14 DAY TRIAL // In interviews with three media outlets today, Australian businessman Craig Wright claimed to be and attempted to prove he was "Satoshi Nakamoto," the moniker used by Bitcoin's inventor in the cryptocurrency's early life.
In front of reporters from the BBC, The Economist and GQ, Mr. Wright executed a Bitcoin transaction and signed the operation using the same public key used to sign the first ever Bitcoin transaction back in 2009.
Influential people in the Bitcoin world believe Wright's claims
Mr. Wright also posted a technical write-up on his blog, providing the evidence to support his claims. Jon Matonis, founding director of the Bitcoin Foundation, gave Wright's demonstration legitimacy and said that he believes that the Australian cryptography guru is truly the man that created Bitcoin.
Later during the day, Gavin Andresen, one of Bitcoin's core developers and a force to be reckoned with in the Bitcoin landscape, also said that he also believed Wright.
Later during the day, the other Bitcoin devs revoked Andresen's commit access to Bitcoin's core code. They explained their decision by claiming that they suspected that Andresen's blog was hacked.
Controversy surrounds Wright's claim
Wright's name first surfaced in the media last year in December, when Wired and Gizmodo published separate investigations that arrived at the same conclusion, that Bitcoin was Wright's brainchild.
Critics dismissed the investigations claiming to be nothing more than a clever and doctored media stunt. Those critics weren't impressed with today's demonstration either.
The first one to criticize Wright was a Google engineer who tweeted that "He's not Satoshi. He just reused a signed message (of a Sartre text) by Satoshi with block 9 key as 'proof'." The Bitcoin project itself soon followed suite.
Many users of the Bitcoin community pointed out on Reddit and about any other site that has its comments section open that Wright is under investigation by the Australian Taxation Office, and he may be nothing more than a charlatan, sent in by the banking sector to destabilize the cryptocurrency.