This Man Did Not Invent Bitcoin

For years, Craig Steven Wright, an Australian cryptocurrency enthusiast, claimed to be

Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. Then the courts got involved.

By David Yaffe-Bellany
Reporting from High Court in London

May 21, 2024 Updated 10:32 a.m. ET

For much of its existence, the cryptocurrency company nChain was governed by a
golden rule of office politics: It was not a good idea to challenge Craig Steven Wright, the
chief science officer.

At nChain’s London offices, Dr. Wright, an Australian computer scientist, was treated as
a sort of philosopher king. He wore three-piece suits and drove a Lamborghini. A middle
manager would tape Dr. Wright’s ramblings about obscure technical matters and then
share the recordings with a staff of researchers, who were instructed to turn his musings
into patents.

In 2017, Martin Sewell, an nChain employee, circulated a skeptical memo documenting

technical errors in a series of papers that Dr. Wright had published about economics and
computer science. A manager called Mr. Sewell into his office and told him that he had to
stop.

The deference to Dr. Wright “was just this extraordinary arrangement,” Mr. Sewell
recalled. “Like he was some sort of god of everything.”

Indeed, Dr. Wright’s authority rested on a claim to a kind of divine significance — that he
was the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency.

In 2008, a person using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper
explaining the basics of Bitcoin, a clever idea that eventually became the foundation of a
multitrillion-dollar industry. Then, as abruptly as he had emerged, he vanished. Satoshi,
who’s known by his first name, controls an estimated 1.1 million Bitcoins, a $75 billion
stash that has sat untouched for more than a decade.

The mystery of Satoshi’s identity has long obsessed crypto experts, who analyze every
record of his communications with the reverence of Talmudic scholars. Various
candidates have been proposed as possible Satoshis, only for them to deny any role in
Bitcoin’s creation.

Dr. Wright, by contrast, has gone to extraordinary lengths to prove that he is Satoshi. He
has presented himself as Bitcoin’s inventor in interviews and social media posts, laying
out evidence for virtually anyone who would listen. In lawsuits tried in three countries,
he has testified that he wrote the original white paper. After a small-time crypto
personality challenged his claims in 2019, Dr. Wright sued for defamation in England. He
followed that up with an aggressive suit against software developers working to improve
Bitcoin’s code, accusing them of violating his intellectual property rights.

“A few will be bankrupted, lose their families and collapse,” he declared.

Dr. Wright had a financial interest in squelching their work: He and a gambling tycoon
had joined forces to promote an alternative digital currency, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, that
they claimed was a pure, uncorrupted version of Bitcoin, with better practical
applications.

This year, Bitcoin’s price surged to an all-time high, renewing optimism that crypto is
destined for widespread adoption. But the industry is still tarnished by a procession of
recent financial scandals that cost investors billions in savings. The mystery of Satoshi is
the last remnant of a more innocent time in its history, when crypto was a renegade,
communal system that seemed to have materialized out of thin air.

Dr. Wright’s claim to Satoshi-dom wasn’t simply an antagonistic legal strategy: It was a
threat to the purity of that founding myth. This year, several of crypto’s most powerful
companies mobilized to stop Dr. Wright from bringing cases. An influential group led by
Coinbase, the largest U.S. exchange, and Block, a company started by the Twitter
founder Jack Dorsey, took him to trial in High Court in London.

They were seeking a judicial declaration: We may never know for sure who invented
Bitcoin, but it wasn’t Craig Wright.

A Financial Lifeline
Among the mysteries about Satoshi Nakamoto that Dr. Wright has tried to explain is the
mystery of Satoshi’s name.

Before Bitcoin was invented, Dr. Wright, 53, worked as an I.T. security consultant in
Australia, but he claims that his interest in creating a new monetary system arose from
extensive academic study. At one point, he testified in court, he was enrolled in 19
universities at once, pursuing five doctorates simultaneously. (“I actually wrote three
papers last night,” he said at that trial in 2021.) The surname Nakamoto, he claimed, was
an homage to a Japanese philosopher whose writing he admired.

Much of what is known about Satoshi Nakamoto comes from hundreds of messages he
exchanged with early collaborators, including Gavin Andresen, an American software
developer who helped promote Bitcoin in the media. In emails and forum posts, Satoshi
wrote about his commitment to privacy and his frustrations with the financial
establishment, while revealing little about his background. None of his correspondents
ever met him in person.

