He claims to have invented Bitcoin. Should we believe him?

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bitcoin

Ever few months, it seems another news organization claims to have figured out the real identity of the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto.

Nakamoto is the name of the anonymous creator of the crypto-currency Bitcoin. Bitcoin was conceived in 2008 when a white paper was published under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. The paper laid the foundation for what would become Bitcoin a crypto-currency.

“Satoshi communicated or collaborated with dozens of individuals in developing the Bitcoin software and Bitcoin network. We have a sense of Satoshi from his writings, but we’ve never heard him speak,” says Jerry Brito, the executive director of Coin Center, a non-profit advocacy organization focused on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

In fact, says Brito, it's unknown whether Satoshi Nakamoto refers to a "he" or "she" or even "they."

“Potentially Satoshi is a pseudonym for a group of people,” explains Brito.

Not so if 45-year-old Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is telling the truth. On Monday, Wright came out to the BBC, The Economist andGQ magazine, claiming that he is the mysterious creator of the virtual currency.

Brito and several other cyrpto-currency experts are not convinced. This isn't the first time that Wright has been outed as Nakamoto, Brito said.

“Craig Wright was outted as Satoshi by [news organizations] Wired and Gizmodo a few months back,” says Brito.

But the evidence these news organizations used to connect Wright to Nakamoto turned out to be bogus and some claim that Wright might even have had a hand in planting the evidence cited by the news organizations, according to Brito.

Brito says, “When you look at Craig Wright a little more, you learn, for example, that he’s called ‘Doctor Craig Wright’ but there’s no evidence that he has any doctorates. He claims to be working on a supercomputer project with Silicon Graphics International [SGI] and SGI then said, ‘We’ve never heard of this guy.’ So he sort of became a person who was discredited as Satoshi.”

However, it’s not hard to imagine why somebody would want to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

“You’d be almost a billionaire,” says Brito.

According the the BBC, Nakamoto is believed to possess around a million Bitcoins or the equivalent of $450 million. However, this currency allegedly held by the unknown Nakamoto has never been used or claimed since the creation of Bitcoin.

Monday may not have been the best day to cash in though, as the volatile currency dipped slightly. 

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