‘So these fans are sending tiny payments to that known address? It is the first generated and the first known address?’
‘Yes. They’re hoping I’ll do something – out myself.’
The address was 12c6DSiU4Rq3P4ZxziKxzrL5LmMBrzjrJX. I could see that people had left messages – ‘public notes’ – for Satoshi: ‘Hey satoshi, change my life, send me some bitcoins!’ ‘God bless you, China.’ ‘If you are reading this, please take some time to remember those who died 12 years ago today in the WTC attacks.’ ‘The bitcoin blockchain can be used as a trusted timestamp for arbitrary messages,’ Wikipedia said.
If you scroll back to the very first transaction associated with this address, you find that it is the first bitcoin transaction recorded. It was for fifty bitcoins and they remain unspent. Anyone can enter that bitcoin address into a search engine and inspect the history of transactions associated with it. ‘The Genesis block was hardcoded on 3 January 2009,’ Wright said to me, ‘and that was the first run. There was no previous block.’ (Under the heading ‘Previous Block’, there is a line of seventy-four zeros.) ‘Then the code was reworked,’ he continued, ‘and fired up and the first address that was ever created from the hardcoded Genesis block – the first mined address – is the one I’m sending you a message from.’ He was about to use the original cryptographic key to sign a message to me and it was as if he was dropping a sugar lump into my tea. He typed the words, ‘Here I am, Andrew,’ and rested his fingers. ‘This gives us that little block there,’ he said, before verifying the signature. He looked sheepish and resigned in his blue checked shirt. ‘Welcome to the bit I was hoping to bury,’ he said. He leaned back and I noticed a samurai sword by the desk.
I shook his hand. Then I stared at the screen and considered how strange it would be to live with a secret for seven years and then feel no relief when it finally came out. Perhaps it never felt like a professional secret; it felt like a part of his being, and now he was giving it up. ‘I want it in layman’s terms,’ I said. ‘Explain what you just did.’
‘I just digitally signed a message using the first ever mined address on bitcoin.’
If he had done what he appeared to have done, and what he said he’d done, then his claim to be Satoshi was strong. For a moment, the amassed unlikelihoods and dissemblings seemed circumstantial, and the case against him suddenly much more fanciful than the idea of him being the famously secret man who invented this protocol. An alternative Satoshi would have had to share his entire password hoard with him, and to have synchronised his ‘real world’ timeline in order to be placed where Wright was placed and align with his email existence and his expertise. It wasn’t merely that Wright had been in the right place at the right time: he had been in the only place at the only time, and that time was stamped not only into the blockchain but into his correspondence and the experiences of those around him. He sat back in his large black chair and asked me if I wanted more tea. ‘I could have been working with Satoshi, I guess,’ he said, ‘who told me he was going to fire it up at this time and I had all my machines ready and just took over from him. But that would make me Satoshi anyway.’ He stared into the bank of screens and seemed nostalgic for a more ghostly self, and I asked him if it felt overwhelming.
‘I don’t care – whatever,’ he said. But of course he did care – care is what he did most. He was agitated through the whole process, mainly, I guessed, from an old cypherpunk embarrassment at having to bend to authority. He wasn’t satisfied when he sat back in his chair, he was annoyed and already making his detractors’ arguments for them. ‘They’ll say I killed Satoshi and stole the keys. Having them doesn’t prove I created them. Maybe it was a collaboration between me, Dave, Hal and some random person. Maybe I compromised Hal’s machine and stole everything and his family didn’t know. Maybe, maybe, fucking maybe. All that bullshit. Those people don’t believe in Occam’s razor. I’ve seen Reddit. They want the most convoluted explanation. But they can say what they want; I’ve got nothing more to prove.’
There is a message embedded in the Genesis block, a headline from The Times of 3 January 2009, the day the block was mined: ‘Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.’ I later asked Wright why he’d chosen that particular headline. ‘As you know, I am rather anti-central/reserve bank,’ he wrote to me. ‘I see them as the true cause of these issues and the bubbles and collapses. But the date was important as a timestamp. It means that I could not have been “pre-mining” and gaming the system. The first iteration of the code was finalised on 9 January 2009. The run was started when I was at the farm in Macquarie later that week. It means that I cannot have been mining for months ahead and had collected a pre-mined set of solved hashes to game the system. I ran more than fifty machines, so the headline was a marker.’
The question of proof in a story about computer science is a question for the birds. If you can’t check the maths, how can you be sure? I wrote to four Princeton and Stanford cryptocurrency experts during the preparation of this story and sent them some of Wright’s white papers. These men, authors of a textbook on bitcoin and blockchain technology, are obsessed with who Satoshi is, and obsessed with who he isn’t. But they behave like visitors to a funhouse: they see distorting mirrors everywhere and hear distant laughter and weird music. