Is Craig Wright Really Satoshi Nakamoto? Only Cryptographic Proof Can Answer

Lawyers for Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist best known for claiming to be the inventor of Bitcoin, said he will not provide any new cryptographic proof that he is Satoshi Nakamoto during his trial against bitcoiner Hodlonaut. The trial kicked off here on Monday. The Norwegian trial is one of two simultaneous lawsuits centered around a series of tweets from March 2019 in which Hodlonaut expressed doubt about Wright's claims to be Satoshi, and called him a "fraud" and a "scammer." Hodlonaut, known in real life as Magnus Granath, initiated the lawsuit in Norway to get a judge to rule that his tweets were protected by the constitutional right to freedom of speech and prevent Wright's defamation suit filed in the U.K. from moving forward.

According to Coindeck, the 7-day trial seeks to determine whether a series of Hodlonaut's tweets in March 2019 – in which he wrote that Wright's claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto were false, and called him a fraud and a scammer – are protected by freedom of speech in Norway.

The suit, brought by Hodlonaut, is one of two concurrent lawsuits between the two men over the tweets. Wright has also sued Hodlonaut in the United Kingdom. If Hodlonaut emerges victorious in Norway, Wright would be unable to collect damages for libel in connection to the tweets in the UK.

Craig Wright claims his investment in Bitcoin

Over the years, different people have come forward and claimed they were Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous individual or group that published the Bitcoin white paper in 2008 and launched the network to the world in 2009. Though many have claimed they were Nakamoto, no one has definitively proven such claims to the satisfaction of the Bitcoin community and thus, Nakamoto's identity remains a mystery. (Without getting too much into the weeds, there are a few simple actions that would help to prove identity — but no one has actually made those moves.)

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database. Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010.

There has been widespread speculation about Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity, with a variety of people posited as the person or persons behind the name. An Australian computer scientist Craig Steven Wright has publicly claimed to be Nakamoto, though this claim has been met with skepticism. Though Nakamoto's name is Japanese, and he stated in 2012 that he was a man living in Japan, most of the speculation has involved software and/or cryptography experts in the United States or Europe.

Development of Bitcoin

Nakamoto stated that work on the writing of the code for bitcoin began in 2007. On 18 August 2008, he or a colleague registered the domain name bitcoin.org and created a website at that address. On 31 October, Nakamoto published a white paper on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com describing a digital cryptocurrency, titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

The first known Bitcoin commercial transaction occurred on May 22, 2010, when programmer Laszlo Hanyecz traded 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas. At Bitcoin price today in mid-September 2021, those pizzas would be worth an astonishing $478 million. This event is now known as "Bitcoin Pizza Day." In July 2010, Bitcoin first started trading, with the Bitcoin price ranging from $0.0008 to $0.08 at that time.

However, while Nakamoto was the original inventor of Bitcoin, as well as the author of its very first implementation, he handed the network alert key and control of the code repository to Gavin Andresen, who later became the lead developer at the Bitcoin Foundation. Over the years a large number of people have contributed to improving the cryptocurrency's software by patching vulnerabilities and adding new features.

Bitcoin's source code repository on GitHub lists more than 750 contributors, with some of the key ones being Wladimir J. van der Laan, Marco Falke, Pieter Wuille, Gavin Andresen, Jonas Schnelli, and others.