Even as his face towered 10 feet above the crowd at the Bitcoin Investor’s Conference in Las Vegas, Craig Steven Wright was, to most of the audience of crypto and finance geeks, a nobody. 
 
 The 44-year-old Australian, Skyping into the D Hotel ballroom’s screen, wore the bitcoin enthusiast’s equivalent of camouflage: a black blazer and a tieless, rumpled shirt, his brown hair neatly parted. His name hadn’t made the conference’s list of "featured speakers." Even the panel’s moderator, a bitcoin blogger named Michele Seven, seemed concerned the audience wouldn’t know why he was there. Wright had hardly begun to introduce himself as a "former academic who does research that no one ever hears about," when she interrupted him. 
 
 "Hold on a second, who are you?" Seven cut in, laughing. "Are you a computer scientist?" 
 
 "I’m a bit of everything," Wright responded. "I have a master's in law…a master’s in statistics, a couple doctorates..." 
 
 "How did you first learn about bitcoin?" Seven interrupted again, as if still trying to clarify Wright’s significance. 
 
 Wright paused for three full seconds. "Um. I’ve been involved with all this for a long time," he stuttered. "I—try and stay—I keep my head down. Um..." He seemed to suppress a smile. The panel’s moderator moved on. And for what must have been the thousandth time in his last seven years of obscurity, Wright did not say the words WIRED’s study of Wright over the past weeks suggests he may be dying to say out loud. 
 
 "I am Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin." 
 
 Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he's a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did. 
 
 Since that pseudonymous figure first released bitcoin’s code on January 9th, 2009, Nakamoto’s ingenious digital currency has grown from a nerd novelty to a kind of economic miracle. As it’s been adopted for everything from international money transfers to online narcotrafficking, the total value of all bitcoins has grown to nearly $5 billion. Nakamoto himself, whoever he is, appears to control a stash of bitcoins easily worth a nine-figure fortune (it rose to more than a billion at the cryptocurrency’s peak exchange rate in 2014). But the true identity of bitcoin’s creator remains a cipher. Media outlets from the New Yorker to Fast Company to Newsweek have launched investigations into unmasking Nakamoto that were either inconclusive or, in Newsweek’s case, pointed to a man who subsequently denied having anything to do with cryptography, not to mention cryptocurrency. Altogether, the world’s Satoshi-seekers have hardly put a dent in one of the most stubborn mysteries of the 21st century, one whose answer could resonate beyond a small sphere of crypto geeks and have real economic effects. 
 
 In the last weeks, WIRED has obtained the strongest evidence yet of Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity. The signs point to Craig Steven Wright, a man who never even made it onto any Nakamoto hunters’ public list of candidates, yet fits the cryptocurrency creator’s profile in nearly every detail. And despite a massive trove of evidence, we still can’t say with absolute certainty that the mystery is solved. But two possibilities outweigh all others: Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did. 
 
 The Evidence 
 
 The first evidence pointing to Wright appeared in mid-November, when an anonymous source close to Wright began leaking documents to Gwern Branwen, a pseudonymous, independent security researcher and dark web analyst. Branwen provided those documents to WIRED, and they immediately led to several direct, publicly visible connections between Nakamoto and Wright: 
 
 An August 2008 post on Wright’s blog, months before the November 2008 introduction of the bitcoin whitepaper on a cryptography mailing list. It mentions his intention to release a "cryptocurrency paper," and references "triple entry accounting," the title of a 2005 paper by financial cryptographer Ian Grigg that outlines several bitcoin-like ideas. 
 
 A post on the same blog from November, 2008. It includes a request that readers who want to get in touch encrypt their messages to him using a PGP public key apparently linked to Satoshi Nakamoto. A PGP key is a unique string of characters that allows a user of that encryption software to receive encrypted messages. This one, when checked against the database of the MIT server where it was stored, is associated with the email address satoshin@vistomail.com, an email address very similar to the satoshi@vistomail.com address Nakamoto used to send the whitepaper introducing bitcoin to a cryptography mailing list. 
 
 An archived copy of a now-deleted blog post from Wright dated January 10, 2009, which reads: "The Beta of Bitcoin is live tomorrow. This is decentralized... We try until it works." (The post was dated January 10, 2009, a day after Bitcoin’s official launch on January 9th of that year. But if Wright, living in Eastern Australia, posted it after midnight his time on the night of the 9th, that would have still been before bitcoin’s launch at 3pm EST on the 9th.) That post was later replaced with the rather cryptic text "Bitcoin - AKA bloody nosey you be…It does always surprise me how at times the best place to hide [is] right in the open." Sometime after October of this year, it was deleted entirely. 
 
 WIRED 
 
 In addition to those three blog posts, we received a cache of leaked emails, transcripts, and accounting forms that corroborate the link. There’s a leaked message from Wright to his lawyer date June 2008 in which Wright imagines "a P2P distributed ledger"—an apparent reference to bitcoin’s public record of transactions known as the blockchain, long before it was publicly released. The email goes on to reference a paper called "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party" that Wright expects to release in 2009. 
 
 '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 Steven Wright 
 
 Another leaked email from Wright to computer forensics analyst David Kleiman, a close friend and confidant, just before bitcoin’s January 2009 launch discusses a paper they’d been working on together. Wright talks about taking a buyout from his job and investing in hundreds of computer processors to "get [his] idea going." There’s also a PDF authored by Kleiman, who died in April of 2013, in which he agrees to take control of a trust fund, codenamed the "Tulip Trust," containing 1.1 million bitcoins. The PDF is signed with Kleiman’s PGP signature, a cryptographic technique that ensures it couldn’t have been altered post-signature. 
 
 That million-coin trove—The Tulip Trust—is the same size as a mysterious bitcoin fortune that’s long been visible on bitcoin’s blockchain and widely attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. No one but Nakamoto is known to have assembled such a massive hoard of the cryptocurrency, and only Nakamoto could have generated so many bitcoins so early in its evolution, when a bitcoin could be “mined” with relatively small amounts of processing power. Only one such bitcoin megapile exists, and the closely-watched coins haven’t moved in bitcoin’s entire history. 
 
