Bitcoin has had an eventful life. Since the cryptocurrency’s inception in 2008, all the bitcoins in circulation have grown from being worth nothing to a value of nearly $7 billion today.

Along the way, however, bitcoin helped fuel the rise of the Silk Road, a globe-spanning black market for narcotics and other contraband that prompted a major clampdown by US authorities. Its founder, Ross Ulbricht (also known as the “Dread Pirate Roberts”), is currently facing two consecutive life sentences.

Today, the open-source technology is in the midst of a “civil war” among its top developers that threatens to stifle its growth, while convoluted paternity claims pop up on an almost annual basis.

That’s why bitcoin has been declared dead 101 times, according to one estimate by bitcoin guide 99 Bitcoins.
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I feel like this is a dead site... Can't raise investor funds, can't even turn a profit with the funds it does have...can't stay online. What can SD do?

why they should destroy their own business? 51% will never happen, with their cheap electricity they are earning a shitload of money...

What kind of an idiotic clickbait title did this journalist use? He just stated something deliberately stupid and provactive then didn't elaborate at all on why he wrote it. People like this are such fucking jokes where they make these kind of statements and then immediately run away and hide behind disabled comments pages or just block out any responses entirely.

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As for Bitcoin, it could do with a leader. Before Wright came along, the community was consumed by a stand-off that threatened to destroy it, one that Wright’s intervention has done little to resolve.

Put simply, Bitcoin is getting too big for the network Satoshi designed. As it grows, many of the exchanges that process Bitcoin payments are seeing transactions delayed, with the network’s building blocks filling up with data. A floated solution is to increase the network’s capacity, but purists argue that this would centralise power...

The debate over this has been rumbling along for months with few signs of a conclusion. Vested interests have prevented much real progress, and it is unclear that Satoshi – should Bitcoin’s near-mythical creator ever really be revealed – would actually hold much sway. ...

Meanwhile, central banks and financial giants are picking some of the Bitcoin’s best parts and copying them for their own systems. The Bank of England has helped design RSCoin – a rival based on the Bitcoin technology – while Nasdaq is piloting the underlying technology to record share transactions. Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever they are, has changed the financial order, but perhaps not in the way that was intended.

The mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity has had all the hallmarks of a classic thriller. A secretive genius develops a technology that changes the world, develops a cult-like following and becomes fabulously wealthy in the process, without a soul knowing who he, or she, is.

Bitcoin, unveiled by the pseudonymous Nakamoto (more commonly known as Satoshi) to an obscure internet mailing list eight years ago, now fascinates the world.

An independent, decentralised virtual currency, practically impervious to fraud or theft and with no transaction fees, it promised to liberate money in the same way that the world wide web made information free. The technology is widely accepted as brilliant: the value of all the bitcoins in circulation now totals almost £5bn, and the blockchain technology that backs it up is being studied by every major bank.
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The about-face of the Australian entrepreneur who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, is the latest embarrassing controversy for a virtual currency that has become increasingly popular among serious techies and financiers.

On Thursday, three days after the entrepreneur, Craig Wright, presented persuasive but incomplete evidence to support his claim, he changed his mind and said he would not produce more information, as he had promised, to quiet a chorus of skeptics who questioned him.

"I believed that I could do this. I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me," Wright wrote in a blog post titled "I'm Sorry." "But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access...I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot."

The move was a bizarre twist in what many believed was the end of the search for Satoshi, who is credited with authoring a 2008 academic paper that laid the groundwork for bitcoin. News organizations from Newsweek to The New Yorker have investigated the person or team of people who created the virtual currency and come up dry, though Wright had been floated more than once as a probable candidate.
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Poor Gavin Andresen.

First he publicly backs Craig Wright, saying that the Australian computer scientist really is the man who created bitcoin under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. Then, when Wright’s own promised evidence falls apart – utterly disintegrates, really, faster than a tissue left in your pocket when you wash a pair of jeans on the spin cycle – he can only respond “what the heck?” On Thursday, it became clear that Wright wasn’t even going to try to provide any other evidence, and Andresen started mulling platitudes, tweeting: “‘we are all Satoshi’ is such a lovely idea; might say ‘yes’ when asked ‘are you?’”

Now, it looks like Andresen might have just been fired from Bitcoin development. He took over development of the Bitcoin code from Nakamoto himself when the latter retired from the scene, but since then he has also taken a back seat, leaving others to do the heavy lifting.
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As one would-be father of bitcoin falls by the wayside, squabbling among the web-based currency's lead developers is exposing a fundamental flaw: it must evolve to meet growing demand, but may lack a governance structure to achieve this.

The latest bickering erupted after Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright promised to prove he was the mysterious creator of bitcoin - which allows users to move money across the world quickly and anonymously - but then said on Thursday he could not provide further evidence to back this up.

Wright stopped short of reneging on his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, assumed to be a pseudonym for the person or people who launched the digital cryptocurrency in 2009. However, he apologised for damaging the reputations of bitcoin experts who had believed him.

Many members of the bitcoin community reckon this is all a distraction and agree with Wright when he said that the identity of Nakamoto "doesn't, and shouldn't, matter".
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Sometimes that intrigue takes the form of so-called alternate reality games, played out in the networked landscape of the real world but borrowing heavily from fiction. Gamers chase clues and leads by way of secret messages, billboards and multimedia. The game is open to all, and the prize is often just the simple satisfaction of knowing you figured out the mystery before anyone else.

This week the non-gaming world got a glimpse of these activities when it became a stage for a new type of alternate reality game: the search for the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the multibillion-dollar digital cryptocurrency bitcoin. The system claims to eliminate the need for trust in financial transactions.
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Doesn't matter to you, unless it's your money. 

After eight years of sitting on those coins, you imagine Satoshi is going to spend them in a way that destroys the entire Bitcoin economy?  I'll say you don't have much to worry about, and if you weren't fetishizing sheer wealth, so would you. 

How about http://silliconangle.com/blog/2016/05/03/Craig-Wright-faces-criminal-charges/index.html

Today anonymous sources from the UK police leaked information about intentions to arrest Mr. Wright using anti-terror legislation, however this is yet to be confirmed.

buy a goddamn clue already, people.

Who Satoshi is doesn't matter.

Who claims to be Satoshi doesn't matter.
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tl;dr

In fact right now several governments (starting with the UK, but with Australia not far behind) are quite prepared to charge terrorism charges

I can only say what I and a lot of people here would do if confronted with a situation like this:

1. Sign a message with the 2008 PGP key or GTFO
2. If he wants to prove to me he is Satoshi, it is me who will setup the enviroment not him. If he doesn't agree: He is not Satoshi.
3. If he provides any old conversations I would be amazed, but not even 60% convinced (go back to 1.)
4. Sign the said blocks or GTFO

Gavin does it completely different. He might get paid for this, dunno.

Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin, has backtracked on a pledge to provide proof of his earlier claims.

Despite promising on Tuesday that he would be offering “extraordinary evidence” to verify his claim that he is really Satoshi Nakamoto, Wright wiped his blog on Thursday, replacing it only with a message headlined: “I’m Sorry.”

In the new message, Wright continues to maintain that he really is Nakamoto, but accepts that the total absence of credible evidence means few are likely to believe him. “I believed that I could do this,” he writes. “I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me. But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot.”
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Craig Steven Wright, the Australian businessman who this week claimed he was the creator of the digital currency bitcoin, abruptly pulled his offer to provide more proof.

Almost immediately after Mr. Wright’s claim to be bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto became public this week, skeptics demanded more proof, namely digital encryption keys that would only be held by the founder. Mr. Wright pledged to offer more evidence, but withdrew the offer Thursday in a post on his website.
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The Australian entrepreneur who has claimed to be the inventor of Bitcoin has reneged on a promise to present new "proof" to support his case.

Craig Wright had pledged to move some of the virtual currency from one of its early address blocks, an act many believe can only be done by the tech's creator.

This would have addressed complaints that earlier evidence he had published online was misleading.

Dr Wright said that he was "sorry".

"I believed that I could put years of anonymity and hiding behind me," he blogged.

"But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot.

"When the rumours began, my qualifications and character were attacked. When those allegations were proven false, new allegations have already begun. I know now that I am not strong enough for this."

Dr Wright's claims were first reported by the BBC, the Economist and GQ magazine on Monday.
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Earlier this week, Australian Craig Wright offered what he called proof that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, months after we had identified him as a possible candidate. Almost immediately the crypto community assessed that the proof was “a scam.” However, two respected members of the Bitcoin community—Jon Matonis, a former board member of the Bitcoin Foundation, and Gavin Andresen, one of Bitcoin’s earliest programmers—said they had privately seen actual proof that Wright was Nakamoto. We spoke to Andresen, who described the method Wright used to convince him, telling us at the time that he was “still convinced [Wright’s] Satoshi despite the really weird proof he’s put in his blog post,” but admitting “it’s certainly possible I was bamboozled.”

After that backlash, Wright promised on Tuesday that he would share “extraordinary proof” soon that would convince the rest of the world of what Andresen and Matonis apparently already believed.
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I don't believe Gavin, that he didn't smell the setup in London. He plays the innocent guy now, but he is not very good at acting.
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I’m Sorry

I believed that I could do this. I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me. But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot.

When the rumors began, my qualifications and character were attacked. When those allegations were proven false, new allegations have already begun. I know now that I am not strong enough for this.

I know that this weakness will cause great damage to those that have supported me, and particularly to Jon Matonis and Gavin Andresen. I can only hope that their honour and credibility is not irreparably tainted by my actions. They were not deceived, but I know that the world will never believe that now. I can only say I’m sorry.

And goodbye.