Craig Steven Wright has long claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto . Unfortunately for him, he was never able to prove it. Over the years, he mostly proved he didn’t understand how Bitcoin works , and most of his so-called evidence was fabricated.
His ego of galactic proportions also pushed him to trigger a contentious fork of Bitcoin Cash, the result of which was the appearance of his creation, Bitcoin SV , and Bitcoin Cash ABC , notably supported by Roger Ver , and today now simply referred to as Bitcoin Cash. So you guessed it, Craig Wright has lost the Bitcoin Cash War.
But that doesn’t mean he’s given up metaphorically dancing tecktonik on the crypto scene, for example by constantly reiterating that he’s Satoshi, and that he’s going to file a complaint against anyone who claims the opposite. So let’s take a tour of the life of the craziest hatter in the land of crypto; or in any case, of his life as he describes it . And hang in there, because this won’t be an article you’ll read in 5 minutes.
Youth, education and jobs
As with many prominent figures in the crypto world, not much is known about Craig Wright’s past other than his birth in October 1970 in Brisbane, Australia. But unlike Nick Szabo who was obsessed with privacy, Craig Wright mostly owes it to the lack of rarity of his first and last name.
We must trust the information he gives, or has given, about him. And there are a lot of them, so it all mixes up a bit. It will take effort to keep up.
Most of the information is on his LinkedIn profile, much of which has now disappeared. Luckily, we have access to the older version through archive sites.
It was therefore stated that he completed his secondary education in 1987 at Padua College, Australia. It is a priori that of Brisbane, since he then studied computer systems engineering for 4 years at the University of Queensland which is also in Brisbane.
In the paragraph about his studies at the University of Queensland, he indicates that they remained incomplete because he “changed to Comp Sci [computer science] in the 4th year”. But strangely, the following paragraph indicates ” Nuclear Physics ” between 1993 and 1995. It is difficult to say exactly what he did with regard to computing. As for nuclear physics, it will be assumed that he studied it at the University of Queensland as well.
After nuclear physics, Wright says he studied fuel science and organic chemistry until 1997. Perhaps he decided that as a result of his employment in the industry. Indeed, in 1996, he declared on the mailing list of cypherpunks that he “had worked” in a gas station.
Then, between 1998 and 2003, he indicates having obtained the title of doctor of theology , in a university which is not mentioned. He does not fail to boast of his knowledge of Greco-Roman mythology.
From 2003 to 2004, he obtained a master’s degree in computer science on networks and system administration at Charles Sturt University. And he will continue in this university, since he says he studied there between 2004 and 2006 to obtain a master’s degree in management and finance .
In 2007, it was certificates awarded by an American computer security institute that he obviously obtained, not without boasting about it to the Australian press , even though the institute in question had previously had some problems in the matter. .. computer security. Funny.
And just after, we see, still on this LinkedIn profile, that between 2005 and 2008 he studied at Newcastle University for a Masters in Statistics . University which is more than 600 kilometers from Charles Sturt University.
But wait, that’s not all!
Returning to Charles Sturt University, he also studied between 2005 and 2008, obtaining a master’s degree in computer security systems .
And at the same time, he also says that he studied law at Northumbria University between 2006 and 2008!
And let’s not forget, still at Charles Sturt University, psychology studies between 2007 and 2010.
According to this LinkedIn profile, Craig Wright had therefore carried out simultaneously :
- In 2005, studies for three different masters ,
- In 2006, studies for four different masters ,
- In 2007, studies for four different masters , in addition to having obtained diplomas in computer security supposedly extremely difficult to access,
- In 2008, studies for four different masters .
You are probably already thinking that Craig Wright is an undeniable genius and a superman capable of working 48 hours a day. You wouldn’t be wrong if you left it at that, but his LinkedIn profile also mentions information about his jobs, which we can combine with his education to paint a more accurate picture.
Indeed, between 1991 and 1994, Craig Wright says he worked in the restaurant industry, and was trained to practice French cuisine among other things. Strangely, this is one of the only relatively detailed paragraphs, the others mostly containing only brief descriptions of the company concerned.
He then says that he had various and varied jobs in the computer field between 1992 and 1995, as well as a job as a network manager between 1992 and 1996, and a job as a customer account manager between 1996 and 1997.