Gavin Andresen, interviewed at the 2014 Web Summit in Dublin, was one of Satoshi’s
closest collaborators but didn’t know the Bitcoin creator’s true identity. Stephen
McCarthy/Sportsfile

Then in 2011, with no warning, Satoshi went silent, cutting off communication. “I wish
you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure,” he told Mr.
Andresen in their final email exchange.

Over the next few years, his identity became a tech-industry obsession. “You can’t help
but be pulled into this black hole — the gravity of it is so enormous,” said Andy
Greenberg, a longtime tech reporter who has written a book about cryptocurrencies.
“Satoshi’s identity is one of the greatest mysteries in the history of technology.”
Hardly anyone had heard of Dr. Wright until 2015, when Mr. Greenberg co-wrote an
article for Wired arguing that Dr. Wright was probably Satoshi. The article was based
partly on private emails and transcripts supplied by an anonymous leaker: “I did my
best to try and hide the fact that I’ve been running bitcoin since 2009,” Dr. Wright said in
one transcript. “By the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know.” (The
article included a caveat: “Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who
very badly wants us to believe he did.”)

Wired did not reveal its source, and Dr. Wright has denied he was behind the leak. At the
time, he was operating on the margins of the crypto industry. He had written some blog
posts about Bitcoin, and made it onto a conference panel in Las Vegas.

He was also in serious financial trouble. By early 2015, months before Wired published its
article, he was locked in disputes with the Australian tax office, which accused him of
backdating documents and conducting “sham transactions,” court records show.

Dr. Wright needed a lifeline. A former colleague put him in touch with Calvin Ayre, a
businessman who had made a fortune in the sports betting industry and wanted to invest
in crypto. A Canadian, Mr. Ayre was worth at least $1 billion in the early aughts,
according to Forbes. In 2012, the U.S. Justice Department charged him with operating an
illegal online gambling business. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and avoided prison
time.

Before Wired’s article came out, Dr. Wright met with Mr. Ayre in Vancouver, British
Columbia, where they discussed “all things Bitcoin,” according to an account that Mr.
Ayre gave in 2022. He and a business partner made plans to offer financing to Dr. Wright
and publicize his Satoshi claim. The eventual deal, outlined in court documents in
London, included a loan of 2.5 million Australian dollars to resolve Dr. Wright’s tax
problems. It also made Dr. Wright the chief scientist of a new company, which would
have “exclusive rights to Craig’s life story.”
 Calvin Ayre, right, who made a fortune in the sports betting industry, bankrolled Mr.
Wright’s crypto endeavors. Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images
But when the Wired article appeared that December, it drew a skeptical reaction. Dr.
Wright hadn’t given an interview, which meant some crucial questions remained
unanswered. Forbes pointed out that Dr. Wright’s résumé appeared to exaggerate his
credentials. And in any case, there was only one definitive way to prove that he had
written the white paper: The genuine Satoshi would have access to cryptographic keys
unlocking his Bitcoin stash.

Dr. Wright’s sponsors devised a plan to prove that the Satoshi claim was genuine. In
2016, they flew Mr. Andresen to London, hoping to secure the endorsement of Satoshi’s
old collaborator, who was one of the most trusted figures in the Bitcoin world. In a hotel
conference room, Dr. Wright gave a demonstration meant to show Mr. Andresen that he
controlled Satoshi’s private keys.

Mr. Andresen, still groggy after his overnight flight from Boston, was impressed. In a
blog post titled “Satoshi,” he gave his endorsement, saying Dr. Wright’s demonstration
proved he had invented Bitcoin.

“I saw the brilliant, opinionated, focused, generous — and privacy-seeking — person that
matches the Satoshi I worked with,” Mr. Andresen wrote.

Dr. Wright’s backers saw an opportunity to profit. He was the “the goose that lays the
golden egg,” one of his backers told the author Andrew O’Hagan. Soon, Dr. Wright was
supposed to make the cryptographic proof public and end the Satoshi mystery forever.
But when the day arrived for the big reveal, Dr. Wright didn’t offer any proof. Instead, he
published a jargon-heavy blog post about the mechanics of “digital signatures.”

