Craig Wright Makes More Claims

It seems like the Craig Wright battle is the drama that just won’t end. After a year of rough legal proceedings due to Wright having been assigned a $7.2 billion settlement after defrauding the family of his deceased friend, he still won’t stop insisting that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. 

His new claims surfaced during an interview where he showed the academic journal that inspired the Nakamoto pseudonym. He has a document showing a JSTOR article and his handwritten notes on the article. His notes say: 

“Nakamoto is the Japanese Adam Smith. Honest Ledger + Micro Cash. Satoshi is Intelligent History. Not too hard.”

Does This Change Anything? 

It is unclear how this proves that he is Nakamoto rather than someone who was able to make the connection to an 18th-century economist after the fact, but this is his claim. If anything, this is just more grasping at straws rather than definitive proof of the veracity of his claim. 

Further proof that Wright is unlikely to be Satoshi Nakamoto comes from the fact that he has said that he does not have the funds to finance the settlement he owes in the Kleiman case. After being found liable for the funds he stole from David Kleiman, a fellow Bitcoin developer who left his Bitcoin to his family, he attempted to use this defense. The one issue with that is that Satoshi is still in possession of a far higher sum than was mined as part of the genesis block. 

Logical Analysis of the Claims

The most entertaining part about the “is Craig Wright Satoshi Nakamoto?” debate is that it seems very out of character for Nakamoto to suddenly be so loud about needing to have his identity revealed. The whole purpose of the anonymous design of Bitcoin is that no one person can retain dominance or ownership over the ecosystem. 

If Satoshi’s identity were revealed, that would cheapen the brand and create a hero to worship rather than a symbol to worship. One is clearly more powerful than the other. For money to truly “evolve” to the next level, it needs to become democratic. In the same way that a 51% attack is financially prohibitive, thus preventing a plutocracy, the lack of a figurehead in the Bitcoin world allows for the community to rule and invest without any single person controlling its future. Anything else would end up being more of a benevolent (hopefully) dictatorship. 

The second question one would ask is “why would Nakamoto reveal his (or her) identity now?” It seems far more likely that Wright is just an opportunistic party who wanted to make a profit off of a perceived “gap” in the market.