 Another clue as to Wright’s bitcoin fortune wasn’t leaked to WIRED but instead remains hosted on the website of the corporate advisory firm McGrathNicol: a liquidation report on one of several companies Wright founded known as Hotwire, an attempt to create a bitcoin-based bank. It shows that the startup was backed in June 2013 by $23 million in bitcoins owned by Wright. That sum would be worth more than $60 million today. At the time of the company’s incorporation, Wright’s investment in that one firm alone represented more than 1.5 percent of all existing bitcoins, a strangely large stash for an unknown player in the bitcoin world. 
 
 The giveaways go on: There’s a leaked email from Wright to an associate in January 2014 about a tax dispute with the Australian government. In it, he seems to consider using Nakamoto’s name to wield influence with New South Wales Senator Arthur Sinodinos "Would our Japanese friend have weight coming out of retirement?" Wright asks. It includes a draft email to the senator signed "Satoshi Nakamoto." And a leaked transcript of Wright’s meeting with attorneys and tax officials in February 2014 quotes him in a moment of exasperation: "I did my best to try and hide the fact that I've been running bitcoin since 2009," Wright says. "By the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know." 
 
 Making Contact 
 
 On December 1st, WIRED sent an encrypted email to Wright suggesting that we knew his secret and asking for a meeting. A few hours later, we received a wary response from the address Tessier-Ashpool@AnonymousSpeech.com, a cyberpunk reference to a rich and powerful corporate dynasty in William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. Wright had referenced the same fictional family in the bio of his private twitter profile. The email’s IP showed that it came from an IP address in Panama controlled by Vistomail, the same service that Satoshi Nakamoto had used to send his emails introducing bitcoin and to run Bitcoin.org. “This is a throw away account. There are ways even with [the anonymity software] Tor, but the people in Panama are exteremly [sic] good and do not violate people's desired privacy,” the email read. “You are digging, the question is how deep are you?” The message ended, “Regards, the Director of Tessier-Ashpool” 
 
 After WIRED sent an encrypted email to Wright suggesting that we knew his secret, we received a perplexing message: 'You seem to know a few things. More than you should.' 
 
 A few hours later, we received another, even more perplexing message from the same account. “The nature of this moniker is selected for a purpose. I now have resources. This makes me a we now. I am still within that early phase of learning just what my capabilities happen to be. So, even now with resources I remain vulnerable,” it read. “You seem to know a few things. More than you should.” 
 
 When we responded by describing the three blog posts that showed Wright’s clear connection to bitcoin’s creation and asking again for a meeting, he gave a revealing answer. “Although we all desire some level of credit, I have moved past many of these things,” read his response from the same Tessier-Ashpool account. “Too many already know secrets, the world does not need to know. There are other means to lead change than to be a dictator.” 
 
 After our second followup message asking for a chance to talk, Wright responded that he would consider our request. Then he stopped responding altogether. 
 
 Dropping Breadcrumbs? 
 
 Despite that overwhelming collection of clues, none of it fully proves that Wright is Nakamoto. All of it could be an elaborate hoax—perhaps orchestrated by Wright himself. The unverified leaked documents could be faked in whole or in part. And most inexplicably of all, comparisons of different archived versions of the three smoking gun posts from Wright’s blog show that he did edit all three—to insert evidence of his bitcoin history. The PGP key associated with Nakamoto’s email address and references to an upcoming "cryptocurrency paper" and "triple entry accounting" were added sometime after 2013. Even the post noting bitcoin’s beta launch is questionable. While it was ostensibly posted in January 2009, it later seems to have been deleted and then undeleted—or possibly even written for the first time—sometime between October 2013 and June of 2014. 
 
 Wright’s blog, his public records, and his verified writings on mail lists and Twitter sketch a man who matches with Satoshi Nakamoto's known characteristics well enough to place him leagues above other candidates. 
 
 Why those breadcrumbs were dropped remains a mystery. Is Wright trying to falsely steal Nakamoto’s glory (or money)? Is he quietly revealing himself as bitcoin’s creator? 
 
 But this much is clear: If Wright is seeking to fake his Nakamoto connection, his hoax would be practically as ambitious as bitcoin itself. Some of the clues added to his blog were made more than 20 months ago—a very patient deception if it were one. His references to Grigg’s "triple entry accounting" paper would represent an uncannily inventive lie, representing a new and obscure possible inspiration for bitcoin. And there’s little doubt Wright is a certified bitcoin mogul. Even the $60 million portion of his cryptocurrency stash that’s verifiable in McGrathNicol’s public audit record is suspiciously large. 
 
 More circumstantially, Wright’s blog, his public records, and his verified writings on mail lists and Twitter sketch a man who matches with Satoshi Nakamoto’s known characteristics well enough to place him leagues above other candidates. He’s a former subscriber to the 1990s "cypherpunks" mailing list devoted to anti-authoritarianism and encryption, an advocate of gold as a financial tool, an accomplished C++ coder, a security professional plausibly capable of writing a tough-to-hack protocol like bitcoin, a libertarian who battled with tax authorities, and a fan of Japanese culture. 
 
 He is also—parallels to Nakamoto aside—a strange and remarkable person: an almost obsessive autodidact and double-PhD who once boasted of obtaining new graduate degrees at a rate of about one a year. He’s a climate-change denier, a serial entrepreneur who started companies ranging from security consultancies to a bitcoin bank, and an eccentric who wrote on his blog that he once accepted a challenge to create a pencil from scratch and spent years on the problem, going so far as to make his own bricks to build his own kiln in which to mix the pencil’s graphite. 
 
 Wright’s blogging and leaked emails describe a man so committed to an unproven cryptocurrency idea that he mortgaged three properties and invested more than $1 million in computers, power, and connectivity—even going so far as to lay fiberoptic cables to his remote rural home in eastern Australia to mine the first bitcoins. His company, Tulip Trading, built two supercomputers that have officially ranked among the top 500 in the world, both seemingly related to his cryptocurrency projects. (Wright seems to enjoy tulip references, a likely taunt at those who have compared bitcoin to the Netherlands’ 17th century "tulip bubble.") The first of those supercomputers he named Sukuriputo Okane—Japanese for "script money." Another, named Co1n, holds the title of the world’s most powerful privately owned supercomputer. As Wright told the Bitcoin Investor’s conference, he’s applying that second machine towards the mysterious task of "modeling Bitcoin’s scalability," and meanwhile building an even more powerful supercomputing cluster in Iceland because of its cheap geothermal power. 
 
 Bitcoin watchers have long wondered why the giant cache of coins they attribute to Satoshi Nakamoto never moved on the bitcoin’s publicly visible blockchain. Wright’s "Tulip" trust fund of 1.1 million bitcoins may hold the key to that mystery. The trust fund PDF signed by Wright’s late friend David Kleiman keeps those coins locked in place until 2020, yet gives Wright the freedom to borrow them for applications including "research into peer-to-peer systems" and "commercial activities that enhance the value and position of bitcoin." 
 
 Despite those exceptions to the trust’s rules, the million-coin hoard has yet to budge, even after Kleiman’s death in 2013. That may be because Wright could be keeping the coins in place as an investment. He could be leveraging the trust in less visible ways, like legally transferring ownership of money to fund his companies while still leaving it at the same bitcoin address. Or he might still be waiting for January 1st, 2020, a countdown to a date that could take the lid off the biggest cryptocurrency fortune in history. 
 
 Coming Clean 
 
 In spite of all the clues as to Wright’s possible secret life—some that he apparently placed himself—Wright has demonstrated such a talent for obfuscation and a love of privacy that he’s never even raised the suspicions of most Nakamoto-worshipping bitcoiners. "If we don't want to go out there and say ‘I’m a billionaire,’ or ‘I’m running XYZ,’ or ‘this is my life,’ I shouldn't have to tell people that," Wright told the Las Vegas crowd in October when an audience member asked his thoughts about what bitcoin means for property rights. "We should be able to choose how we live." 
 
 In the leaked emails, Wright seems to bristle at the few times anyone has attempted to out bitcoin’s creator. "I am not from the bloody USA! Nor am I called Dorien [sic]," reads a message from Wright to a colleague dated March 6, 2014. That’s the same day as Newsweek’s largely discredited story claimed the inventor of bitcoin to be the American Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. 
 
 If Wright is bitcoin's creator, the revelation of his work carries more importance than merely sating the curiosity of a few million geeks. 
 
 Wright seemed to take personal offense at the Newsweek story. "I do not want to be your posterboy. I am not found and I do not want to be," he writes in another message the same day. The email, addressed to a colleague and titled "please leak," may have been an early draft of the Nakamoto’s posted denial of Newsweek’s story. That public denial, a rare message from Nakamoto posted from his account on the P2P Foundation forum, simply read “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.” But Wright’s private response was far angrier. "Stop looking... Do you know what privacy means? A gift freely given is just that and no more!" 
 
 At times, however, Wright has seemed practically envious of Nakamoto. "People love my secret identity and hate me," he complained to Kleiman in a leaked email from 2011. "I have hundreds of papers. Satoshi has one. Nothing, just one bloody paper and I [can’t] associate myself with ME!" 
 
 If Wright is bitcoin’s creator, the revelation of his work carries more importance than merely sating the curiosity of a few million geeks. The bitcoin economy would need to consider that if his million-bitcoin trust unlocks in 2020, Wright and those to whom he may have assigned hundreds of thousands of bitcoins would be free to sell them on the open market, potentially tanking the cryptocurrency’s price; debates within the bitcoin community like the current fracas over bitcoin’s "block size” may look to long-lost Nakamoto for guidance; the world would have to grapple with the full scope of Wright's vision when he unleashes the result of his companies' post-bitcoin research. The other suspected Satoshis may finally get a reprieve from nosey reporters like us. And the intellectual history of cryptocurrencies would be forever rewritten. 
 
 Wright himself, despite his hostile response to Satoshi-seekers, has lately seemed to be dropping clues of a double life. In the last two years he’s started to write more frequently about bitcoin on his blog; he’s even peppered Twitter with hints (Though he also deleted many of those earlier this month and made his tweets private.) 
 
 "'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 wrote in one tweet in October. 
 
 When a UCLA professor nominated Satoshi Nakamoto for a Nobel Prize earlier this month—and he was declared ineligible due to the mystery of his identity—Wright lashed out. "If Satoshi-chan was made for an ACM turing price [sic] or an Alfred Nobel in Economics he would let you bloody know that," he wrote on twitter, using the Japanese "chan" suffix that indicates familiarity or a nickname. 
 
 "I never desired to be a leader but the choice is not mine," reads a third recent tweet from Wright. "We are a product of the things we create. They change us." 
 
 In one cryptic and meandering blog post in September in which Wright takes stock of his long career, he even seems to concede that no one can build and wield the wealth that Satoshi Nakamoto has amassed and remain hidden indefinitely. "There is a certain power and mystery in secrets," Wright mused. 
 
 "Am slowly coming to the realisation and acceptance," he added, "No secret remains forever." 
 
 Update 12/14/2015 2:40pm: New clues following the publication of this story have shown inconsistencies in Wright's academic and supercomputing claims that may point to the second, strange possibility we noted: an elaborate, long-planned hoax. 
 
 You may also like: ||||| The identity of "Satoshi Nakamoto", the pseudonym of the mysterious individual or group that created the concept of Bitcoin in late 2009, has been the subject of frenzied investigation by the currency's enthusiasts and the tech press for years. It turns out that the shadowy figure behind the digital alternative currency may be from Australia, and living in Sydney. 
 
 UPDATE: The house belonging to Craig Wright in North Ryde has been raided by police, The Guardian reports. 
 
 Bitcoin image via Shutterstock 
 
 A month-long Gizmodo investigation into Dr Craig Wright and the late Dave Kleiman, an American computer forensics expert who died in 2013, has revealed that they were almost certainly involved in the creation of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency protocol. Wright, from North Ryde in Sydney, is a cryptocurrency enthusiast and serial entrepreneur. 
 
 Wired has gathered enough evidence to suggest that Wright is the cryptocurrency's creator that it's confident in naming him publicly; it's not certain of its discovery, but it's more than confident — pointing to blog posts made by Wright before the public unveiling of the Bitcoin protocol, as well as his apparent ownership of a 1.1 million bitcoin blockchain worth $605,000,000. 
 
 In the last weeks, WIRED has obtained the strongest evidence yet of Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity. The signs point to Craig Steven Wright, a man who never even made it onto any Nakamoto hunters’ public list of candidates, yet fits the cryptocurrency creator’s profile in nearly every detail. And despite a massive trove of evidence, we still can’t say with absolute certainty that the mystery is solved. But two possibilities outweigh all others: Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer... 
 