Crypto aficionados dismissed Dr. Wright as a charlatan. “I’m starting to doubt myself
and imagining clever ways you could have tricked me,” Mr. Andresen wrote in an email
to him.

Mr. Andresen did not respond to requests for an interview. But his correspondence with
Dr. Wright left him even more confused, he testified at a deposition years later. “I don’t
recall thinking anything other than maybe Craig Wright is crazy,” he said.
Why Claim to Be Satoshi?
Hardly anyone knows as much about Craig Wright as Arthur van Pelt. A prolific blogger,
Mr. van Pelt is the dominant figure in a small but enthusiastic corner of the internet
where obsessive historians of the Satoshi saga dissect Dr. Wright’s legal campaign.

Mr. van Pelt returns repeatedly to a key psychological question: What would motivate
someone to insist that he invented Bitcoin if he hadn’t?

Over the years, Mr. van Pelt said in an interview, he has weighed various possible
answers, from fame and money to family trauma. In one lawsuit, Dr. Wright ordered up a
medical declaration from a psychologist who had diagnosed him with autism and who
described his struggles with a “volatile” and “abusive” father.

“The feeling that Craig Wright has is that he has never been enough,” Mr. van Pelt said.

Even after Dr. Wright failed to produce the evidence, he retained a band of loyal online
followers. He didn’t have access to Satoshi’s private keys, he claimed in court, because he
had smashed a hard drive containing them; he described it as an impulsive decision,
partly related to his autism.

Mr. Ayre stood by him, and in 2018, he and Dr. Wright launched Bitcoin Satoshi Vision,
which trades at about $70 per coin, a tiny fraction of Bitcoin’s price. Dr. Wright oversaw
its development from the offices of nChain, a company that Mr. Ayre funded as a vehicle
for converting his partner’s ideas about crypto into a portfolio of patents.

At nChain, Dr. Wright was a difficult boss, prone to shouting, four people who worked
with him said. He liked to flaunt his wealth, bragging that he had more money than the
entire country of Rwanda. Employees at nChain attended extravagant parties in
London: At one memorable event, arranged by Mr. Ayre, guests ate sushi off the bodies
of naked women, while performers in samurai costumes hovered nearby, two of the
people said.

Rejected by much of the crypto industry, Dr. Wright pressed his claim to Satoshi-dom in
the courts, pursuing litigation that Mr. Ayre helped finance. By 2022, his defamation
battle reached Norway, where Magnus Granath, the little-known Bitcoin enthusiast who
had accused him of fraud on social media, won a judgment against him. That year, Dr.
Wright also sued the Bitcoin coders, claiming copyright infringement.
“He seems to have enough money and backing from others that he can make good on his
threats to ruin people financially by bringing expensive litigation,” Steve Lee, a manager
at Block, a company that Mr. Dorsey co-founded after Twitter, said in a court filing last
year.

Mr. Lee was part of a coalition of prominent crypto companies called the Crypto Open
Patent Alliance, or COPA, which was founded to stop patent rules from preventing the
development of crypto technology. In 2021, Dr. Wright’s lawyers asked COPA and its
members to remove the Bitcoin white paper from their websites. COPA responded by
suing Dr. Wright in High Court in London, seeking a ruling that he did not invent Bitcoin.

Christen Ager-Hanssen, who was previously on Dr. Wright’s legal team, had a change
of heart. REX, via Shutterstock

As the litigation intensified, Christen Ager-Hanssen, a venture investor, joined nChain

and helped oversee Dr. Wright’s legal affairs. Mr. Ager-Hanssen has a flair for the
dramatic: He has acknowledged secretly recording meetings, and likes to compare his
work to John Grisham novels. Last fall, he switched sides, saying he didn’t believe Dr.
Wright’s claims.

On social media, he posted an email that appeared to show that Dr. Wright’s relationship
with his sponsor was starting to sour. “Every cent spent on your cases is me pissing
away my kids inheritance,” Mr. Ayre wrote. (In a post on X that was cited in court, Mr.
Ayre seemed to acknowledge that the email was authentic.)
In an interview, Mr. Ager-Hanssen said Dr. Wright struck him as clever but delusional,
someone who clearly enjoyed the trappings of wealth and status. Still, he said, he found it
hard to understand why Dr. Wright has spent so many years trying to prove that he
invented Bitcoin.

