin, and had based its story on leaked emails, blogposts.
In its investigation, Wired showed blogposts that were published by Wright before January 2009, before Bitcoin had gone live. He had later deleted these blogposts.
According to the BBC, Wright aka Nakamoto, provided technical proof backing his claim as bitcoin’s creator, and interacted with them using “digitally signed messages using cryptographic keys” which were created during Bitcoin’s early development.
“These are the blocks used to send 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney in January [2009] as the first bitcoin transaction,” Wright is quoted by the BBC as saying.
BBC’s report says that the bitcoin creator hopes to end press speculation about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. “There are lots of stories out there that have been made up and I don’t like it hurting those people I care about,” he told the BBC. “I don’t want any of them to be impacted by this.”
As this report on The Economist notes the identity of bitcoin’s creator has been a mystery, since the first ‘white paper’ was published in October 2008 by “Satoshi Nakamoto.” The paper had revealed the technical details behind the digital money, which has since then grown bigger in the last couple of years.
Bitcoins are are digitally signed for security, to send and receive Bitcoins, one needs a Bitcoin address and a private key, which are created using Bitcoin wallets.