Craig Wright therefore managed, for example, in 1992, to manage two different jobs simultaneously, one in the kitchen and the other in IT, in addition to his computer studies.
Finally, a little further on, he says he was Associate Director of the risk department for a company of accountants and financial advisers, between 2004 and 2009… That is to say during the time when he was also studying four different subjects in parallel.
In other words, Craig Wright has nothing to envy to Barry Allen and Doc Brown, according to the information on his old LinkedIn page.
Did he stop there? Of course not.
In a 2011 article , he claims to have designed the architecture of the first online casino. First, we can note that the casino mentioned, Lasseter’s Online, is not the first online casino since it appeared in 1999 while its competitors began to appear from 1996 . Then, well, we must not forget that in 1998 Craig Wright said that he worked for the Australian Stock Exchange, and that in 1998 and 1999 he was studying theology.
In a 2016 book called “The Satoshi Affair” , our favorite Aussie told the reporter a story worthy of appearing in an episode of Julie Lescaut. Indeed, at the time, he was wanted by the tax authorities , because two newspapers had published articles saying that he might be Satoshi Nakamoto.
He therefore said, in this account, that the police came to look for him at his home. He allegedly escaped them by hiding in a toilet in the high-rise building where he lived. By the way, he did not forget to catch the one of his computers that was “not yet completely encrypted”.
All this, before finally leaving by plane without being arrested at the airport … Indeed, while he was going to be interrogated, another passenger would have made too much noise. Airport officials then allegedly told Wright to leave without going through the interrogation box, to deal with the other passenger.
The police knew he was going to take a flight and to where, but they remained mysteriously helpless against Wright.
It also seemed important to him to clarify to the reporter that during the flight he had watched Matrix. In 2016 . And he even said he found the story “strangely reassuring”, implying that he had watched it for the first time then.
This pointless detail, like many others in this article, might lead some to believe that Craig suffers from a very specific mental illness, but it would be libel to state it loud and clear.
Let’s go back to this article from 2016 instead. In the paragraphs following the story of Craig Wright’s leak, it says that Craig Wright had worked for Centrebet around 2007 (a casino, for those who don’t follow), still in addition to his four concurrent masters at the time, among other things.
Then, he tells some details about his family. In particular, he specifies that his father had worked for the NSA , while his mother believed that the father worked for NASA . Son of a spy and/or an astronaut at the same time, he found himself “more or less kidnapped” by his father after his parents’ divorce.
But his father was not only a spy and/or an astronaut: he was also a soldier , and had been a scout for the 8th Battalion of the Australian Army in Vietnam, according to what is indicated. Craig Wright also states that his father had “lost all his friends”. Interestingly, the wikipedia page of the said battalion indicates that it consisted of 370 men and that at the end of the war there were 18 casualties and 108 wounded. Bad luck for Father Wright, all of whose friends were part of the 5% casualties of this battalion in this war.
Luckily for Craig, his dad wasn’t the only man capable of teaching him about life, as he later went visibly mad and started playing chess with a baby.
His maternal grandfather, Ronald Lyman, was also a top climber, apparently Australia’s first-ever radio specialist, military officer, and also a spy for the Australian Secret Service.
In the next paragraph, Wright’s mother said that Wright was, in his youth, a pure weeaboo , constantly dressed as a samurai with wooden shoes, kimonos and carnival swords, including on the street.
Right after, Wright states that he learned Karate , then Judo , and finally Ninjutsu , all thanks to an illustrious unknown karate teacher, who is certainly very small, bald, bearded and a little perverted. During this time, Craig says he used to fracture his knuckles to get stronger. Strangely, this method only seems to work on him, proof of his extraordinary genetic code.
Then, Craig Wright declares having joined the Air Force at the age of 18. And he obviously didn’t go through the “training” box, since he says he was “locked up in a bunker” to work on ” smart bombs “. Bad luck, after some time, skin cancer appeared on his back. He managed to beat cancer, and after that he went to the University of Queensland.
If we go back to see his date of birth, located in October 1970, a small calculation makes it possible to determine that he would have entered the Air Force in 1988, the year in which he indicated that he started university … Both a computer science student and an Air Force miracle man in charge of designing revolutionary smart bombs, Craig Wright was clearly starting his adult life with a bang.
