The house of the man behind the alias Satoshi Nakamoto has been raided by the Australian police. The entrepreneur Craig Wright is, together with American computer forensics expert Dave Kleiman, likely behind the Satoshi Nakamoto alias which first published the Bitcoin sourcecode. Wright is the only one of the two people reportedly behind Satoshi who's left, Kleiman died in 2013 of 'infected bedsores'. According to Gizmodo his body was found decomposing and surrounded by empty alcohol bottles and a loaded handgun but no used shell was found.
Screenshot from Craig Whright's Blog - source: Wired
The raid on Wright comes after the website Wired published that he was behind Bitcoin which was later backed by additional proof provided by Gizmodo.
Wired found evidence such as blog posts on Bitcoin. The blog posts were published before a white paper on Bitcoin was published on a cryptography mailing list and before the digital currency became popular. On his blog he also used a PGP key that could later be linked to the Satoshi Nakamoto alias and he used the email address satoshin@vistomail.com, which is incredibly similar to satoshi@vistomail.com , the email address that published the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Also an archived, now deleted, blog post where Wright writes that 'The Beta of Bitcoin is live tomorrow. This is decentralized... We try until it works' which was posted a day after the 'official' release of Bitcoin on January 9th 2009.
Both Wired and Gizmodo also received a cache of leaked emails, transcripts and accounting forms which made them conclude that Wright is indeed behind Bitcoin. The documents come from an undisclosed hacker.
Wright also made his co-founder Klein to manage a Trust in the Seychelles of 1,100,000 Bitcoins which would be worth $446 million today. According to a contract on which the website had access, this Trust would pay all coins back to Wright as of 2020. Now Klein passed away, it's unclear what will happen with that enormous amount of Bitcoins but it isn't unlikely that Wright will regain access to them in the next 5 years.
The reason the people behind the Satoshi alias were able to gain such a large number of Bitcoins is because at that time only a little computer power was required to mine a single coin. Bitcoin works with the concept that the amount of computer power required to mine a coin raises as more coins are released. For example, where it would first take a Core i7 CPU about an hour to generate a valid Bitcoin, nowadays it might take a cluster of hundreds of these computers to generate a coin. This means that currently it takes way more resources to mine a Bitcoin than when the coin was just introduced.
So far there has only been one big stash of Bitcoins and this particular one exists nearly since the release of Bitcoin when there was only little computer power required to mine coins. Therefore it's a widely adopted theory that the stash of 1.1 million Bitcoins belong to those behind the Satoshi alias.
Wired also found evidence that Wright tried to create a Bitcoin-based bank which was backed by $23 million in Bitcoins owned by Wright. At that time an incredible amount certainly when owned by an, at that time, unknown Bitcoin user.
When Wired wrote to Wright they received mysterious replies from an anonymous email address of which the IP was controlled by Vistomail. In the mails Wright states that Wired 'already known too much' and that he 'has he has moved past many of these things'. Later no more replies came from the mysterious e-mail address.
In 2014 Wright wrote an email to an associate that he had a tax dispute with the Australian government which appears to be the reason that the police have raided his house today.
All evidence indeed points to Wright as behind Satoshi Nakamoto. However it doesn't explain why only a few days after this was revealed his house was raided. The Guardian reports that the Australian police told them that they 'can confirm it has conducted search warrants to assist the Australian Taxation Office at a residence in Gordon and a business premises in Ryde, Sydney. This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency bitcoin'.
Nevertheless, it's strange that it has happened so soon after the publication.
Also, the emails and transcripts that were given to Gizmodo and Wired can't be verified as 100% real. While it's possible Wright staged everything, it's more likely he indeed is one of the Bitcoin founders. We have to find out later how the raid fits in this story. Surely to be continued...
