SAN FRANCISCO -- Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?For many in the tech world, the identity of bitcoin's elusive creator has been a long-running parlor game.And the speculation might not be over.Australian entrepreneur Craig Steven Wright, who announced Monday that he founded the digital currency , convinced at least one longtime bitcoin contributor that he's the real deal.He managed that feat via a technical demonstration involving Nakamoto's secret bitcoin keys.But Wright's public documentation, which he posted online Monday, underwhelmed others and left the question of Nakamoto's true identity far from settled."There'sno way you can conclusively prove that you are the creator of bitcoin," said Jerry Brito, executive director of Coin Center, a Washington, D.C.-based crypto-currency think tank, who is skeptical of Wright's claims.Tracking a pseudonymous cryptographic genius would be challenging under the best circumstances.And here we're talking someone who invented a way for people to send money around the world anonymously, without banks or national currencies.

Someone who apparently disappeared five years ago for unknown reasons.None of that has stopped people from trying.Journalists, researchers and amateur detectives have scoured Nakamoto's emails and online posts, plus the original bitcoin code, for unusual phrases, cultural references and other potential clues to their author.One of the most celebrated candidates - to his own dismay - was an unassuming Japanese-American engineer who found himself in the cross-hairs of Newsweek magazine in 2014.A Newsweek cover story fingered Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a retired resident of suburban Los Angeles County, after citing circumstantial clues and a vague comment that Nakamoto made when confronted briefly on his front doorstep.The article sparked a media frenzy and a car chase with reporters that ended at the Los Angeles offices of The Associated Press - where Dorian Nakamoto emphatically denied any involvement with bitcoin.An earlier contender named in a 2011 New Yorker magazine piece was Michael Clear, then a graduate student in cryptography at Trinity College in Dublin.

The New Yorker cited some of Nakamoto's writings, which used British slang such as "maths" for mathematics and "flat" for an apartment.ethereum power calculatorIt also noted that Clear had worked on currency-trading software for an Irish bank and co-authored a paper on "peer-to-peer" technology similar to that used in bitcoin.At first, according to the New Yorker, Clear was evasive when asked at a cryptography conference if he had created bitcoin.litecoin hash rate gpuBut he later denied it repeatedly.bitcoin fork ethereumHe also suggested another candidate to the New Yorker reporter, naming Finnish researcher Vili Lehdonvirta, who studied virtual currencies and created video games."Ibitcoin crush android

would love to say that I'm Satoshi, because bitcoin is very clever," Lehdonvirta told the New Yorker, after laughing for several seconds.litecoin trend 2017"But it's not me."Speculationbitcoin gambling setuphas also focused on a Hungarian-American computer scientist named Nick Szabo, who was called a likely candidate by linguistic experts who conducted their own "reverse textual analysis" - essentially, looking for distinctive phrases or word patterns - on an early white paper by the bitcoin creator.The only problem?Szabo, who has worked on other digital currencies, has repeatedly denied creating bitcoin.Other scientists' names have surfaced over the years; some theories pose the notion of two or three working together.But denials have usually followed each new mention.At one point, two Israeli mathematicians floated, and later retracted, the notion that bitcoin was created by the founder of Silk Road, an online bazaar known for trade in various illicit goods.Conspiracy theorists have even speculated it could have been the work of some shadowy government agency - no one's saying which government - to undermine established currencies or somehow monitor online transactions.

(That theory depends on the unproved notion that the creator retained the ability to decode bitcoin's encryption.)Vice magazine once suggested Nakamoto might be Gavin Andresen, an American software expert and early bitcoin enthusiast who has helped push bitcoin forward in Nakamoto's absence.Andresen has denied it - and on Monday declared that he believes Wright is Nakamoto.But other cryptocurrency enthusiasts aren't convinced it's Wright.The truth, they say, is still out there.On Tuesday, Gizmodo and Wired published the results of separate but parallel investigations into documents that suggested a new candidate for the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.In emails and documents shared with both publications (by an individual who identified themselves to Gizmodo reporters as a hacker) Dr. Craig Wright, an Australian academic and serial entrepreneur, appears to take credit for Bitcoin’s creation in several instances dating back to months before the cryptocurrency was first introduced to the world in 2008.