“This is my biggest question,” Mr. Ager-Hanssen said. “I believe he thinks he deserves to

be Satoshi.”

A Judge Decides
At first glance, the page of notes scrawled on a Quill pad looks like an artifact of
potentially historic significance. Dated August 2007, the notes summarize a meeting that
Dr. Wright held with a colleague in which he discussed a new form of digital money that
passes directly from person to person, without an intermediary to oversee the
transaction. A list of follow-up steps mentions a “paper,” set for publication in 2008.

Notes that Dr. Wright claimed proved he invented Bitcoin.

The notes were part of a cache of more than 100 “reliance documents” that Dr. Wright
filed in High Court as evidence that he invented Bitcoin — the “identity claim,” as the
judge described it. Before the trial began in February, a forensic expert hired by COPA
submitted to the court an analysis finding that the vast majority of the documents had
been doctored.
The notebook entry was one of them. A sworn statement from Hamelin Brands, the
parent company of Quill, revealed that the pad didn’t go into circulation until 2012, four
years after Bitcoin was invented. Dr. Wright took the witness stand in the first week of
the trial and insisted that the company was mistaken about the provenance of its own
pad.

“Dr. Wright,” COPA’s lawyer responded, “you are making this up as you go along.”

As the trial reached its conclusion in March, a few of Dr. Wright’s supporters, mostly
investors in Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, gathered in the courtroom to watch his final stand.
Mr. Ayre was not among them. He had written some supportive messages for Dr. Wright
on X, but he spent the morning of closing arguments in a pool, drinking beer and posting
clips from “The Godfather” on social media.

As Dr. Wright’s legal team tried to address the forgery claims, Mr. Ayre began texting a
New York Times reporter. “Drunk and happy,” he wrote in one of dozens of typo-riddled
messages. (The texts came from a number that Mr. Ayre had used in the past; it was
later disconnected.)

The trial was “old powers wanting to slow innovation,” Mr. Ayre wrote. He used a series
of vulgar expressions to describe his business rivals and said only a “moron” would
disbelieve Dr. Wright.

“Craig is Satoshi,” Mr. Ayre declared. “He is also 14 year old kid.”

A few minutes later, the judge overseeing the proceedings, James Mellor, issued a ruling
from the bench. “Dr. Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the
pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto,” he said.

Crypto fans celebrated online, proclaiming the end of a “reign of terror.” Mr. Dorsey, the
Twitter founder, posted the full text of Justice Mellor’s ruling. In a closing submission,
COPA’s lawyers called for the court papers to be forwarded to British prosecutors, who
could investigate whether Dr. Wright had committed perjury.

Once the most talkative man in the industry, Dr. Wright went silent. He did not answer
calls or texts requesting an interview, and his name no longer appears on nChain’s
website. (The company did not respond to messages seeking comment.)

The week after the ruling, corporate filings in England showed that Dr. Wright was
transferring assets worth as much as 20 million pounds to an offshore entity. COPA
argued that he might be shielding them from seizure by the court, and Justice Mellor
ordered his assets frozen. COPA has “a very powerful claim to be awarded a very
substantial sum,” the judge said.

This week, Justice Mellor elaborated on his conclusions in a 231-page ruling, finding that
Dr. Wright had forged numerous documents. “He is not nearly as clever as he thinks he
is,” Justice Mellor wrote. Dr. Wright has already dropped his defamation claim, as well as
one suit he filed against Bitcoin developers. But a message posted to his X account on
Monday said he planned to appeal the COPA ruling.

The mystery of Bitcoin’s creation seems likely to endure. One morning, in the final
stretch of COPA v. Wright, a blond man in a baseball cap shuffled into the gallery, taking
a seat among a group of reporters before striking up conversation. At first, he revealed
little about himself, other than his devotion to personal security. A back brace he had
started wearing after a motorcycle accident served as a convenient “stab vest,” he
explained — no knife could penetrate it. For supplemental protection, he had reinforced
the lining of his hat with plastic, which he planned to upgrade to Kevlar.

But why had he shown up to Dr. Wright’s trial? He leaned in to whisper a secret: He was
the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
David Yaffe-Bellany writes about the crypto industry from San Francisco. He can be reached at
davidyb@nytimes.com. More about David Yaffe-Bellany