If one thing has become apparent over the years, it’s that Dr. Craig Wright knows a lot about Bitcoin.
With a massive patent portfolio, an unrivaled knowledge of the Bitcoin system, and having repeatedly proved critics wrong about fine details, Dr. Wright has emerged as the expert on Bitcoin.
For those who don’t believe Dr. Wright is Bitcoin’s inventor, I’d like to challenge you to answer the following questions.
How does Dr. Wright know so much about Bitcoin?
Satoshi Nakamoto told Mike Hearn that Bitcoin scales past Visa (NASDAQ: V) levels upon release and can handle extreme size. This was well before scaling debates or ideas like the Lightning Network and side chains entered the conversation.
Dr. Wright has always agreed with Satoshi on this. His ideas and some intellectual property from his former companies have helped scale Bitcoin to 1.5 million transactions per second with Teranode. No layer-two scaling solutions or side chains are needed, as he has said many times.
Dr. Wright knew early on that Bitcoin could handle all sorts of transactions despite the BTC Core developers stripping out the opcodes and butchering the original protocol. Back in 2014, on ‘the Bitcoin Doco,’ he explained how it could do everything from tracking litter to smart contracts. Since then, he has explained how it can revolutionize supply chains, how blockchain-based identity systems can be built on it, and much more.
Those who have read the book, Satoshi’s Vision: The Art of Bitcoin, also know Dr. Wright has an extremely detailed understanding of how Bitcoin works. His understanding of the protocol, the economics at play, the legal aspects, and what Bitcoin is for are deeper than any other so-called expert in the industry.
How did Dr. Wright know all of this? Did he just nerd out on Bitcoin and become the foremost expert in the world? Or is it more likely he is the mastermind behind it?
For those who say he could have read up on Bitcoin (after all, even his critics concede he’s intelligent), the next question should be of interest.
How does Dr. Wright know about early vulnerabilities in Bitcoin’s code?
Stefan Matthews met Dr. Craig Wright when he was Chief Information Officer at Centrebet in Australia. Dr. Wright worked as a forensic auditor for BDO, and over the years, they talked about many subjects related to ecash, digital ledgers, and more. In an interview with CoinGeek’s Kurt Wuckert Jr., he told us how Dr. Wright told him about Bitcoin before it was publicly released.
During COPA vs. Wright, Matthews took the witness stand and gave more detail about this period and the events that followed it, including the ‘proof sessions.’ He explains how Dr. Wright was reluctant to go through with a public signing but went along due to pressure from business associates. Emails presented during the proceedings corroborate this.
After signing for Gavin Andresen, Jon Matonis, and several others privately, Dr. Wright didn’t follow through on an arrangement to move coins from early Bitcoin blocks.
Why? He was worried about an early vulnerability in Bitcoin’s code. Matthews describes how he spoke to Andresen about this on a mobile loudspeaker, and Andresen reassured him the bug had been fixed after he moved on from the project.
Unconvinced it had been fixed, Dr. Wright was unwilling to move the coins, but this brings up another interesting question: how is Dr. Wright so familiar with intricate details of the early Bitcoin code? How could he have known about vulnerabilities in the Satoshi era and not know they had been fixed after Satoshi left? Dr. Wright seems intimately familiar with minor details about how Bitcoin works and even problems with its early code.
How does Dr. Wright know Satoshi never posted on Bitcoin Talk?
In March 2020, Dr. Wright published a blog titled Satoshi Never Posted on Bitcoin Talk.
At the time, I remember the reaction. Max Keiser and Stacey Herbert laughed at and mocked him on The Keiser Report, stating this as yet more proof that Dr. Wright is a clueless Satoshi cosplayer. Of course, they never addressed his arguments and the details in his blog about how this happened; they just ridiculed him and kept their viewers in the dark.
Now, during the COPA vs. Wright trial, we have absolute proof that Dr. Wright was right about this. Martti Malmi confirmed that he did, in fact, migrate the website and forums to another server and that Satoshi did lose admin privileges.
Malmi says he “respects Mr. Nakamoto” and would only have had to ask to be reinstated. Regardless, this isn’t the point: how did Dr. Wright know this happened so long ago and that Satoshi was locked out?
Once again, we have compelling evidence that Dr. Wright and Satoshi are one and the same. Or maybe it’s just another fortunate coincidence in Dr. Wright’s favor.
How does Dr. Wright know Satoshi won’t expose him?
If all of this is not enough to convince you that Dr. Wright is Bitcoin’s inventor, think about the following: those who believe he is a fraud think he has conducted a decade-long scheme involving multiple extremely expensive and high-stakes legal battles, has gone around the world talking about Bitcoin, and has claimed under penalty of perjury to be Satoshi, all while running the risk that the ‘real’ Satoshi might expose him at any given moment.
Critics of Dr. Wright often say that all he has to do is move a coin to prove his Satoshi identity. However, this argument cuts both ways. All Satoshi has to do is move a coin to sink him and send him to prison for a long time.
How does Dr. Wright know this won’t happen? Sometimes, his critics will say he knows Nakamoto is dead, but they never elaborate further. How would he know this? The answer is usually silence. Anything but admit that the Aussie man who loves the law and wants Bitcoin to be honest money is their beloved Satoshi!
No sane, rational individual would commit perjury on multiple continents, fund multi-million dollar legal battles, and go on television, endless podcasts, and tour the world telling everyone he invented Bitcoin, knowing that at any moment, Bitcoin’s real inventor could bring him down. Neither would a self-serving conman; even they have a sense of self-preservation.
The rational conclusion is that Dr. Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, beyond any reasonable doubt. Those who refuse to accept it have to twist, contort, and make up answers to or ignore the questions laid out above.
Here are a few bonus questions for those who remain skeptical:
If Dr. Wright knew he couldn’t follow through on moving Satoshi coins or signing publicly, why did he agree to do it in the first place?
If he doxxed himself for the adoration and attention, why do all of the emails we have seen in court show him displaying extreme resistance to the so-called ‘big reveal’?
Suppose Dr. Wright is incompetent and confuses naive people with techno-babble, as some critics say. How did he convince Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin Foundation founder Jon Matonis, and financial cryptographer Ian Grigg that he is Satoshi Nakamoto? Could these people understand more than the average Dr. Wright critic?
If Dr. Wright defrauded the Australian tax office, as one particular conspiracy theorist posits, why has he won all his cases against them? Why have they not arrested him? More importantly, why did he go to England, a country with an extradition treaty with his native Australia?
If Dr. Wright is a dishonest fraudster, why do so many people in his life testify under oath that he was obsessed with detecting and stamping out fraud and unauthorized network access? They also claim he developed systems (TimeChain) that act as a timestamp server to detect both. Could it be a coincidence that Bitcoin is also a distributed timestamp server? Is it likely these people would risk their reputations and lie to help him?
Is it a mere coincidence that Dr. Wright was working on similar concepts in the decade prior to Bitcoin? For example, TimeChain (see above) and end-to-end-encrypted networks (BlackNet) which he filed tax rebates for.
Is it another coincidence that Dr. Wright did an LLM thesis at Northumbria University titled ‘Payment Providers and Intermediaries in the Law of the Internet,’ which delves into the issues as to why cash exchanges cannot occur online, among other issues Bitcoin solved?
All of these are questions that need to be answered. While none of the answers definitely provide absolute proof that Dr. Wright is Bitcoin’s inventor, they are the questions that led me to believe he is. Think about them.
Watch: On the very start of Bitcoin
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