Chapter 10 Crypto Craziness
Craig - where's my Bitcoin?
A joke currency, Dogecoin, is suddenly worth more than Ford or General Motors, born aloft by enthusiastic tweets from Elon Musk. There are wild swings in the value of Bitcoin, as China threatens to ban crypto currency mining. And NFTs, non fungible tokens supposedly giving you some illusion of ownership of digital paintings or videos or even Tweets via the magic of the blockchain, are selling for millions.
Truly, we are in an era of crypto craziness. I wrote this chapter and chose the title in the summer of 2020, not imagining that just how much crazier things would get in the world of crypto currencies by the time the book was published.
I did my first story about Bitcoin back in 2013, buying a pizza for Radio 4’s PM programme with the crypto currency. Even then, the sheer complexity of the transaction (it cost 0.5BTC, about £30 then, which would now be around £13,000) had me wondering whether this whole project really was the future of money.
But it was an encounter in 2016 which showed me just what a hall of mirrors, peopled by hucksters and hype merchants - along with a few true believers - the cryptocurrency scene was. For a while it seemed I had been handed a huge scoop, the identity of the inventor of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym adopted by the author of the 2009 paper which outlined how the crypto currency would work.
I met and interviewed a somewhat truculent and moody Australian Dr Craig Wright, who performed a demo which he said showed that he was Satoshi. Two eminent members of the Bitcoin community who witnessed the performance declared themselves satisfied with the proof.
On a Monday morning Dr Wright published a blogpost going public with is claims, while my various reports began appearing across BBC output. Then events took an unfortunate turn. Here’s an extract from the chapter:
Very quickly things began to fall apart. That very day leading lights from the Bitcoin community were gathering in New York for a conference called Consensus – and the only topic of conversation was the unmasking of Satoshi. As various cryptography wizards began to delve into Craig Wright’s ‘proof’, doubts quickly grew. Gavin Andresen, the most credible witness to the demo in London, said he still believed that the Australian was the real deal but, as he was chased around the conference by camera crews, he appeared increasingly anxious.
Within hours, evidence emerged from the crypto experts that Wright could have simply copied an earlier transaction in which Satoshi’s private key had been used: he definitely had not proved he had access to that key, they said. By now, I was in a difficult position. While we had not said Craig Wright was Satoshi, merely that he had identified himself as the father of Bitcoin, we were not looking too clever – ‘gullible’, was how a snarky piece in the Financial Times put it.
We asked for more evidence, and by the next day Craig Wright and his spin machine were promising they would go further, and provide ‘extraordinary proof’ of his claims. An email arrived: ‘In the coming days Dr Wright will provide further evidence as to him being Satoshi and the creator of Bitcoin by moving a coin from an early block.’
Well, that sounded good – those early blocks of Bitcoin had lain dormant ever since they had been created. Whoever owned the private key to the blocks was now sitting on an enormous fortune, and spending a tiny bit of it would be convincing proof of his identity.
After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing a scheme was arranged whereby I, Jon Matonis and Gavin Andresen – who by now appeared to be regretting ever having got involved – would send a tiny sum to the Bitcoin address used in the first ever transaction. Then Craig Wright would send it back, in what would be the first outgoing transactions from the block since its creation in January 2009.
I sent my contribution – 0.017 BTC, or about £5 at that time – and then we positioned a camera in front of the web page showing the ledger address where my sum was recorded, along with those from Matonis and Andresen, with a green arrow indicating it was money coming in. What we were waiting for was a red arrow showing Bitcoin coming out.
We waited. And waited. Hours passed, and nothing happened. Then I got a call from the PR agency to say the operation was ‘on hold’, with no further explanation as to what was happening. The following day Craig Wright published another blogpost on his website, from which all previous posts had been removed. This time, the message was brief and stark:
I’m Sorry
I believed that I could do this. I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me. But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot.
When the rumors began, my qualifications and character were attacked. When those allegations were proven false, new allegations have already begun. I know now that I am not strong enough for this.
I know that this weakness will cause great damage to those that have supported me, and particularly to Jon Matonis and Gavin Andresen. I can only hope that their honour and credibility is not irreparably tainted by my actions. They were not deceived, but I know that the world will never believe that now. I can only say I’m sorry. And goodbye.
And that was that - we heard no more from Craig Wright and I wrote off my 0.017 BTC.
I continued to cover the crypto scene but with a jaundiced eye. The next big thing was the craze for ICOs, Initial Coin Offerings, where businesses issued new crypto currencies to fund projects based on the blockchain, the magical technology underpinning Bitcoin.
For a while outlandish ideas - dating on the blockchain anyone? - raised outlandish sums of money, then the whole thing went pop. Don’t be surprised if the NFT craze follows a similar trajectory.
And Craig Wright is back, endorsed by a casino billionaire , and threatening lawsuits against anyone who suggests that he might not be Satoshi Nakamoto. Of course, he could settle things once and for all by sending me back my 0.017 Bitcoin. Which by the way was worth nearly £500 last time I looked…..
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I appreciate that you've come forward with corrections on your earlier reporting in 2016, but I still feel this post falls very short of calling a spade a spade. It is inadequate to characterize Craig Wright as having failed to prove he's Satoshi; indeed, he's very much proven he is, without a doubt, a completely fraudulent con man.
This is a man who has been called a liar by 7 different judges on 3 continents, been proven to have submitted numerous forgeries in court, massively plagiarized every academic article he has published (including copy/pasting graphs from ornithologists in the dodgy PhD he was awarded in 2017 to justify the "Dr." title he had been flaunting for ten years before that), and every apparent link he's claimed to the early bitcoin scene has been shown to be fabricated.