Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto

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The Faketoshi saga so far in a nutshell

Written by Arthur van Pelt, proofread by Peter Scott-Morgan

ABOUT EDITS to this article: as more material may become available after the publication of this article, it could have edits and updates every now and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress, and become a reference piece for years to come.

In reality, Craig Wright did not win any lawsuit yet where his opponent showed up in court.

One of my Twitter followers (no, not ‘komadori’, he’s a Craig Wright apologist and not really a fan of my work) recently reminded me of the fact that there’s not really a good, short, high level Craig-is-not-Satoshi article. Of course, there are several handfuls of long form articles of the undersigned that contain very detailed deep dives into many individual aspects of the fraud that Craig Wright executed during his ever-failing quest to be recognized as someone he clearly isn’t: Satoshi Nakamoto. But it’s absolutely fair to say that those long forms mostly cater to a niche audience.

So here you go, dear reader. The compressed, more high level version of my entire TL;DR Medium oeuvre, with again tons of links to all the relevant sources, intertwined in a timeline starting 2007 when the real Satoshi started to design and code up our beloved Bitcoin. This timeline will contain only the highlights of Craig Wright’s lies, deception, self-owns and forgeries.

Allow me to humbly call it the mother of all my Craig “Faketoshi” Wright articles so far. For those who need a quick and easily digestible introduction into the fraudulent cosplay world of Craig Wright.

Let’s go.

A lot. Basically everything. Let’s say that Craig Wright should be able by now to effortlessly patent the “proving a negative in every possible way” concept.

Because, Craig Wright:

Has never signed a message on a known Satoshi Bitcoin address that could be widely, publicly verified by its signature
Instead, there are others who have been able to sign Bitcoin addresses on his so-called ‘Tulip Trust list’ of Satoshi-mined bitcoins in the 2009–2010 era (see “The Year 2020” section), making it perfectly clear this list is a forgery
Has never moved any of the known Satoshi bitcoins
Instead, there are others who have been able to move (block subsidy) bitcoins from his so-called ‘Tulip Trust list’ of Satoshi-mined bitcoins in the 2009–2010 era, making it perfectly clear (again) this list is a forgery
Has never used one of Satoshi’s passwords to log on to any of the forums and other platforms that Satoshi used in the 2008–2010 era to post a message
Has never used one of Satoshi’s PGP keys
Has never used one of Satoshi’s email addresses
Has never come up with any previously unknown Satoshi material that could be verified with any of the early Bitcoin developers or other Bitcoin OGs
Has never provided any untampered physical or digital ‘Satoshi evidence’
Instead, has only provided 100s of forged and backdated pieces of ‘Faketoshi evidence’

And not only the Bitcoin community knows this for a fact, also judges notice.

Has never come up with remotely believable eye witnesses who were able to show physical evidence of his Satoshi-ness
Simply can’t code. Repeat: Craig Wright simply can’t code
(please go check out chapter ‘2. Coding Bitcoin: Does Craig Wright even have the skills?’ for numerous examples!)
Has no stylometry match whatsoever with the real Satoshi
Was not recognized by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), who thoroughly inquired him in the 2013–2015 era — and who is currently executing a criminal investigation against him — as Satoshi, instead they declared early 2016 that they firmly believed “Craig Wright is not the creator of Bitcoin, and that he may have created the hoax to distract from his tax issues” because major parts of Craig’s evidence were found a “nullity based on sham”
To add, in not any of his plethora of lawsuits in which he is, or was, involved, is he recognized by a judge or a jury as Satoshi Nakamoto
Instead, several judges have recently determined, and ruled, that he has failed to be recognized as Satoshi in any material way
Has been caught lying and falsely rewriting history inside and outside court rooms on numerous occassions, and not only about his self-proclaimed Satoshi-ness
Is well known for a treasure box full of self-owns in which he completely contradicts the real Satoshi Nakamoto (source example below: YouTube, 5 minutes in)

Satoshi Nakamoto on P2P Foundation forum, February 11, 2009: “I’ve developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called **Bitcoin. It’s completely decentralized,** with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust.”

And a few days later, on February 15, 2009, Satoshi would firmly emphasize how extremely important the decentralized nature of Bitcoin was to him:

“I hope it’s obvious it was ONLY [emphasis mine] the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.”