A few thousand words later, Craig Wright looks back on his childhood, and specifies that in addition to Karate, Judo and Ninjutsu, he also mastered ten other martial arts such as Wing Chun and Muay Thai. And he did say “mastered”, not simply “practiced”. According to him, he is therefore certainly one of the greatest masters of martial arts in the world, and could quite see his name engraved in the Guinness Book as such.
But his own mother seems somewhat doubtful of her son’s words. She said in the aforementioned 2016 article that her son always had a habit of adding things to the truth to make it more impressive. A woman of little faith if ever there was one. Who would want to doubt the words of a great man like Craig Wright?
Wright’s mother had told me about her son’s long-standing habit of adding bits on to the truth, just to make it bigger. ‘When he was a teenager,’ she said, ‘he went into the back of a car on his bike. It threw him through the window of a parked car. That’s where his scar comes from. His sister accompanied him to the hospital and he’s telling the doctor that he’s had his nose broken twenty or so times, and the doctor is saying “You couldn’t possibly have had it broken.” And Craig says: “I sew myself up when I get injured.”’ What his mother said connected with something I’d noticed. In what he said, he often went further than he needed to; further than he ought to have done. He appeared to start with the truth, and then, slowly, he would inflate his part until the whole story suddenly looked weak.
Excerpt from “The Satoshi Affair”
A few years after this article, in a post on Medium.com dated 2019, he reaffirms having worked for Lasseter’s, and indicates that he has also worked for “several companies like Centrebet”. This, in parallel with his computer studies and his other jobs, again.
Finally, last interesting element in this post: he claims to have worked for a long time in forensic computing , before the appearance of Bitcoin. No date specified, but we will assume that it was more or less during the 2000s, around the time when he was already studying 4 degrees in parallel. And incidentally, when Bitcoin was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto.
In a later post on Medium.com , he ends up stating that he worked in Colombia and Venezuela with a ” Jawbreaker ” team, or in other words, the CIA . In the footsteps of his father and grandfather, Craig Wright is also a spy who has nothing to envy to OSS 117. As to whether it is the original or the Dujardin version, c it’s up to you to decide.
He also states that he was ” a pastor for a while”.
Finally, he ends up adding that he has “spent more than 25 years working in places that many would refuse to believe exist in a modern world”. We can therefore add, to all the previous jobs and studies that he said he had done, a job in an organization that is not described at all, but which must most certainly be scary, like birds (because they have no arms). Craig Wright’s life becomes even more incredible .
If you keep looking it should be possible to find more jobs, degrees and other activities that Craig Wright says he had until 2020, but I’m afraid we don’t have enough pixels to make an exhaustive list. So let’s move on to the next paragraph.
The Post-Bitcoin Years
It’s hard to say when exactly Craig Wright discovered bitcoin. Having only made its presence known from around 2013-2014, it could be that it was active long before that. Indeed, Craig Wright had been part of the cypherpunk network for a long time, as evidenced by this discussion he had with Julian Assange in 1996 .
It is therefore possible that Craig Wright was one of the first users of Bitcoin, but there is no proof of this for the moment. The oldest information we have about him vis-à-vis cryptocurrency is the Ferrier affair recounted in this article , during which Wright filed a complaint against a notorious Australian scammer.
Wright, he said, had promised Ferrier to pay him almost a hundred million dollars in bitcoin in exchange for gold and banking software. Still according to him, the market fell into the water. But, strangely, Craig Wright dropped the charges soon after. Guess it’s just pocket money for him.
Even stranger, it is also stated in the article above that Craig Wright was in debt to the tune of $425,000 and was on the verge of total bankruptcy between 2006 and 2013. Strange, for someone who claims to have enough bitcoins to get $85 million by selling them.
Some time later, in 2014, Craig Wright said he wanted to start a Bitcoin-based bank, a completely novel idea at the time. Bad luck for him, the project fell through and the Australian tax authorities told him to look elsewhere if they were there.
The company he owns that was to be used to launch this banking project, Hotwire PE, was simultaneously implicated in a tax fraud case, as reported by Business Insider .
