Who mined the first 70 blocks of the Bitcoin blockchain? Dr. Craig Wright. This was asserted by a June 11 disclosure to the Florida court, where he is defending against Ira Kleiman, the deceased Dave Kleiman’s brother.
In the filing, which was brought to the public’s attention by Twitter user oudekaas, it discloses for the first time that Wright provided the court with the public addresses of the first 70 blocks mined on the Bitcoin blockchain, which are currently under seal. It also states, under penalty of purgery:
After Dr. Wright mined the first 70 blocks of bitcoin (the public addresses for which he has already disclosed), he implemented a unique and proprietary algorithm that he created to automate the key generation process so that each later block mined (after block 70) was assigned a different public address.
The filing does not explain beyond what this revelation means to the creation of Bitcoin, but the conclusions to draw are pretty straightforward. Wright, under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, created Bitcoin and went on to mine the first 70 blocks for himself.
To reach any other conclusion, you’d have to suspend any sense of logic. Could Satoshi Nakamoto have created Bitcoin, and then brought Wright in to do the honor of mining the first 70 blocks? That doesn’t make much sense. The first blocks of the blockchain were nicknamed Satoshi blocks for a reason; because Satoshi Nakamoto mined them, and now Wright has given the court his proof that he mined those blocks.
If the proof doesn’t hold up for some strange reason, Wright faces a penalty of perjury, as Richard Shultz has pointed out. That carries a penalty of $1,000, one year in jail, or both. If he repeats the claim, he could spend as much as five years in jail. It would have been very unwise of him to make this claim if it were untrue.
The filing goes on to explain why Wright can’t provide public addresses beyond the 70th block (they are in a trust protected by a Shamir system,) and questions how information pertaining to any of these blocks helps Ira Kleiman’s case if he can’t prove how much of it belonged to Dave Kleiman.
This case is not going the way Dr. Wright’s critics hoped it would. Wright has showed up for mediation on June 18 when many thought he would avoid doing so. He’s now testified under oath to mining the first 70 blocks of Bitcoin, and Kleiman has also indicated he believes Wright was Satoshi. The truth about Bitcoin’s creation is quickly coming out, if you care to hear about it.
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