Let me be perfectly clear about the Satoshi Nakamoto quote above: if one denies or doesn’t understand the importance of, let alone doesn’t support the full decentralization of Bitcoin, then one doesn’t understand Satoshi Nakamoto, then one doesn’t understand Bitcoin and then one is 1,000% certainly not the inventor of Bitcoin. Full stop.

Gregor Sailer: Carson City VI/Vågårda, Sweden, from the series “The Potemkin Village”, 2016

Now let’s return to Satoshi cosplayer Craig Wright:

Has shown an utter incompetence on all levels when it comes to his Bitcoin knowledge: design and tech (as explained by Satoshi in the Bitcoin whitepaper, on the Bitcoin Forum and elsewhere, including privately to Bitcoin developers in the 2008–2011 era), development dynamics, legal, social, economics… you name it, Craig crippled, ruined or destroyed it
Inspired to the creation, but has made *no contribution whatsoever* to its codebase, of a failing altcoin fork in November 2018 called BSV that is, with a massive stretch, remotely resembling something Bitcoin but is in reality a ‘set in stone protocol’ (red flag: Satoshi was against this) minority knockoff that ‘stores arbitrary data’ (another red flag: Satoshi was against this) of another failing altcoin fork called Bcash (BCH) that split from Bitcoin in August 2017
Is well known for a mindboggling list of plagiarisms, both within as outside the Bitcoin realm
(a comprehensive list of his plagiarisms can be found in “Craig Wright: The Fraud That Didn’t Make It To The Court Rooms. Yet.”)

Plagiarisms that are also mindboggling easy to trace back to their sources.

Can not come even remotely close to a number of way more logical Satoshi candidates, such as Adam Back, Nick Szabo, Timothy May, Hal Finney, David Chaum — and let’s not forget the late cypherpunk Len Sassaman (but let’s not forget also though, none of these people ever came forward as a Satoshi candidate)
Has to ‘compete’ for the Satoshi moniker against about a dozen of other known Satoshi claimants. These individuals, of which two are serving jailtime as we speak, are all considered being Faketoshis too though, just like Craig Wright, as none of them delivered any proof whatsoever… just like Craig Wright

Now let’s run down a brief history of Satoshi Nakamoto (2007–2011) and intertwine this history with Craig Wright’s Satoshi cosplay history (2014–present). The reader will learn that especially 2014/2015 and 2019 were very productive years for Craig Wright. Many sloppy forgeries to support the false claim that he is Satoshi Nakamoto can be traced back to these years.

The Prelude 1997–2006

Although Satoshi Nakamoto never indicated, nor even hinted, that he was doing something Bitcoin related in these years, Craig Wright created a false and completely debunked narrative that something called ‘BlackNet’ was the predecessor to Bitcoin. In February 2019, he even lied about ‘BlackNet’ as part of his false Satoshi claim in front of the CFTC.

Since it has been thoroughly debunked, Craig Wright appears to have abandoned the BlackNet lie in recent days.

The Year 2007

Satoshi Nakamoto starts coding up Bitcoin. And we know he started roughly in May 2007, because on November 17, 2008 he told James A. Donald:

“I believe I’ve worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them.”

And on June 18, 2010 Satoshi Nakamoto repeated on the Bitcoin Forum, when asked ”How long have you been working on this design Satoshi?”

“Since 2007. At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn’t resist to keep thinking about it. Much more of the work was designing than coding.”

Satoshi also made perfectly clear that he first executed the Bitcoin coding part, and only then started writing the Bitcoin whitepaper last minute, as he explained to Hal Finney on November 8, 2008:

Craig Wright on the other hand… Feeling the pressure of a handful of libel lawsuits that he ignited early 2019, with hodlonaut even countersuing him in Norway for a so-called Non Declaratory Relief, Craig realized that he potentially needed a lot of convincing ‘Satoshi evidence’ to show his opponents in these lawsuits.

So Craig Wright frantically went to work, creating all kinds of backdated counterfeit documents and digital files that were supposed to give the impression, at first glance, that they were stored and found back in the attic of Satoshi Nakamoto.

One of the forgeries that Craig created in 2019 was a BDO meeting minutes paper which he backdated to August 2007. This forgery is unique in the sense that it is the only one we currently know of with a 2007 (back)date.

But as usual, leave it to the Bitcoin community to quickly destroy any credibility of Craig’s proof, and turn his Satoshi evidence into the next item on an ever growing list of Faketoshi counterfeits.