“I need your help and I need a version of me to make this work that is better than me,” Wright appears to write in a 2008 email to Dave Kleiman, an American computer forensics expert who died in 2013.That email is one of several documents in the trove linking both Wright and Kleiman to Bitcoin’s creation.Since our story was published (along with subsequent profiles of both Wright and Kleiman) things have only gotten weirder.Wright’s home was raided by police due to an investigation by the Australian Tax Office that’s reportedly unrelated to Tuesday’s articles.Wright himself has pretty much disappeared.And several outlets have done even more digging to try and figure out whether Wright and Kleiman were, in fact, closely involved in creating Bitcoin.Some of those pieces have been excellent.Several of them revealed valuable information about Wright in particular that merits close examination.Few, if any, acknowledge that outside of the document dump, Craig Wright has been telling people for over a year that he was involved in creating Bitcoin.

None have proved anything conclusive about whether he was telling the truth.Below, briefly, is the collected evidence that he wasn’t:All of the above are great reasons to question and dig further into Wright’s apparent link to Satoshi Nakamoto.Other supposed proof against the connection—such as the opaque claim that his “intellectual signature” does not match Satoshi’s, by a Cornell professor who claims to know a stronger candidate for the Bitcoin creator’s identity—is far less convincing.If Craig Wright was not in fact involved in the origin of Bitcoin, the likeliest explanation for the documents provided to Gizmodo and Wired is that they were carefully forged with the intent of making it seem like he was.But what the forgery theories tend to leave out is that Wright himself has claimed repeatedly to be one of Bitcoin’s inventors.In 2014, roughly 10 months after Dave Kleiman’s death and nearly two years before the documents were leaked to Gizmodo, he reached out to Kleiman’s brother and business partners to tell them that he and Kleiman were among the creators of the cryptocurrency.

A February 2014 comment on a TechCrunch post about Bitcoin indicates that Kleiman’s 94-year-old father had also received information about his son’s apparent involvement with the invention.Furthermore, Wright’s ex-wife Lynn recalled to Gizmodo that he was working on and talking about “digital money” many years ago.Craig Wright acts in the manner of someone who either believes that he invented Bitcoin or badly wants someone else to believe it, and he’s been acting that way for a long time.If he is not Satoshi, what’s going on here?Either Wright was conning someone into believing that he was the inventor, and the leak was engineered by his enemies, or he engineered the leak himself in some bizarre attempt at self-promotion.Was the leaker, as put forth by a cryptocurrency insider who claimed to have been in contact with Wright’s friends and family, an anonymous extortionist with a vendetta against Wright?It’s absolutely possible—the leaker provided very little information about their identity to Gizmodo and stopped responding to emails days after first reaching out—but that possibility is not an effective argument against the leak’s authenticity.

If Wright were being targeted by someone with a cache of fake documents, he had many opportunities to argue his case and failed to take them.Over the course of a month, Gizmodo reporters had two telephone conversations with him, sent him several emails, and showed up multiple times to his home and place of business.He was evasive throughout and made no attempt to correct the line of questioning connecting him to Satoshi Nakamoto.If he were being targeted by someone with a cache of real documents, his behavior is fully understandable.By its nature, blackmail tends to work best when the information you have is true.That leaves us with the idea that Wright faked the documents himself, either because he wanted to con someone into thinking he was Satoshi or because he had deluded himself into believing that he was.Chris McCardle, an attorney who has been battling Wright in court for years, characterized him recently as someone who was living in “his own fantasy world.” “I don’t know whether Craig Wright started Bitcoin,” McCardle added to the Australian, “but I ­believe Craig Wright believes he started Bitcoin.”If Wright is running a hoax himself, it is an incredibly elaborate one that’s taken him years to carry out.

It would mean that when he called Kleiman’s closest associates, who were likely still mourning his death, he was setting up a revelation to journalists that would not arrive for another 21 months., an account known to belong to the Bitcoin inventor—was sent to Ramona Watts, Wright’s wife and business partner; Andrew Sommer, his lawyer; and John Chesher, his accountant.If the email is real, it should be easy to verify its authenticity by checking their inbox archives.If the forger wanted to ensure that his fakes were difficult to disprove, why wouldn’t he make the recipient Dave Kleiman, whose email accounts presumably became inaccessible forever when he died in 2013?It seems clear from the raids on his home and office that Wright is in some sort of real trouble with Australian tax collectors.Falsely placing himself at the center of one of our era’s greatest mysteries would be a strange gamble for a man who you’d think would want to keep a low profile.As both Gizmodo and Wired acknowledged in our original reports, there are many unanswered questions about Craig Wright, and no unassailable proof that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.