Other Wright-owned companies appeared to fund themselves through the Australian equivalent of the research tax credit (one of them up to $54 million), as this article indicates. But Hotwire PE didn’t seem to work that way, and apparently asked the Australian government to give it a few million dollars of alleged overpayment for another reason.
The case fell into the hands of the ATO, the Australian tax authority, and it was this event that triggered Craig Wright’s incredible escapade that we described in the first part of this article. Claiming to be the creator of Bitcoin, Craig Wright was wanted everywhere.
The years following this debacle were quite eventful for Craig Wright: first, in 2015, Wired and Gizmodo declared that Craig Wright might indeed be the founder of Bitcoin.
Then in 2016, the BBC and The Economist both published articles that claimed that Craig Wright personally signed BTC transactions related to Bitcoins mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. Bad luck for Craig, several researchers like Dan Kaminsky have proven it to be a fake .
In April 2019, he claimed to Finder newspaper that Bitcoin was created by Dave Kleiman, Hal Finney and himself. As with so many of Craig Wright’s unverifiable “arguments”, this one involves dead people . It’s still practical, that the dead don’t speak.
Also in April 2019, he will register a US patent in his name regarding the Bitcoin 0.1 code. According to his spokesperson, this meant that a US government organization recognized him as the creator of Bitcoin. But the US Copyright Office reacted immediately by indicating that they had no control over the link between the subject matter of the patent and the person filing the patent.
Again in April 2019, Craig Wright put a bounty on the head of a Twitter user who dared to publicly claim that Craig was a scammer . It’s not the first time he’s done it, but he’s also filed a complaint against this person, without success so far . And it’s not the first time he’s done it, since he has already sued Vitalik Buterin , Roger Ver and Peter McComack, for example.
You might think he already has a full life with it all, but we haven’t talked about the most interesting stuff yet. For example, did you read the entire 2016 article entitled “The Satoshi Affair”?
The hen with the pyrite eggs
In the aforementioned article, it is stated that in June 2015, Wright made a deal with a company called nTrust , through a certain Stefan Matthews he met while working for a casino in 2007.
And, according to that article, “Wright’s companies were so indebted that the market seemed like a bailout to him, so he went along with it all, without, it seemed, really considering what he should do. within months, according to later evidence from Matthews and MacGregor, the deal would have cost MacGregor’s company $15 million.”
nChain website
The plan for this market was simple: use the image of Craig Wright and his supposed knowledge to file patent after patent , before reselling the intellectual property of the whole to big companies like Google and Uber for billions of dollars . Or maybe it’s really for patent trolling purposes , but we can’t be sure.
In a way, Wright was seen as the goose that laid the golden eggs by this MacGregor. For example, between January and April 2016, Wright was responsible for drafting 32 different patents. In this environment, he had rather bad relations with his subordinates, and some even considered that he was completely incompetent at times despite some of his scholarly words. Constantly off the mark and very disjointed, discussions with him do not seem easy.
But all of this must have seemed bland and boring to someone used to taking four college courses at once while juggling two jobs. Craig Wright therefore quickly decided to embark on the creation of a new version of Bitcoin.
The Creation of BCH and the Bitcoin Cash vs. Bitcoin SV War
During the month of August 2017, Craig Wright was among the supporters of the Bitcoin Cash fork . Later, differences of opinion began to appear between members of the BCH community, and in particular because of Craig Wright.
A new fork then took place, between Bitcoin Cash ABC on the one hand, and Bitcoin Cash Satoshi’s Vision , Craig’s version, on the other. He immediately promised to shut down competitor Bitcoin Cash ABC, which he said was not in line with Satoshi Nakamoto’s wishes.
Bitcoin SV Logo
To carry out his fight, Wright decided to attempt to carry out a 51% attack on the Bitcoin Cash ABC network in order to delegitimize this crypto-asset, and to promote the idea that BSV is the only one real bitcoin.
During this war between the supporters of these two digital assets, a spectacular price drop took place. The total capitalization of crypto-assets then fell from 220 billion to 100 billion . Deeming Craig Wright’s attitude particularly damaging to the industry as a whole, exchanges such as Binance decided to delist BSV from their platform.
After this war, Bitcoin Cash ABC inherited the name Bitcoin Cash, as it was deemed more legitimate in the eyes of the community.
