Living quietly in an affluent village, is this really the man who came up with Bitcoin?
It is one of the world’s most tantalising puzzles: who created the cryptocurrency? Now, a court in Miami has ruled it was an autistic tech genius called Craig Wright. And if that is true, he’s worth a staggering $36bn
THE leafy lane is regularly described as one of the most expensive addresses in Britain, a home counties idyll where Premier League footballers now threaten the commuter belt ascendancy of stockbrokers and other City types. The new-build mini-mansions and more established hacienda-style homes in the ‘Beverly Hills’ of Surrey are a far cry from Craig Wright’s urban, subtropical upbringing in Australia.
There, as a troubled but intellectually precocious four-year-old, he was regularly ‘whacked’ by his father, a military veteran who had fought in the Vietnam War, if he made a ‘wrong’ move in one of their games of chess.
Life has changed dramatically for the controversial, combative and, above all, mysterious Dr Wright LLM PhD.
Why mysterious? Because Dr Wright, 51, is said, not least by himself, to be the real identity of ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, the pseudonymous ‘Japanese cypherpunk’ whose genius heralded a new era in the global movement of money via digital technology.
It was Nakamoto who, in 2008, wrote a groundbreaking academic paper entitled ‘Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ which has been called ‘the most important [scientific] paper of the 21st century’.
Yet soon afterwards and without ever having made a public appearance, ‘Satoshi’ issued an online goodbye to the world and disappeared without trace.
If the Australian is indeed Satoshi – and there are many who decry him as a ‘fake’ – he must also be regarded as the father of bitcoin, the cryptocurrency or digital currency, which has rocketed in value from a few cents when it was launched 13 years ago to a record high of more than $68,000 (€60,480) last month. As such, Dr Wright is also likely to be ‘one of the 25 richest men in the world’.
THAT makes his decision – suggested by legal documents seen by the Mail – to relocate to a mere millionaires’ row in Cobham a matter of modesty rather than conspicuous consumption. The Bitcoin economy he apparently created, and in which he is said to retain a considerable stake, is now worth billions if not trillions of pounds. Until quite recently, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies were still seen as a geeky activity on the fringe of the financial markets. But now they have taken off.
A recent survey found that most financial tech specialists believe bitcoin will surpass money issued by central banks as the dominant form of finance worldwide in less than 30 years. China is so suspicious of cryptocurrencies, it has banned people from trading in them. And last month, former presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton warned that their rise could undermine the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.
In contrast, El Salvador, in Central America, has adopted bitcoin as a national currency, while Fortune magazine reports that teenagers are trading in it regularly, and many are making tens of thousands doing so.
Six years have passed since Craig Wright was ‘unmasked’ as Satoshi Nakamoto by invescoin tigative journalists in Australia, and this month his story reached another landmark when a federal jury in Miami effectively found in his favour in what has been described as the ‘bitcoin trial of the century’.
The civil case had been brought against Dr Wright, a twice-married father of three, on behalf of the estate of his late best friend Dave Kleiman, a paraplegic U.S. Army veteran and computer forensics expert he had met online.
Kleiman, who died aged 46 in 2013, was a fellow cryptographer – someone involved in ‘the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behaviour’.
Both sides came to court with the understanding that Dr Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto and had created bitcoin. What the plaintiff alleged was that Kleiman had been Dr
Wright’s business partner and bitco-creator, so his estate, represented by Kleiman’s sister Ira, was owed a share in a trove of 1.1m bitcoins worth $36bn.
Wright denied Kleiman was anything but his best friend. He had helped him edit the famous Satoshi paper, yet provided no other input.
During the hearing, Dr Wright gave evidence over four days, which shone an uncomfortable light on his unhappy past and complex personality. But he declared he had won, although observers might feel he took a pretty big hit.
The judge ruled against Kleiman having been Dr Wright’s business partner. But he ordered Dr Wright to pay $100m in compensation to the Kleiman estate after the jury found him liable for ‘conversion’ – a legal term for making use of something that is not yours.
‘I feel remarkably happy and vindicated,’ Dr Wright said afterwards. ‘I am not a fraud and I never have been.’
HE claimed he had offered Kleiman’s estate ‘twelve million many years ago, which if he had taken that then in bitcoin, when bitcoin was [worth] $200, and kept it – you can do the maths.’ The eye-watering ‘maths’ is this: each bitcoin is now worth around $51,000. Dr Wright’s implication is that by not accepting his original offer, Kleiman’s estate has lost out on about $3.08bn .
What the Florida court case has done, though, is bring what has been called ‘the greatest mystery in tech’ to a wider audience who have read about bitcoin or even invested in it, but were unaware of the claims and counter-claims over its creation.
Craig Wright was born in Brisbane and during the trial he described how, after his parents’ marriage failed, he grew up with a ‘single mother working three jobs’. As a result, he valued hard work.
His counsel told the court that Dr Wright came from ‘a very difficult home’, had ‘very few friends in his childhood’ and ‘was considered strange... even by his sister’.
‘At 13, he wore a ninja outfit to a playground and all the other kids called him a freak,’ the court heard.
Indeed, several years ago his mother spoke to the British writer Andrew O’Hagan about her son’s teenage obsession with Japanese culture.
‘He was different,’ she said. ‘He used to dress up... in samurai clothes, with odd wooden shoes and everything. Making all the noises. His sisters would complain about him embarrassing them. He used to have this group of nerdy friends in the 1980s: they’d come around in hornrimmed glasses and play Dungeons & Dragons for hours.’
The Florida court also heard that Dr Wright has recently been diagnosed with autism.
‘Dr Wright has a lifelong pattern of becoming obsessed about specific areas of interest as a coping style,’ according to one specialist. ‘He ended up alienating his peers and was mercilessly bullied, ridiculed and ostracised.’
Wright joined the Australian Air Force aged 18, where he worked on computer coding. He later studied computer science at university and has been pursuing various higher academic qualifications ever since.
He also found time to marry, twice.
His first wife,
Lynn, was a nurse almost
20 years his senior, whom he met online. He proposed to her within six weeks.
He met his current wife, Ramona, in 2010. At first, they were ‘business associates’ but their relationship deepened and they married in 2013. By then, bitcoin was entering the mainstream.
Five years earlier, on October 31, 2008, with the world in financial meltdown, an academic paper was published online under the authorship of one Satoshi Nakamoto, of whom no one had previously heard.
The paper describing bitcoin was circulated among a small group of cryptographers. It set out how a ‘decentralised, nonsovereign and exclusively digital currency could be created and distributed’.
This would be done through a process called ‘mining’ and involved computers solving ‘a series of linked mathematical puzzles’ created by an algorithm. Bitcoins were awarded to whoever solved the problems first. It sounds complicated – and it is. But you don’t need to understand the
nuts and bolts of bitcoin to appreciate the achievement in its creation, nor the impact it has had.
Dr Wright has predicted that in 50 years’ time, bitcoin ‘and blockchain technology will have replaced the internet and all traditional finance systems’. And he would ‘retire happy’ if and when five billion people were using bitcoin on a daily basis.
Before that, he has other reputational battles to fight. In April, in the High Court in London, Dr Wright began a copyright infringement lawsuit to stop a website publishing the original Satoshi Nakamoto white paper.
If it goes ahead, the case will hinge on who wrote the paper. In other words, can Dr Wright prove once and for all that he is Satoshi? That the Australian kid who pretended to be a samurai became the man who adopted a Japanese persona to launch an idea that changed the world.