There are some major flaws in the 'outing' of Bitcoin's mysterious founder

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The cryptocurrency Bitcoin was created in 2009 by "Satoshi Nakamoto," a pseudonym which may actually be Dr. Craig S. Wright, a 44-year-old tech entrepreneur from Australia.

Or maybe not.

Wired Magazine and Gizmodo published lengthy articles on Tuesday claiming that Wright might be the man behind Bitcoin, based on leaked documents consisting of emails, blog posts, transcripts, and accounting forms.

While both publications hedged their bets on whether they were 100% sure — Wired for instance wrote that "Wright either invented Bitcoin, or he's a brilliant hoaxer" — skeptics are starting to poke holes in the story that may push it into the latter category.

Any investigation into the real identity of Bitcoin's founder needs to bring with it a heavy dose of skepticism, especially after so many people have been wrongly "outed" as Nakamoto. In one of the more famous cases, Newsweek claimed in March 2014 that a California engineer named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto was behind Bitcoin, which he "unconditionally" denied.

But why does anyone even care who Satoshi Nakamoto is? It's not just for the satisfaction of simple curiosity. This mystery man is sitting on a stash of more than 1 million in the digital currency, which, at nearly half a billion US dollars, is roughly 7% of the global market. At any moment this amount could be sold off, sending the value of the currency into a tailspin.

It's been a source of concern among Bitcoin investors for quite a while.

So here's where we are: Last month, an anonymous tipster (possibly the same person) provided documents to both publications, which Wired described as "leaked" while Gizmodo said were "hacked." The tipster also sent an email to Nathaniel Popper of The New York Times (also author of a book on Bitcoin), who tweeted that he "didn't find it convincing at the time."

Even Hunter Walker of Yahoo News got an emailed pitch. He told Tech Insider it contained "no smoking gun," so he passed. But clearly, this person really wanted to get some press.

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The emailer was anonymous, which makes it very hard to discern their intentions. Fusion's Kashmir Hill even thinks the anonymous "leaker" was actually Craig Wright himself, a theory I happen to share.

There are a bunch of emails in the document dump in which Wright — purportedly emailing from Nakamoto's known email address of satoshi@vistomail.com — claims he is indeed the creator of Bitcoin. While this sounds like a big deal, emails can easily be faked with online tools like this one. It's a point that Andy Cush, one writer on the Gizmodo story even conceded on Twitter, telling TI that was "why we spent a month reporting after getting the dump."

A similar line of skepticism can be aired over purported blog posts from Wright. In one post supposedly written the day before Bitcoin's official launch, he wrote, "The Beta of Bitcoin is live tomorrow." As Wired notes, the post was later edited with cryptic text and then deleted entirely.

What is not mentioned, however, is that unlike a newspaper with a printed dateline, an author on Blogspot (where his blog was hosted) can easily change the date on a post. It looks like that's what Wright did, as Michael Goldstein pointed out on Twitter.

Just to be sure, I created a brand new blog and wrote a post to test it, setting the date of a post written today to Jan. 9, 2009.

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Then there's a transcript of Wright discussing Bitcoin with the Australian Tax Office, which the ATO would not verify. But let's just say the transcript is real, for a moment. In it, Wright says, "I did my best to try and hide the fact that I've been running bitcoin since 2009 but I think it's getting ... by the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know."

While Gizmodo wrote of this as "an oddly casual admission of his identity as Satoshi," it's not just an odd admission, it's incredibly odd. No one "runs" Bitcoin. It's a completely decentralized currency that nobody owns or controls, a fact made abundantly clear on the Bitcoin.org website.

Knowing this, it seems Wright is talking about "running Bitcoin" in the sense of running Bitcoin mining operations, as one redditor pointed out. He's sitting there with tax authorities, trying to keep private that he got in very early, mined a ton of bitcoins that are potentially worth a lot of money, because if the government finds out about it, they'll try to tax it.

His concerns over avoiding taxes seems to have been partly bolstered by a raid on his home and offices Wednesday morning, which was over a $1.7 million tax penalty from the ATO, according to BI Australia (Australian authorities claim this has nothing to do with the recent stories).

Perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence in either article comes from supposed encryption keys used by Satoshi Nakamoto that were created in 2008. While just a single "original key" hosted at Bitcoin.org has been known to be linked to Nakamoto up to this point, the new stories offer evidence of two additional keys that supposedly link Nakamoto with Wright, one of which was found retroactively added to a 2008 post on Wright's blog.

Beside the fact that both the PGP keys analyzed by Wired and Gizmodo used much stronger encryption than many used at the time, much like blog posts, the date that shows when they were created can be easily forged, as Motherboard made clear by having a staff writer make a brand new key that appears as if it was created in 2008.

"The keys are important because they’re not just plain suspicious, there’s evidence of active, intentional deception with respect to the keys," Sarah Jeong writes, in a great analysis demonstrating just how easy it is to fake a PGP key with a different creation date, or even for an email account you don't control.

So what does this all mean?

Is Craig Wright a big hoaxster, just an early adopter with plenty of interesting parallels to the real Nakamoto, or the actual creator of Bitcoin? As the authors of the Wired story note, it has "the strongest evidence yet" that he is.

But with many of caveats and questions, and plenty of skepticism, we can only say at this point no one really knows for sure. With nearly a dozen people now having been at one time thought to be Nakamoto, it seems the only way we'll ever know is when — and if — the mysterious Bitcoin master resurrects the one true encryption key he's truly known to be associated with.

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