Craig Wright’s legal troubles
Despite Craig Wright’s ability to multiply the lawsuits like Jesus multiplied the loaves, Wright has so far never succeeded in convicting anyone for defamation. On the other hand, he himself found himself in the defendant’s box several times since the beginning of the millennium.
Indeed, his first court conviction dates from 2004. He was then sentenced to 28 days in prison for having approached clients of his former company, from which he had resigned a year earlier after signing a non-compliance clause. -competetion.
His second trial is currently underway, as of the publication date of this article, and it is obviously the famous Kleiman trial. Again, it would take hours to say all there is to say, so we’ll stick with a succinct summary of the case.
The case began in February 2018, when David Kleiman’s heirs filed a lawsuit against Wright over bitcoins he allegedly placed in an overseas trust beyond the reach of Kleiman and his heirs.
David Kleiman
Indeed, Wright had previously stated that he had mined a colossal amount of Bitcoins with Dave Kleiman . As these two people were supposedly associated and that Craig Wright would have obviously tried to slip away with the money, the heirs of the latter sued him, and ask for half of the assets in BTC that claims to obtain Craig Wright. At the time the lawsuit was filed, that was worth just over $5 billion .
In this story, Craig was never able to prove that he really had mined all those bitcoins, and he used a whole host of strategies to slow down the trial: providing thousands of loose documents as exhibits, claim that a certain ” bonded courier ” was to arrive with the keys to an encrypted archive in which the keys were located…
The latest news in this case is that Craig Wright had provided the court with a list of very old bitcoin addresses which he claimed were the ones he had mined bitcoins on with Dave Kleiman. Since it’s fairly rare for addresses from 2009 to move bitcoins overnight, the strategy was clever. But, bad luck for him, a message was published and signed by 145 different addresses , accusing him of being a liar and indicating that they did not belong to him.
You can read this message here, and check its validity with the following websites: Bitcoin.com , Bitcoin Tools , or ReinProject . All you have to do is copy the message in its entirety, and without a single extra space , into the Message box ; then copy the shortest sequence of numbers/letters into the Address box, and copy the longest sequence of numbers/letters into the Signature box.
Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud. He doesn’t have the keys used to sign this message.
Of course, Craig Wright tried to defend himself by asserting in a totally absurd way that you had to have an identity to produce a digital signature, thereby proving his utter ignorance of one of the pillars of the functioning of Bitcoin.
His only defense against the Bitcoin code is to stammer like a 5-year-old child before sulking and pretending that what he saw does not exist.
Weird, for someone who supposedly created Bitcoin.
The Gradual Collapse of Mr. Wright’s Fictions
Unfortunately for Craig Wright, all stories come to an end. In her case, of course, some doubted her words from day one, but it took a few years to see the clues accumulate…
For example, it was only in December 2015 that Mashable.com published this article , the passage of which interests us is the following (translated into French):
On Friday afternoon, Charles Sturt University released a statement via email to Mashable, confirming that Wright had completed three qualifications from the university: Master’s in Networking and System Administration, Master’s in Management (Computer Technology), and Master’s in Computer Security Systems.
He had not been awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) by the university, nor a Masters in Systems Development or a degree in Psychology as he claimed on his LinkedIn page and in his CV.
It took a few months with Craig on the front page of crypto media for anyone to think about taking a look at his past. Fortunately, from there, a few collections of evidence have emerged, such as the StopCraigWright site, now renamed Billfodl , or simply, the Bitcoin Wiki .
Others have conducted extensive investigations, and proven for example that Craig Wright had resorted to plagiarism to write some of his texts, and especially his doctoral thesis … This Twitter thread is also interesting on the subject of plagiarism by Craig Wright.
Since he arrived on the front of the stage, the evidence is piling up, and today his credibility is almost zero. But there are still, somewhere in the country of Bitcoin, diehard fanatics who refuse to see the truth in the face.
Conclusion
Craig Wright has built up, over the years, a fascinating and adventurous imaginary past, in which he has lived a dozen different lives. Passing from one myth to another regularly, this habit of inventing legends about himself will have slowly pushed him into an inextricable trap whose only way out is to admit that he invented everything.
But Craig Wright being who he is, we may never know what he actually did in his lifetime. In any case, what we can be fairly sure of is that he is not Satoshi .