Credits for this meme go to Peter Scott-Morgan

The Year 2008

Satoshi Nakamoto starts writing the Bitcoin whitepaper, and sends a draft to a few people like Wei Dai and Adam Back. He anonymously buys the bitcoin.org domain, publishes the whitepaper on the cypherpunk’s Metzdowd platform, and he shares the early Bitcoin source code for review purposes with a few people. Among them: Hal Finney.

Email forgery created in the 2014/2015 era, backdated to March 12, 2008. One of the reasons this email was found a forgery is because Craig Wright only obtained the information-defence.com domain in Januari 2009. Craig not misspelling Bitcoin like he did in August 2011 (see “**The Year 2011**” section) when he first discovered Satoshi’s cryptocurrency project is a fun detail. But the icing on the cake is that the real Satoshi Nakamoto did not even have the name ‘Bitcoin’ in mind at this point in time.

Craig Wright on the other hand… claims in 2019 in public with a document (image below, left) that he chose the Satoshi Nakamoto moniker in January of 2008. This document was immediately debunked as a clear-cut forgery by the Bitcoin community again, though.

To add insult to injury, in September 2022 a forensic report of KPMG Norway became public after the Norwegian hodlonaut v Wright trial, showing the exact same forgery (image below, right). Of course, KPMG Norway also determined, in even finer detail, that the document that Craig Wright showed in front of the webcam in 2019 is indeed just that: a homemade forgery by Craig Wright.

Then there was the case of a few early 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper drafts that popped up in the hodlonaut v Wright Norway lawsuit.

In 2019, Craig Wright takes the publicly available 2009 PDF version of the Bitcoin whitepaper from bitcoin.org and tries altering it, to give it an appearance of an early 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper draft. Part of his forging process is changing Bitcoin to TimeCoin (lol), and sloppily adjusting the metadata of the original PDF file.

What does this all tell the reader? It tells us that Craig Wright basically created this new line of forgeries specifically for the hodlonaut v Wright lawsuit in Norway, running from early 2019 till late 2022. And Craig — who was requested to come up with the creme de la creme of his Satoshi Nakamoto evidence — created dozens of these (backdated to 2008) forgeries: source code files, other whitepaper drafts, print outs, images, you name it. The forensic investigation department of KPMG Norway examined all the 71 documents and files that Craig had handed over, and found all of them to be… oh surprise… forgeries.

Source: **Oslo, Norway: The hodlonaut v Craig Wright No-Defamation Trial**

Ready for another Craig Wright self-own? It’s too much for this article to map them all out, but this one is pretty hilarious. In May 2008, Craig obtained a Masters in Law at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle.

So in March 2019 Craig bragged about that fact, leading to the umpteenth self-own of Craig Wright. Because look what Satoshi Nakamoto told Mike Hearn on April 27, 2009, almost a year after Craig Wright obtained his law degree…

Other false but fully debunked Craig Wright claims where he tried to rewrite the 2008 history of Bitcoin: he said he laid fibre to Bagnoo (nope, didn’t happen), he set up and maintained a Bitcoin network of 60 to 70 computers (nope, such massive network wasn’t needed to kick off Bitcoin and only existed in Craig’s dreams), and he stated that he paid for the bitcoin.org domain with his credit card (nope, didn’t happen either as this statement on his blog was only supported with one of his infamous forgeries again).

The Year 2009

On January 3, 2009 the Bitcoin Genesis block (aka block 0) was created by Satoshi Nakamoto. Block 1 was only mined on January 9, 2009 though. On January 8, 2009 Satoshi released the Bitcoin software v0.1.0 Alpha. Hal Finney is the first “running Bitcoin”, and also the first person crashing Bitcoin in the wild on his device. Together, Satoshi and Hal quickly solved the issue without interrupting the Bitcoin network as a whole.

Then Dustin Trammell — who started running a Bitcoin full node only hours before Hal Finney — swiftly follows running the second Bitcoin mining node early January 2009 alongside Hal Finney when he had figured out he had to use the Bitcoin node software menu ‘Options — Generate Coins’ to switch on mining.

A few months into 2009, Martti Malmi joined Satoshi as Bitcoin developer and administrator of the Bitcoin website on bitcoin.org. Late 2009, just after Bitcoin started its price discovery with help of the same Martti Malmi who performed the world’s first BTC to USD trade with newly raised Bitcoin exchange New Liberty Standard, and after Satoshi changed Bitcoin from an Alpha to a Beta status shortly after this first trade, they also set up the Bitcoin Forum (a Simple Machines Forum freeware template) together, under a subdomain of bitcoin.org.