 Possibly the strongest evidence is a leaked email about an alleged tax dispute that Wright had with the Australian government, where the self-described "security nerd, economist and researcher" supposedly suggests using Satoshi Nakamoto's identity to reach out to then-New South Wales senator Arthur Sinodinos: "Would our Japanese friend have weight coming out of retirement?" 
 
 Wright lists DeMorgan Ltd in his Twitter profile, a company "focused on alternative currency" with "several Bitcoin based research projects". The Australian Securities and Investment Commission proposed to deregister DeMorgan in June 2014 after its initial registration in January to an address in North Ryde in Sydney's northwest. The company's ABN, registered to an address in Wauchope near Port Macquarie and previously trading as "Vin De La Terre", was cancelled in late October this year. 
 
 Wright is also the founder and CEO of Cloudcroft, an Australian supercomputing firm whose Tulip Trading C01N is currently ranked at #17 in the supercomputing world's Top 500 list. Here's a video where Dr Wright introduces Cloudcroft and C01N, a high-performance computing cluster designed for finance and apparently built in North Ryde in partnership with SGI, with 115,200 CPU cores and 146TB of main memory. Gizmodo has contacted SGI to confirm this information. Gizmodo Australia has also reached out to Dr Wright for comment. 
 
 Questions, comments, tips? You can find me on Twitter at @csimps0n. ||||| SYDNEY, Australia — The Australian authorities on Wednesday raided the home of a computer expert and entrepreneur in suburban Sydney, just hours after two news outlets identified the man as a likely creator of the digital currency Bitcoin. 
 
 The Australian Federal Police said the raid on the residence of the man, Craig Steven Wright, was for a tax investigation, and a spokesman said it had no connection to the Bitcoin reports. The Australian Taxation Office, which asked the police to carry out the raid, declined to comment on “any individual’s or entity’s tax affairs.” 
 
 The raid, in the leafy suburb of Gordon on Sydney’s upper north shore, came hours after reports in Wired magazine and Gizmodo drew strong links between Mr. Wright and Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the virtual currency that has grown to billions of dollars in total value. 
 
 The identity of Mr. Nakamoto has been a mystery since the currency’s computer code was released in 2009, with several false leads having been aired and debunked. The growing value of Bitcoin, which is managed by computers that run its peer-to-peer software, has driven the search for its creator or creators. 
 
 Wired, which was first to identify Mr. Wright as a possible inventor of the currency, cited old blog posts as well as leaked documents and emails. The magazine acknowledged that the trail of clues could be a hoax, but it added: “If Wright is seeking to fake his Nakamoto connection, his hoax would be practically as ambitious as Bitcoin itself.” 
 
 The Gizmodo report said that Mr. Wright and Dave Kleiman, an American who died in 2013, “were involved in the development of the digital currency.” 
 
 Both outlets cited what was described as a transcript of a 2014 meeting among Mr. Wright, lawyers and tax officials, in which he is quoted as saying, “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,” he added, according to the transcript. 
 
 Efforts to reach Mr. Wright on Wednesday were unsuccessful. 
 
 A Newsweek investigation in 2014 incorrectly identified the Bitcoin creator as Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a physicist living with his mother in Southern California. He denied the report, saying he had only learned of Bitcoin weeks earlier after a reporter contacted his son. ||||| Update: Craig Wright’s claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto come under fire 
 
 IMAGINE that the paternity of a particularly brilliant child is in doubt, and someone steps forward to claim he is the father. In the real world a DNA test would sort the matter out quickly. In the confusing world of bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, things are not that simple. From the start bitcoin has rested on a mystery: the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of the author of the academic “white paper” published in October 2008 which first outlined the technology behind the digital money. This mystery may finally be solved: Craig Steven Wright—a 45-year-old Australian computer scientist and inventor who was outed against his will and with dubious evidence as Mr Nakamoto in December last year—now claims he is the real Satoshi. On May 2nd he published a blog post offering what he says is cryptographic proof that he is indeed the creator of bitcoin. 
 
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 The Economist—along with the BBC and GQ Magazine—had access to Mr Wright before the publication of his post (see footnote). We interviewed him, reviewed the documents he has provided and talked to bitcoin insiders who have communicated with Mr Nakamoto in the past and who had access to the same information. Our conclusion is that Mr Wright could well be Mr Nakamoto, but that important questions remain. Indeed, it may never be possible to establish beyond reasonable doubt who really created bitcoin. 
 
 Bitcoin has become much bigger than Mr Nakamoto; he stopped participating in the project a few years ago, and his successors have written far more code than he ever did. Whether Mr Wright’s claim is believed, especially by bitcoin cognoscenti, matters nonetheless. The bitcoin project has been riven for months by what some call a “civil war” between two competing camps of developers and bitcoin companies (although the rhetoric has recently become less strident). One side wants to keep bitcoin smallish and pure; the other is pushing for it to grow rapidly, even if this means turning it into something more like a conventional payment system. The bone of contention is the size of a “block”, the name given to the batches into which bitcoin transactions are assembled before they are validated. The intervention of a resurrected Satoshi would certainly change the dynamics of this debate. First, however, Mr Wright has to persuade people of his claim. 
 
 Mystery man 
 
 Nobody, not even his closest collaborators, ever met Mr Nakamato in person. They only communicated with him electronically. He not only wrote the white paper, but also the first version of the software that powers the system and then worked with other developers to improve it. But a couple of years into the project, he stopped participating. “I have moved on to other things,” he wrote in April 2011. Except for a few messages, most of which are believed to be hoaxes, he has not been heard from since. 
 
 That suggests a huge desire to remain private—and extraordinary willpower. Thus far, at least, the person behind the pseudonym has forgone fame and kudos. Despite its shady side (for instance as an anonymous means of payment for drug dealers) the system has proven very resilient: its exchange rate has recovered after a steep fall last year (see chart). The invention that underlies it, called the “blockchain”, is widely considered downright brilliant. Nor does Mr Nakamoto seem to be motivated by fortune: all bitcoin in circulation are now worth about $7 billion, more than the basic monetary supply (cash and deposits) of many small countries. According to some estimates, Mr Nakamoto holds 1m bitcoin, worth about $450m at current rates, but they have never been touched. 
 
