Thank you for the sleuthing. Maxwell has demonstrated on occasions that he doesn't do thorough enough analysis to question his own biases and lashes out at others.
Theymos how about the possibility (and almost a certainty) that Satoshi isn't one person and that this Craig Wright is asserting his role. He mentions working in a group on research and also mentions having other "beta coders" involved.
I haven't researched the case enough to form an opinion on the likelihood he is a scammer or other motive.
I offer a theory. I am not claiming this theory is correct or even likely. Take it as one example of why circumstantial assumptions are not the same as irrefutable mathematical proofs.
What we do know is that Kleiman and Wright were associates since at least 2008, Kleiman died in 2013, online documents were edited after this time to illustrate Wright's links to Bitcoin and Wright's companies are tied up in a disastrous situation with the ATO that has been ongoing for years.
Did Wright ever claim he is Satoshi? My vague recollection of what I have perused thus far is he wrote something akin to his level of involvement would be coming out soon. And that he had represented to others that he was deeply involved with Bitcoin. But did he actually claim to be Satoshi? I haven't seen such a quote implicating that he made such an explicit claim.
So given the above assumption, why is everyone analyzing whether the man is Satoshi and blaming him for claiming that he is?
Let me assume (without having studied deeply all the background evidence) that he has represented to others that he has a special involvement with Bitcoin. And that he is even doctoring signatures to make it look like he was involved since 2009. If his motive was not to prove to the public he is Satoshi but rather to convince to some investors or Australian investment board that he had deep involvement with Bitcoin (leaving the question of whether he is Satoshi or not an intentional enigma), then he may not have cared about getting every last detail correct on the back-dated PGP public keys. He may have been doing the minimum level of publicity to assert this position to those who he had such a motive to convince. Thus a back-dated public key doesn't necessarily indicate he intended to deceive the Bitcoin community-at large or even that he has no bonafide deep connections.
One plausible possibility is that he was somehow connected to the real Satoshi and somehow that relationship soured or changed in such a way that he now has to fabricate data in order to protect the investments and/or commitments he had formed. For example, what if Kleiman was Satoshi (or was the liason to Satoshi) and Kleiman unexpectedly died in 2013 (of an antibiotic resistant staph infection) so Wright has to meet his ongoing commitments somehow.
In other words, I doubt very much that Satoshi was one person. Bitcoin was likely created by some highly secretive group. Maybe that group had some subcontractors. Maybe Kleiman was connected. Maybe Wright rode the coattails of Kleiman. Kleiman dies, Wright tries to rewrite history to maintain the continuity.
My plea is please be more objective and less brash at jumping to conclusions. Reality is sometimes not as binary (black and white). Rationality and reason should prevail if we are to be a sane community.
Again I am not asserting this theory is likely. I too have strong intuitions that Wright is caught up in some level of deception or gaming the system.
The real "Satoshi" (or multiple people) may be dead. If it was a highly secretive plot then it is plausible if not also probable the creators have conveniently died of "natural causes" to preserve the secrecy. It is virtually implausible that the national security agencies don't know who the real Satoshi is/was. Delve a little bit into the impossibility that a government level power was not involved in planting the military-grade nano-thermite that toppled the WTC towers on 9/11. Be realistic. And in that case of 9/11, the discovery phase of evidence has been extensive and is beyond-any-reasonable-doubt. And is nearly irrefutable, but still not a mathematical proof.
As I remember the accounts we associate with Satoshi stopped communicating after the publicity started for Bitcoin. And afair (from reading his post) he stated the publicity was one of the issues. This doesn't indicate a fear of the NSA, but rather a fear of the public sector. Normally a person afraid of harassment from sovereign powers wants publicity in order to gain more security. That is one of the small tidbits of circumstantial evidence that lead me to believe that Satoshi was connected to the secret and powerful groups behind the curtain of governmental level power. I wish Satoshi was a Libertarian phenomenon. I have contemplated scenarios where the truth is a mix of both, e.g. a group of researchers outsmarts their handlers. The latter point was inspired by
Eric Raymond's blog about how the researchers outsmarted the government in order to create the internet. In other words, you build a system that you know is flawed and will end up handing the power to the government because it can't scale without being controlled by the professional miners and exchanges which can be easily located and regulated. But you outsmart your handlers by realizing that you will launch a paradigm that will be improved by the community and in a grassroots manner it will subvert the government while the government is lost in complacency thinking they have Bitcoin regulation under control. Or an alternative scenario (and the one I favor) is a powerful group wants to destroy the nation-state Central banking and the nation-state currencies and finance systems to accelerate the move to a one-world reserve currency and the netizens using electronic currency. This powerful group might think they benefit from such a transition and also given that electronic currency is more traceable than physical cash (well at least so far that seems to be the case but I had a new relevation recently that maybe Zerocash is the only technology that can liberate from that reality that IP addresses can be correlated to human identities). Another possibility is Bitcoin was created by some developer (or developers) from Bittorrent realm as they would have had the requisite P2P network and decentralization experience (and libertarian ideals motivation), but based on
my interaction with them about decentralized tit-for-tat economics back in 2008, I think that is less likely.
I favor the scenario where Wright is either just another person gaming and trying to make money in the Bitcoin ecosystem, or at best he is a pawn of the people who are really behind the creation of Bitcoin. Or perhaps Satoshi was a lone brilliant engineer, but I place the odds of that at very near to 0. Even the smartest people can't work and develop without collaboration. To execute what Satoshi did as a loner, would be amazing nearly beyond belief.
I have not been able to confirm that he claimed PhDs from CSU. I read he also studied in London. I heard on video he claimed 3 masters degrees and maybe 2 doctorates but he also said, "I forget exactly what I have".
He has 3 more Masters degrees than most of you do.
And he apparently was mining Bitcoin. I can't see where he has claimed to be Satoshi. It is true that miners run Bitcoin. If he was mining back in 2009 and had spent the $1 million he claims on mining equipment, then he was likely literally running Bitcoin. And he may have a lot of mined
BTC.
Why do you hate him for mining Bitcoin?
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/09/who-is-craig-wright-and-how-likely-is-it-that-hes-behind-bitcoinDuring the interview, the person the transcript names as Wright says: “I did my best to try and hide the fact that I’ve been running bitcoin since 2009 but I think it’s getting – most – most – by the end of this half the world is going to bloody know.”
Guardian Australia has been unable to independently verify the authenticity of the transcripts published by Gizmodo, or whether the transcript is an accurate reflection of the audio if the interview took place. It is also not clear whether the phrase “running” refers merely to the process of mining bitcoin using a computer.
