'I Am Satoshi Nakamoto!' - The Man Suing His Way Into Being The True Bitcoin Creator

The identity of Bitcoin's founder is one of crypto's best-kept secrets. We still have no clue who this person or group truly is, even after over 13 years since the coin's inception. People have speculated with a list of 'usual suspects' like Hal Finney, Dorian Nakamoto, and Nick Szabo.

And then there is Craig Wright, a man on a legal mission to prove they are Satoshi. His name is infamous in the Bitcoin community, and it's no wonder why!

How it all started

Wright (born in October 1970) is an Australian businessman and computer scientist. Having worked for various IT-related companies, Wright would have known about Bitcoin in its early days.

Yet, he first gained significant media attention in December 2015 when Wired and Gizmodo published findings suggesting he was the Bitcoin inventor. These included various leaked emails and since-deleted blogs.

Others like Gavin Anderson and Jon Matonis, who have been closely linked with Bitcoin, supported the claims. Yet, soon after, there were questions about whether the data was real and the people who had a bone to pick in leaking it.

This article here from CoinGeek offers an interesting take on how Wright never proclaimed to be Nakamoto. Yet, why did he get involved in many high-profile legal cases related to defamation about being the Bitcoin inventor?

Even before this, Wright was sued for BTC worth about $ billion over intellectual property rights in the US by Dave Kleiman's estate. Dave Kleiman is another big part of this puzzle. Kleiman was an American computer forensics expert who passed on in April 2013.

When Wired and Gizmodo did their exposés in 2015, Kleiman's name was mentioned alongside Wright's as Satoshi. In simple terms, reports alleged that the American was involved in inventing Bitcoin.

The Florida-based cour handling the matter only settled it in late 2021, where they found Wright liable for conversion. Yet, the Kleiman estate only received $100 million, a far cry from the requested $25 billion.

But the madness hasn't ended. From April 2019, Wright went on a suing spree against people that called him a liar and a fraud and pretty much anything else that went against his 'IP rights' as the so-called Bitcoin inventor.

• April 2019: sued YouTuber Roger Ver, who declared him a 'fraud,' a suit Ver won. In the same month, he sued Peter McCormack for the same reason, a case which he also lost.
• June 2019: sued blogger Hodlonaut for calling him a 'scammer' and 'fraud,' a case he won for $1.1 million.
• April 2020: launched (but dropped) a libel lawsuit against Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin who was another one that labelled him a trickster.
• April 2021: sued Cobra, the pseudonymous creator of the site Bitcoin.org, for copyright infringement hosting the Bitcoin whitepaper (he won the case by default due to Cobra not showing up)
• May 2022: sued Kraken and Coinbase for £500 billion for 'undermining' his IP rights by offering Bitcoin as BTC (instead of BSV, his forked version, which he has repeatedly claimed to be the true BTC)
• In February 2023, Tulip Trading, one of Wright's companies, sued many Bitcoin developers, claiming they stole a billion-dollar worth of BTC in a hack.

Wright's latest 'escapade' is to claim Bitcoin's file format via copyright, another bold move.

The obsession of proving that you're someone you're not

In December 2022, Wright tweeted about losing interest in convincing the masses about being Bitcoin's original designer. But I find this funny considering the most recent law case.

In my research, I couldn't find why Wright has been on this non-stop assignment when there is no cryptographic proof they are Nakamoto. The first assumption would be, of course, for financial gain.

But suing people left, right, and centre comes with tons of fees with no guarantee of a favourable judgement. If not that, then what? I expected to find something related to a weird ego disorder as reasoning for Wright's persistence, but zilch.

This goes beyond impersonating, imitating, posing, or any other term for someone trying their utmost best to pretend.

Well, then, who is Satoshi?

We signed up for this when we started using crypto: anonymity. Thus, we keep scratching our heads on answering this question.

At this point, the founder may not be alive anymore, or we'll never find out in this lifetime.