 Mr Nakamoto’s silence has given rise to a cottage industry of Satoshi-hunters. Most books on bitcoin, for instance, feature a lengthy chapter on who Mr Nakamoto may be. Each has its own theory, often based on the same sources. Some locate him in Britain (because of his use of Britishisms, such as “bloody hard”). Others reckon he is somewhere in the eastern parts of the Americas (because of the timestamps on his e-mails). He has been variously identified as a Finnish sociologist, a Japanese mathematician and an Irish student. The names mentioned most often are Nick Szabo and Hal Finney, two American cryptographers, but the former denies it and the latter died in 2014. Then there is the argument that Mr Nakamoto’s bitcoin code is so good that it must have been written by more than one person. 
 
 In March 2014 Newsweek, an American magazine, identified a man living in California, and named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, as the real Satoshi, but this turned out to be an embarrassing canard. In December 2015 it was Mr Wright’s turn to be outed: hackers had apparently broken into his computer, stealing e-mails and documents and passing them on to two websites, Wired and Gizmodo, both of which produced lengthy articles. 
 
 But holes started to appear in that story, too. Some of the academic degrees Mr Wright had listed on a profile on LinkedIn, a social network, could not be confirmed. SGI, a maker of supercomputers, denied that it had ever done business with one of his companies, Cloudcroft. And cryptographic keys found in the leaked documents and some of his blog posts, which both could have linked him to Mr Nakamoto, were said to have been backdated or changed recently. After a raid by Australian tax officials on his house in Sydney, many came to believe that the entire story was an elaborate hoax staged by Mr Wright himself. At the time he kept silent, and soon thereafter moved to London, where one of his companies has an office. 
 
 So why would Mr Wright now try to out himself? “I’m not seeking publicity, but want to set the record straight,” he explains. “People are assuming [the misinformation against me] is true, because I’m not saying anything. This impacts not just me and my work, but my family, my staff and everything else.” He also wants to “dispel any negative myths and fears about bitcoin and the blockchain,” as he writes in his blog post. He doesn’t want to cash in on his bitcoin fortune, but plans to spend the money on research (and only slowly, as not to push down the bitcoin price), he says. Asked why his alter ego disappeared from view in the first place, he simply says that there was a media storm at the time and he wanted to remove himself from it. He says he called himself “Nakamoto” after a 17th-century Japanese philosopher and merchant, Tominaga Nakamoto, who was highly critical of the normative thought of his time and favoured free trade. (He doesn’t want to say why he picked “Satoshi”: “Some things should remain secret.”) 
 
 Having been named as Mr Nakamoto once, unconvincingly, Mr Wright has a steep hill to climb to convince the world that he is indeed bitcoin’s founder. Evaluating his claim involves the application of a multi-step paternity test. First comes the factual evidence: can Mr Wright prove that he is in possession of cryptographic keys that only Mr Nakamoto should have? Second, does he have convincing explanations for the holes in the story which came to light when he was first outed in December? Third, does he possess the technical knowledge which would have enabled him to develop a system as complex and clever as bitcoin? And fourth, to what extent does he fit the image that people have of Mr Nakamoto; in particular, what do those software developers who have collaborated online with the founder of bitcoin think of Mr Wright’s claim? 
 
 First, the keys. To understand how Mr Wright could cryptographically prove that he is Mr Nakamoto, it helps to keep in mind the basics of public-key cryptography at the heart of encryption schemes such as “PGP” (which stands for “Pretty Good Privacy”). It uses two “keys”—strings of numbers—one public and safe to share, and one to be kept private. Both are mathematically related, meaning that if the holder of the private key “signs” or encrypts a message with this key, it can be decrypted with the corresponding public one. If it can be thus decrypted, that serves to establish the identity of the sender of an encrypted message (assuming, of course, that the private key has not been stolen). 
 
 This is the reason why, whenever a message signed by someone pretending to be Mr Nakamoto appears online (the latest, in December, read: “I am not Craig Wright. We are all Satoshi.”), it is dismissed as a hoax: none has been signed by a private PGP key widely considered to belong to Mr Nakamoto. This private key is related to a public key that was linked to from bitcoin.org, a website which was registered in 2008 by him and used to publish his white paper. But the earliest publicly verifiable date of its existence is February 28th 2011, meaning it could have been put there later than 2008 (Mr Nakamoto’s last public posting dates from December 12th 2010). And he has never signed any message with the corresponding private key, perhaps because he never actually had it. “If someone were to successfully sign with the Satoshi PGP key, it would not prove that he is Satoshi,” says Jerry Brito, the executive director of Coin Center, a bitcoin think-tank, and co-author of a recent blog post about the matter. 
 
 Mr Wright agrees: he says that he has the private PGP key, but that using it would not prove anything. The cryptographic proof he offers is of a different kind. Bitcoin also uses a different form of public-key cryptography, not least to make sure that only the real owner of bitcoin can spend the currency. The public key—or, to be precise, a digital digest of it, called the “bitcoin address”—is like the number of a bitcoin bank account. And the private key is like a secret PIN or a signature on a cheque that allows the holder to transfer money from the account. The analogy is not a perfect one, however: bitcoin holders can have many different accounts, each linked to a separate address and private key. 
 
 Bitcoin addresses can also be linked to “blocks”: those who provide the necessary computing power to create them can win an “reward”, which is sent automatically to a bitcoin address chosen by each block’s creator. Since Mr Nakamoto must, in the very early days of bitcoin, have been the only one to “mine” blocks, as the process is called, he should hold the corresponding private keys. What is more, Mr Nakamoto was also the first to send some bitcoin—using money he earned with the 9th block. The recipient, Hal Finney, confirmed this transaction when he was still alive. 
 
 If Mr Wright can prove that he is in possession of the private key corresponding to the bitcoin address of the miner of block 9, this is strong evidence that he is indeed Mr Nakamoto. His case would be stronger if he performed the same cryptographic trick with keys linked to earlier blocks, which must have been mined by the founder—or, even better, moved some of the bitcoins which were awarded when validating these blocks. 
 
 In his blog post Mr Wright says that he does indeed control the key for block 9 and gives a step-by-step explanation of how this can be proven. He claims to have signed a text (the 1964 speech in which Jean-Paul Sartre explains his refusal to accept the Nobel prize for literature) with this private key, which produces a unique identifier known as a digital signature. He has published this on his website along with a detailed explanation of how to verify that he is indeed in possession of the private key. In a nutshell, the data he has provided can be fed into software, which then says whether all the parts of this puzzle fit together. 
 
