Police have raided the home of a 44-year-old Australian alleged to be the creator of cryptocurrency bitcoin.
Craig Steven Wright, a tech entrepreneur living in Sydney, was labelled by WIRED US as the mysterious 'founder' of the digital currency -- that has previously only been known under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
Since Wright was named as being the potential originator behind bitcoin police have raided his home and office, although the Guardian reports the raids surround tax issues and not the bitcoin revelations specifically.
WIRED US said it first saw evidence linking Wright to bitcoin's origin in November, when a source provided documents leading to "several direct, publicly visible connections between Nakamoto and Wright".
The evidence that WIRED US claimed ties Wright to bitcoin includes blog posts from 2008 stating his intention to release a "cryptocurrency paper," a PGP key linked to Nakamoto, and a deleted blog post from Wright that said: "The Beta of Bitcoin is live tomorrow. This is decentralized... We try until it works.”
WIRED US also received a number of "emails, transcripts, and accounting forms" that link Wright to Nakamoto's identity.
While Wright did not directly name himself as Nakamoto in the materials seen by the publication, and it did not strongly say this was the case, there were strong allusions linking Wright to bitcoin. One blog post stated: "no secret remains forever" and it is also reported Wright started to write more about bitcoin on his personal website.
Trying to identify Nakamoto, who published bitcoin's code in 2009, has been a perilous business for those who have attempted to unravel the secretive persona. In March 2014 Newsweek claimed to have uncovered "the face behind bitcoin," naming 65-year-old Dorian Nakamoto as the currency's source, but Nakamoto denied the link and had plans to sue the publication. The bitcoin community also rejected the Newsweek story. Separately, in 2014, a hacker who claimed to have accessed an email address belonging to Nakamoto threatened to expose the real identity of the secretive creator.
The reports of Wright being the currency's creator were also strengthened, however, by a separate report from Gizmodo, which said it was also following similar leads to WIRED US. That site stated that Wright along with a friend Dave Kleiman, who has since died, were "likely involved in creating bitcoin".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