Meanwhile, in camp Faketoshi… More incompetent rewriting of Bitcoin’s history is being prepared in 2014/2015. Let’s have a look at Craig Wright’s blog. When Craig started to cosplay Satoshi in 2014, this was initially the only place where he dropped his public breadcrumbs, which failed to get any wider traction however.

In 2014 and 2015, Craig Wright created several backdated blog posts, or altered existing ones. Here he claimed in a newly created, backdated blog post that Bitcoin Beta (oops, it was Alpha) went live on January 11, 2009 (and oops, that was supposed to be January 3, 2009).

Notable is also the debunk of Craig Wright’s explanation in 2019 for why there are six days between Genesis block (block 0) and block 1: because, as Craig claimed several times on different occasions, Microsoft patch Tuesday, a reoccuring monthly global outrol of Microsoft updates and patches, interrupted and shut down his Bitcoin network on January 3, 2009, straight after the creation of Bitcoin’s Genesis block. So our cosplayer needed to set up a new Bitcoin network which took him six days. Hence block 1 was only created on January 9, 2009, according Craig.

In his article “**Two steps forward, one step back**”, Craig Wright refers to Microsoft patch Tuesday, mentioning the January 2009 code MS09–001.

However, in January 2009 the monthly Microsoft patch Tuesday event was rolled out globally by Microsoft on the 13th, which is ten days AFTER the creation of Bitcoin’s Genesis block, and four days AFTER the creation of Bitcoin’s block 1.

Oops. Craig Wright busted. Again.

The Year 2010

While this year started with several “overwhelming egoism” slaps and “complete drivel” kicks followed by an “people like you are dangerous and need to be exposed before someone in a position of power actually believes that you know what you are talking about” uppercut at the end in Craig Wright’s face by an internet personality called ‘Thor (Hammer of God)’ while not discussing Bitcoin but instead discussing ‘SMS Banking’…

It is at the same time fair to say that 2010 ended with a goodbye to Satoshi Nakamoto, who left the Bitcoin development community in December, in style. Hal Finney, active in Bitcoin since its inception over two years ago at this point in time, but at this moment unaware of his upcoming departure, told Satoshi he considered the Bitcoin code “an impressive job” and some of its elements that he had studied “powerful machinery”.

Legendary conversation between Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney, two days before Satoshi would enter his last post on the Bitcoin Forum.

The difference between how people perceived Craig Wright and how they perceived Satoshi Nakamoto within the same year couldn’t be more obvious, now could it?

The Year 2011

The year 2011 is notable, because this is the point in time where Craig Wright learned, around July, about the existence of Satoshi’s Bitcoin. Three months after the last known private messages to the main Bitcoin developers of that moment (Mike Hearn, Gavin Andresen and Martti Malmi) of the real Satoshi “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.” Nakamoto, we find Craig Wright misspelling Bitcoin in all kinds of ways: ‘bit coins’, ‘Bit Coin’, ‘(Bit Coin)’, ‘BitCoin’, without ever spelling it the way Satoshi did in public.

Now let that sink in: the real Satoshi Nakamoto never spelled it like Craig Wright did in 2011, as Satoshi always spelled ‘Bitcoin’ or ‘bitcoin(s)’.

And it took Craig Wright several years to figure that out.

Mockup of all the public comments that Craig made about Bitcoin in 2011.

The Year 2012

With the real Satoshi Nakamoto not being around anymore, we can now put our focus on Craig Wright alone. In July, Craig shows his online audience that he knows a thing or two about ‘metadata’. This knowledge is not sufficient enough to surprise forensic experts with spotless digital forgeries in the upcoming years, though.

And it’s not only the metadata of Craig’s forgeries that expose his sloppiness. Below an example where the ATO would discover in 2014/2015 that the content was a complete fabrication of reality, as Dave Kleiman never had anything to do with the UK companies mentioned.

The ATO found out instead that Craig Wright himself had bought these companies in January 2014 to use them in his multi-million tax fraud in that era. At that point in time, Dave Kleiman was not among the living anymore for nine months.