 Mr Wright has also demonstrated this verification in person to The Economist—and not just for block 9, but block 1. Such demonstrations can be stage-managed; and information that allows us to go through the verification process independently was provided too late for us to do so fully. Still, as far as we can tell he indeed seems to be in possession of the keys, at least for block 9. This assessment is shared by two bitcoin insiders who have sat through the same demonstration: Jon Matonis, a bitcoin consultant and former director of the Bitcoin Foundation, and Gavin Andresen, Mr Nakamoto’s successor as the lead developer of the cryptocurrency’s software (he has since passed on the baton, but is still contributing to the code). 
 
 Still, questions remain. Mr Wright does not want to make public the proof for block 1, arguing that block 9 contains the only bitcoin address that is clearly linked to Mr Nakamoto (because he sent money to Hal Finney). Repeating the procedure for other blocks, he says, would not add more certainty. He also says he can’t send any bitcoin because they are now owned by a trust. And he rejected the idea of having The Economist send him another text to sign as proof that he actually possesses these private keys, rather than simply being the first to publish a proof which was generated at some point in the past by somebody else. Either people believe him now—or they don’t, he says. “I’m not going to keep jumping through hoops.” 
 
 Such statements will feed doubts. This is partly because the second element in bitcoin’s paternity test—assuaging the doubts raised after Mr Wright’s outing in December—is not conclusive. He is now going to great lengths to fill the holes in his story by providing plenty of documents and explanations. In some cases this alleviates doubts about his authenticity, in others less so. 
 
 Questions about Mr Wright’s academic degrees arose because he had listed so many on a LinkedIn profile which has since been deleted, and because some could not be confirmed. He now says that the profile was a “joke”—to “take the piss out of myself” and to keep people from bothering him. “No one took me seriously, which was great.” 
 
 The current curriculum vitae and other documents released by Mr Wright’s public-relations agency list dozens of industry certifications (“GIAC Business Law and Computer Security”, for instance), former positions (he was once a vice-president of the Centre for Strategic Cyberspace and Security Science, a consultancy based in London), and a handful of degrees. They include a masters in statistics from the University of Newcastle in Australia, a masters in law from Britain’s Northumbria University and several masters in IT and management from Charles Sturt University (CSU), also in Australia. The CV also says that Mr Wright has submitted his thesis for a doctorate in computer science and lists a doctorate in theology. It finally mentions that he is currently enrolled at University of London in a programme called “Masters of Science in Finance”. 
 
 Mr Wright has provided diplomas and other backup material for nearly all of these degrees. Most could be confirmed with the respective universities. He was, for instance, awarded three masters degrees at CSU, where he also taught as an “adjunct lecturer” and where his thesis is under examination, according to Tanveer Zia, his doctoral adviser. His doctorate in theology, however, remains a mystery and Mr Wright does not want to talk about it (“That has no relevance,” he says). 
 
 As proof of existence for his supercomputer, another element of the December story that was disputed, Mr Wright offers a letter signed by a local SGI director, which states, among other things, that the firm is pleased to work with Cloudcroft, one of Mr Wright’s firms, “in assisting the development of their hyper-density machines and supercomputers.” Asked about this, SGI, which is based in Silicon Valley, has replied that its Australian director “acted as an individual and was not authorised.” The firm has no record of selling a supercomputer to Cloudcroft, but says that it “could have been purchased on the grey market.” 
 
 The reason why SGI has distanced itself from him, explains Mr Wright, is because he has combined the firm’s gear with that of a competitor, Supermicro. But he doesn’t want to say much more, mainly because of security: “It’s a big expensive machine, and we don’t want people to know where it is.” If C01N, as the machine is called, exists, it would indeed be big: with a claimed number-crunching capacity of 3.5 petaflops (a petaflop is a thousand billion floating-point operations per second), it would rank 17th on the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. All this computing power, says Mr Wright, is used to test his ideas about how to improve bitcoin. 
 
 As for the backdated keys revealed in the December outing, Mr Wright presents a report by First Response, a computer-forensics firm, which states that these keys could have been generated with an older version of the software in question. He says that he has lost control of many of his online accounts (which could explain the changed blog posts). As for the tax raid in Australia, he says that was not about him trying to evade taxes, but about how to tax bitcoin correctly—something the Australian Taxation Office does not want to comment about, citing confidentiality provisions on the country’s tax law. Local press reports, however, say that the investigation is much broader and may even include allegations of fraud. Mr Wright denies any wrongdoing, saying that he didn’t leave Australia because of the tax investigation, but because London is a better place to operate a financial-technology company. 
 
 The third stage in the paternity test—the extent of Mr Wright’s technical knowledge—is just as tricky. When Mr Wright was outed, experts called his published writings unremarkable, suggesting that he could not be the author of the original bitcoin white paper. In January Juola & Associates, a firm that uses a technique called “stylometry” to identify authors, released the results of a study that compared texts by Mr Wright with those written by Mr Nakamoto and concluded that they are unlikely to be by the same person. In response Mr Wright says that, although he was the principal author of the white paper, he had extensive help from his friend Dave Kleiman, an American computer-forensics expert who died in 2013. Mr Wright also says that he has many different writing styles, depending on the subject matter. 
 
 Mr Wright has certainly written extensively. A list of publications provided by his public-relations agency includes nearly 100 papers, conference presentations, books and book chapters. Most are shorter pieces about computer security, but they also touch upon topics such as economics, terrorism and risk management, suggesting that Mr Wright likes to roam widely. None covers bitcoin directly, but he explains that bits of research that helped him create the cryptocurrency can be found in many of his publications. Such an interdisciplinary approach sits well with what the bitcoin system is: a clever combination of ideas developed by others. Mr Wright also says that he has written several papers on bitcoin, which are currently undergoing peer review and will be published shortly. The Economist has seen some of them and they show that he has a firm, though not an exceptional, handle on the subject. 
 
 When interviewed in person, Mr Wright was often hard to follow, but he clearly seemed to know what he was talking about. His plans for bitcoin are grandiose. In future, he explained, the blockchain could become so vast that it could keep track of every Visa transaction, every stock-exchange transaction, every bank transaction and much more. “We could even create an individual account for that tissue”, he said, pointing to a paper napkin on the table. 
 
 The fourth test is the most subjective. Since nobody has ever met Mr Nakamoto, and no picture or video of him exists, his personality is anybody’s guess. But some traits recur in any attempt to come up with a composite sketch: he is likely to be a very private person; he is probably a nerd; and politically he is likely to be a libertarian, because bitcoin is rooted in the belief that central banks cannot be trusted. 
 