The Year 2013

Another very notable year. As Craig Wright bought his first few handfuls of bitcoin on the Mt Gox exchange in April. Did this redpill him, one could ask? Looking at the sudden writing spree about Bitcoin on his blog — no less than four long articles within three days — that immediately ignited after his first bitcoin buys, one would think so! Let’s have a look at how that went in April (copied from “Faketoshi, The Early Years, Part 1”):

April 27, 2013
Craig Wright buys 25.5 BTC on Mt Gox. These are the first bitcoins he would physically touch in his life.

April 27, 2013
Craig publishes his first blog post about Bitcoin: “A diatribe on Bitcoin”

A revealing part of his post states: “Bitcoin is not the only solution but it is the leading one. […] I’ve placed my bet and it is against all of those who believe that trust requires a central authority.”.

This doesn’t sound like the inventor of Bitcoin is talking here, right? On the contrary, it tells you why Craig Wright never referred to these blog posts up till now…

April 27, 2013
Craig publishes his second blog post about Bitcoin: “Is hording really an issue with bitcoin?”

April 28, 2013
Craig publishes his third blog post about Bitcoin “Why Bitcoins?”

April 29, 2013
Craig publishes his fourth blog post about Bitcoin “Is Bitcoin volatile?”

Within weeks after his ‘redpilling’, Craig sets up a pretty massive Australian tax fraud with Bitcoin addresses that he apparently randomly picked from the Bitcoin rich list.

How do we know, despite his own claims to the ATO, that Craig Wright never owned let alone controlled these random Bitcoin addresses containing 100,000s of BTC? We know this, because the ATO requested several times in the 2013–2015 era that Craig should sign these rich list addresses. However, Craig always chickened out of these signing requests with lame excuses. So it never happened. The ATO confirms:

Source: One of the ATO reports on CourtListener (section 157)

Instead, this is what happened in 2019 on one of these addresses that Craig claimed to own and control in several forged and backdated documents that he had created in his Australian tax fraud era, documents that became public in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit:

Bitcoin address ‘16cou’ obviously does not belong to Craig Wright.

Craig also abused his dead ‘friend’ Dave Kleiman — who had passed away in April of this same year — in his Australian tax fraud in 2013. Dave his falsified signature was found on several backdated document forgeries that Craig created to further this tax fraud. The finding of these false signatures, and a lot more forgeries, discrepanties and inconceivable stories of Craig Wright, would ultimately lead to the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit in the United States in February 2018, when Dave Kleiman’s brother Ira dragged Craig into court in Miami, Florida, accusing him of all types of fraud including ‘Conversion’.

To cut a long story short, it ended up that the Kleiman v Wright case Jury, after a four week long trial and extended deliberations, penalized Craig Wright in December 2021 for a whopping $100,000,000 after they wrapped up Craig Wright’s fraud(*) that he committed in 2013 after Dave Kleiman’s death, under the label ‘Conversion’.

(*) the linked article of the undersigned won a $1,000 prize and made it all the way to the Nasdaq website under the title “Latest Court Ruling Is Not A Win For Craig Wright Or His Satoshi Claims”. 😎

So how did the Jury come to this conclusion?

Early 2011, before Craig Wright even knew about Bitcoin, Dave Kleiman raised W&K Info Defense Research LLC. Craig joined forces with Dave as a hired, but ultimately unpaid, gun, and together they tried to land four IT projects at the US Homeland Security organization. That failed, however, and W&K dissolved in 2012 without ever taking any revenue. In the second half of 2013, after Dave Kleiman’s death, Craig Wright fraudulently overhauled these four projects-that-never-happened into something Bitcoin-mining/software/IP-that-never-happened-either, using false declarations and several forgeries in an Australian Supreme Court case where Craig was both plaintiff and defendant (because Dave Kleiman wasn’t alive anymore). Miraculously, the Australian Judge approved Craig’s false claims in November 2013, and on paper Craig now ‘owned’ almost $57 million in Bitcoin software and IP that he had created from thin air. Craig then used this fraudulently obtained paper-only Bitcoin software and IP in his Australian tax fraud in the years after 2013. In the section “The Year 2015” we will learn how that ended…

Back to Kleiman v Wright. Three months later, in March 2022, Federal Judge Beth Bloom added another $43,132,492.48 in prejudgment interest, indebting Craig for a total of $143,132,492.48. And to add, since December 2021 a postjudgment interest clock of around $1,000-$1,500 per day is also still running.

Not a penny of these amounts has been paid by Craig Wright at the moment of writing — January 2023 — to W&K Info Defense Research LLC (as said Dave Kleiman’s company, now managed by Ira Kleiman) though.

The Year 2014

Craig Wright’s Satoshi cosplay kicked off in January with a hint to the ATO, and with an even more clear message in an email to the Kleiman estate one month later:

“Your son Dave and I are two of the three key people behind Bitcoin”

Source: **Faketoshi, The Early Years, Part 2**

Under growing pressure of ATO inquiries, Craig Wright set up the foundation of the Tulip Trust myth in October when he bought the empty shelf company Tulip Trading Ltd located on the Seychelles. Subsequently he started to create a line of forgeries to make it appear as if Tulip Trust (a joint venture of Tulip Trading Ltd and Wright International Investments Ltd) was part of Craig’s Bitcoin related business endeavors since the inception of Bitcoin.

It wasn’t, of course.

More here: “Craig Wright’s Tulip Trust List Forgery — A Full History”

The Year 2015

This year saw Craig Wright defrauding Calvin Ayre with a fake paper wallet during a bail out process. At this point in time, the ATO requested millions to be paid back by Craig in unduly received tax returns, plus penalties, but Craig was unable to fulfil these requests.

Screenshot taken from “The Faketoshi Tale of 1Feex”.

Craig Wright created a plethora of forgeries around the 1Feex address. This fake paper wallet is one of them.

For who’s interested, the ATO released several reports in these years, mapping out the tax fraud that Craig Wright performed in this era, and destroying the numerous Potemkin Villages that he had established. Craig his Satoshi cosplay was, and still is, only one of those Potemkin Villages. Those reports are worthy of a read, let me tell you!

ATO report 1 (Reasons for decision Coin-Exch & related entities July 2013/September 2013 tax quarter — unknown release date)
ATO report 2 (starting page 35) (Reasons for decision Craig Wright R&D & related entities July 2013/September 2013 tax quarter — unknown release date)
ATO report 3 (Reasons for decision C01n 2012/2013 tax year — released March 11, 2016)
ATO report 4 (starting page 2) (Penalty and interest position paper C01n 2012/2013 tax year — released March 11, 2016)
ATO report 5 (Reasons for decision Integyrz 2013/2014 tax year — released March 21, 2016)
ATO report 6 (Reasons for Decision Zuhl 2013/2014 tax year — released April 12, 2016)

The next quote from one of the ATO reports nicely summarizes the whole Craig Wright tax situation. As Craig his Satoshi claim is mixed into his tax scammery, it is absolutely fair to say that it is build on the same fraudulent quicksand, a false claim that can also be considered a “nullity based on sham”.

Remember the Kleiman v Wright summary in “The Year 2013”? Now have a look at paragraph 95 below, how the ATO judged this Potemkin Village.

Moreover, we do not accept that the New South Wales Supreme Court court proceedings resulted in any acquisition by you of software and or IP from W&K, or any acquisition by you of software and or IP from W&K for the value asserted. The NSWSC did not consider any evidence or make any findings of fact as to the existence or value of the software you purportedly acquired from W&K as a result of the proceedings.

Indeed. A Potemkin Village.

At the end of the year, Wired and Gizmodo, who stated to have received material from someone who hacked Craig Wright — a claim that hardly anyone believes, many firmly believe Craig doxed himself — , both published articles ‘revealing’ that Craig Wright was possibly Satoshi Nakamoto. As quickly these articles came online, just as fast were they corrected with disclaimers, because of many discrepanties and fraudulent evidence found in the ‘dox package’.

This piece has been updated to clarify Wright’s claims, and the headline has been changed to make clear that WIRED no longer believes Wright is likely to be the creator of Bitcoin.

A full overview, and debunk, of all Craig Wright’s “I was hacked” claims can be found in my article “Your Honor, The Dog Ate My Homework!”.

The Year 2016

After reading the ATO reports, it will come as no surprise to the reader, I’m sure, that in January of 2016, ATO officials made perfectly clear to The Weekend Australian what they ‘firmly believed’ of Craig Wright’s false Satoshi claim.

In May, after a months long preparation including media training sessions, Craig Wright failed to impress with a ‘Satoshi is signing’ reveal for which he even created a fake SiliconAngle website, and he ultimately abandoned the effort with a fake suicide attempt and a lame public excuse.