 In some ways Mr Wright fits this image, but in others he doesn’t. He clearly doesn’t enjoy the limelight and the company of other people. He was visibly nervous when interviewed and did not want to talk about his family. He got most of his degrees via distance-learning programmes and in the other cases rarely went to lectures. Even loyal employees, he says, would not hesitate to call him a “difficult bugger”, who is hard to work with. He regrets that he will no longer be able to attend conferences and lectures unrecognised: “I never wanted to be out there and I don’t want to be out there now.” 
 
 But Mr Wright also seemed to crave recognition. He emphasised several times how many papers he has written, adding once that these even outnumber those by Mr Szabo, one of the other main contenders for the role of Mr Nakamoto. Instead of dwelling on libertarian ideology (although there was some of that), he stressed how much he loves learning. The reason why he has collected so many degrees, he says, is that getting them keeps him motivated: “Life is all about incentives. Doing a degree forces me to sit down in front of my computer in the evening and do my assignments.” 
 
 Those who have exchanged e-mails with Mr Nakamoto and have also spent time with Mr Wright think that the personalities of the virtual Satoshi and the real Craig overlap sufficiently. Mr Matonis first met him in mid-2015, before he was outed as Mr Nakamoto. “I remember saying to my wife that I had this weird feeling of having just met Satoshi,” he reports. But it is the opinion of Mr Andresen, who has collaborated with Mr Wright and considers himself a sceptic, that is likely to convince more than one bitcoin aficionado. “He fits the style of person I was working with,” he says. “He can also say things that sound, at first, ridiculous.” In a blog post, which was published shortly after Mr Wright’s, Mr Andresen writes: “After spending time with him I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt: Craig Wright is Satoshi.” 
 
 We are not so sure. Although they are not completely satisfactory, Mr Wright provided credible answers to the questions which were asked of him after he was outed last year. He seems to have the expertise to develop a complex cryptographic system such as bitcoin. But doubts remain: why does he not let us send him a message to sign, for example? Perhaps he has access only to one proof: the real Mr Nakamoto could have used the Sartre text to prove his identity to one of his peers and this proof is now being used to show that Mr Wright is Mr Nakamoto. Mr Wright could have used his supercomputer to calculate the signature for this particular text in what is known as a “brute-force attack”. And then, as mentioned before, there is always the possibility that he could have obtained the keys from someone else, perhaps Hal Finney or Dave Kleiman. Since both are dead, they cannot be asked. 
 
 Mr Wright’s motivation for stepping forward now also raises flags. About six months ago, before he was publicly outed in the technology press, he approached Andrew O’Hagan, a Scottish novelist who wrote an “unauthorised autobiography” of Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks. Since then the author, whose most recent novel, “The Illuminations”, was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, has had complete access to Mr Wright and his family, as well as to his research and business colleagues. Mr O’Hagan is writing a long article for the London Review of Books on Mr Wright and “his journey towards revealing his work.” (Mr O’Hagan, too, has come to be convinced that Mr Wright is Mr Nakamoto.) This is no proof of an elaborate hoax, but does indicate that Mr Wright had begun thinking of going public long before he was outed—and may have other motivations than simply setting the record straight, though he denies this. 
 
 It pays, too, to bear in mind that Mr Wright’s outing will most likely be of benefit to those in the current bitcoin civil war who want to expand the block size quickly, whose number include Mr Matonis and Mr Andresen. Mr Wright says that if he could reinvent bitcoin, he would program in a steady increase of the block size. He also intends to publish mathematical proof that there is no trade-off between the mass adoption of the cryptocurrency and its remaining decentralised. Simulations on his supercomputer show, he says, that blocks could theoretically be as large as 340 gigabytes in a specialised bitcoin network shared by banks and large companies. And he is already trying to undermine the credibility of the faction that wants bitcoin to grow only slowly. In an article in the press kit accompanying the publication of his blog post, he takes aim at Gregory Maxwell, one of the leading bitcoin developers, who first claimed that the cryptographic keys in Mr Wright’s leaked documents were backdated. “Even experts have agendas,” he writes, “and the only means to ensure that trust is valid is to hold experts to a greater level of scrutiny.” 
 
 This heightened scrutiny will now fall on Mr Wright as well. Whether people will believe he is Mr Nakamoto will largely depend on what he does next. He does not appear to have a clear idea of what his role should be. After proving his identity, he says, he wants to disappear again—“just like Satoshi”. But he also seems to have big plans to influence the evolution of bitcoin. He is poised to release several pieces of research on how to improve the inner workings of the bitcoin system. Should these contributions be as brilliant as Mr Nakamoto’s white paper, even sceptics may come to accept that Mr Wright is indeed the inventor of bitcoin. 
 
 Mr Wright has no desire, he says, to become bitcoin’s benevolent dictator—akin to Linus Torvalds, who manages the development of Linux, the open-source operating system. He has launched a blog “with the vision to create a forum about bitcoin, which dispels myths and helps unleash its full potential,” according to the press release. Rather, he seems to style himself as something of an overlord for bitcoin—staying in the background, but intervening when he deems it necessary. If so, he is trying to do the opposite of what Sartre argued in his Nobel rejection speech: “The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honourable circumstances, as in the present case.” 
 
 Footnote: The Economist was given access to Mr Wright under the condition that we sign a non-disclosure agreement that prohibited us from writing about him before the publication of his blog post. 
 
 Dig deeper ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright says he is Mr Bitcoin 
 
 Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright has publicly identified himself as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. 
 
 His admission follows years of speculation about who came up with the original ideas underlying the digital cash system. 
 
 Mr Wright has provided technical proof to back up his claim using coins known to be owned by Bitcoin's creator. 
 
 Prominent members of the Bitcoin community and its core development team say they have confirmed his claims. 
 
 But many others in the Bitcoin world are asking for more proof. 
 
 Signed blocks 
 
 Mr Wright has revealed his identity to three media organisations - the BBC, the Economist and GQ. 
 
 At the meeting with the BBC, Mr Wright digitally signed messages using cryptographic keys created during the early days of Bitcoin's development. The keys are inextricably linked to blocks of bitcoins known to have been created or "mined" by Satoshi Nakamoto. 
 
 Image copyright AP Image caption Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto was wrongly identified as the inventor of Bitcoin in 2014 
 
 "These are the blocks used to send 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney in January [2009] as the first bitcoin transaction," said Mr Wright during his demonstration. 
 
 Renowned cryptographer Hal Finney was one of the engineers who helped turn Mr Wright's ideas into the Bitcoin protocol, he said. 
 
 "I was the main part of it, but other people helped me," he said. 
 
 Soon after Mr Wright went public, Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, published a blog backing his claim. 
 
 "I believe Craig Steven Wright is the person who invented Bitcoin," he wrote. 
 
 Jon Matonis, an economist and one of the founding directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, said he was convinced that Mr Wright was who he claimed to be. 
 
 "During the London proof sessions, I had the opportunity to review the relevant data along three distinct lines: cryptographic, social, and technical," he said. 
 
 "It is my firm belief that Craig Wright satisfies all three categories." 
 
 Mr Wright said he planned to release information that would allow others to cryptographically verify that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. 
 
 Not everyone has been convinced by Mr Wright's claims and the technical proof he put in his blog. Some cryptographers and developers who worked through the information provided said they had trouble getting verifiable information out of it. 
 
 Security expert Dan Kaminsky said the procedure was almost "maliciously resistant" to validation. 
 
 Many people have called on Mr Wright to go further in proving his identify. 
 
 How Bitcoin works 
 
 Bitcoin is often referred to as a new kind of currency. 
 
 But it may be best to think of its units being virtual tokens rather than physical coins or notes. 
 
 However, like all currencies its value is determined by how much people are willing to exchange it for. 
 
 To process Bitcoin transactions, a procedure called "mining" must take place, which involves a computer solving a difficult mathematical problem with a 64-digit solution. 
 
 For each problem solved, one block of Bitcoins is processed. In addition the miner is rewarded with new Bitcoins. 
 
 Image copyright Eyewire Image caption Verifying bitcoin transactions takes a lot of computer power 
 
 This provides an incentive for people to provide computer processing power to solve the problems. 
 
 To compensate for the growing power of computer chips, the difficulty of the puzzles is adjusted to ensure a steady stream of new Bitcoins are produced each day. 
 
 There are currently about 15 million Bitcoins in existence. 
 
 To receive a Bitcoin, a user must have a Bitcoin address - a string of 27-34 letters and numbers - which acts as a kind of virtual post-box to and from which the Bitcoins are sent. 
 
 Since there is no registry of these addresses, people can use them to protect their anonymity when making a transaction. 
 
 These addresses are in turn stored in Bitcoin wallets, which are used to manage savings. 
 
 They operate like privately run bank accounts - with the proviso that if the data is lost, so are the Bitcoins owned. 
 
 'I want to work' 
 
 By going public, Mr Wright hopes to put an end to press speculation about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. The New Yorker, Fast Company, Newsweek and many other media organisations have all conducted long investigations seeking Bitcoin's creator and named many different people as candidates. 
 
 In December 2015, two magazines, Wired and Gizmodo, named Mr Wright as a candidate after receiving documents believed to be stolen from him that revealed his involvement with the project. 
 
 Soon after these stories were published, authorities in Australia raided the home of Mr Wright. The Australian Taxation Office said the raid was linked to a long-running investigation into tax payments rather than Bitcoin. 
 
 Questioned about this raid, Mr Wright said he was cooperating fully with the ATO. 
 
 "We have lawyers negotiating with them over how much I have to pay," he said. 
 
 The stories in December have led to many more journalists and others pursuing him and people he knows, he said. 
 
 "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 said. "I don't want any of them to be impacted by this." 
 
 Image copyright Valve Software Image caption Game network Steam is one of many sites that now accept Bitcoins as payment 
 
 "I have not done this because it is what I wanted. It's not because of my choice," he said, adding that he had no plans to become the figurehead for bitcoins. 
 
 "I really do not want to be the public face of anything," he said, expressing regret that he had been forced to reveal his identity. 
 
 "I would rather not do it," he said. "I want to work, I want to keep doing what I want to do. I don't want money. I don't want fame. I don't want adoration. I just want to be left alone." 
 
 Bitcoins are now accepted as payment for a vast variety of goods and services - everything from international money transfers to ransoms for data encrypted by computer viruses. There are currently about 15.5 million bitcoins in circulation. Each one is worth about $449 (£306). 
 
 Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to have amassed about one million Bitcoins which would give him a net worth, if all were converted to cash, of about $450m. 
 
 5 May 2016: Clarification 
 
 The original headline and text of this story was changed on the day of publication (2 May 2016). 
 
 The headline "Bitcoin creator reveals his identity" was amended to read "Australian Craig Wright claims to be Bitcoin creator". 
 
 The text of the article was also changed to recognise there was still doubt about Craig Wright's claim.
– Wired says it has uncovered "the strongest evidence yet of Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity." Nakamoto, the alias for the creator of Bitcoin, has never been unmasked publicly, but Wired's Andy Greenberg and Gwern Branwen name Australian Craig Wright, 44, as the most likely candidate. "Either Wright invented Bitcoin, or he's a brilliant hoaxer," they write. Australian police seem to be believers: They raided Wright's home in Sydney on Wednesday, reports the New York Times. Wired notes that Wright—founder of supercomputing firm Cloudcroft, per Gizmodo—blogged about releasing a "cryptocurrency paper" a few months before the Bitcoin white paper was revealed in November 2008, though that post was edited in 2013. He also used an encryption key linked to satoshin@vistomail.com. Nakamoto used satoshi@vistomail.com to introduce the white paper. Wright, who owns at least $60 million in Bitcoin, also has access to 1.1 million Bitcoins worth $605 million—the same amount attributed to Nakamoto. "I am not from the bloody USA! Nor am I called Dorien [sic]," Wright wrote in a leaked email sent the same day Newsweek claimed American Dorian Nakamoto as Bitcoin's inventor. Leaked transcripts from meetings with Wright's attorneys in February 2014 also quote him as saying: "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." Then, in an odd interview at the Bitcoin Investor Conference, a moderator asked Wright how he first learned about Bitcoin. "Um, I've been involved with all this for a long time," he said after a long pause. "I—try and stay—I keep my head down." After sending an encrypted email to Wright suggesting he was Nakamoto, Wired received this response: "You seem to know a few things. More than you should." With a verified identity, Nakamoto could be nominated for a 2016 Nobel Prize, per CoinReport. (Click for more from Wired.)