As a result of this utter signing failure, BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones, Gavin Andresen and Jon Matonis were so far never send back the BTC that they paid to the Bitcoin address of Satoshi-owned block 9, of which Craig had claimed that he possessed the private key.

Also in 2016, the Bitcoin whitepaper was investigated to see if it could have been written by Craig Wright. The conclusion: nope.

“IBT tapped Juola & Associates, a Pittsburgh, Pa.-based company that uses a technique known as stylometry to determine the authors of anonymous texts. Juola compared Wright’s writing with texts that are attributed to Nakamoto. The company has been tracking Nakamoto’s texts for years. John Noecker, the chief scientist at Juola & Associates, said he does not believe Wright authored the bitcoin white paper, based on linguistic texts. He used an analysis tool called Envelope that condenses millions of linguistic features the company has studied for years.” — Text Analysis Confirms Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto

Another notable event in 2016 was the publication of Andrew O’Hagan’s “The Satoshi Affair”. Andrew had been following and interviewing Craig Wright and his entourage between November 2015 and May 2016, to support the (failed) Satoshi reveal. In more recent days, Craig has been lying that Andrew O’Hagan was supposed to write about the company nChain.

The Year 2017

We can be brief about the year 2017. It was basically a year where Craig Wright was licking his wounds, and he kept things about his false Satoshi claims pretty low profile. He had befriended Roger Ver in 2015, and when Bitcoin fork Bcash (BCH) was unleashed in August, Craig followed his friend Roger and started to support Bcash.

Jonathan Bier’s must read book “The Blocksize War” (chapter ‘Faketoshi’) notes about this period in time:

There was also plenty of evidence of fraud and deception committed by Mr Wright for the small blockers to point to. For instance, Mr Wright editing his blog, dated 2008, seven years later in 2015, to make it look like he was writing a cryptocurrency paper at the time, even though a 2014 snapshot of the blog does not include this cryptocurrency comment. By associating themselves with him, the large blockers damaged their cause tremendously. It turned away many of the undecided masses in the middle, convincing them to stay neutral or join the small block side. Convincing and persuading these people is what the blocksize war was all about. It was not until well after the war was over, in November 2018, when the remnants of the large blockers finally parted ways with Craig; well, most of them anyway.

The Year 2018

The start of 2018 shows us a Craig Wright as we will never hear him again in later years. From an interview with Jimmy Nguyen called “A Bitcoin Cash World” we can pen down (fast forward to 34:35) the following quotes:

So we’re collaborating with a lot of groups at the moment. We’ve just announced the Electrum Cash project which is going to sort of increase private transactions, fungibility, and much more within Bitcoin [Cash] so what that will actually allow is people to start treating it as cash. I know, a lot of people out there won’t like this in certain areas, because when we’re finished with it with the addition of Blinded Thresholds and a few other things, it will be truly fungible. There won’t be any network chain analysis. They won’t be linking things back to wallets, there won’t be any of these services like our friends over in Russia are selling at the moment. Where they get, government who bought Bitcoin, I’m sorry we’re going to totally screw the pitch for you on that one and basically ruin everything that you want to do to try and figure out the history of Bitcoin. You can basically go back individual by individual as a government the way cash works and we’re going to make it back to fungible cash. [applause] So those who are putting their money into chain analysis, I’m sorry we’re going to make your life a nightmare. […] I’ve also been in communication with the key Bitcoin Cash developer groups and they’re very important obviously because they help and contribute their time to the software implementations that are so key to the success of Bitcoin Cash and we have announced with them plans to have, you know, every six months starting in May of this year [2018] protocol upgrades because we don’t want to call them hard forks anymore they are software protocol upgrades.

Less than a year later however, Craig Wright his narrative from 2017/early 2018, that is still somewhat Satoshi-like for the casual bypasser without any Bitcoin knowledge, would make a complete U-turn and drift far away from anything that reminds of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Craig’s new narrative is now “protocol set in stone” (Satoshi said “core design set in stone”) followed later by “freezing and re-appointing coins with the Notary Tool” (Satoshi said “Bitcoin transactions can be sufficiently irreversible in an hour or two.” and “Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.”).

Starting 2018, we also see the Faketoshi bashing ramp up again in the Bitcoin and wider cryptocurrency related industry. A few examples:

May 23, we find this short but hilarious clip on YouTube. It is obviously fair to say that Craig Wright is criticized all over the world for his false Satoshi claim.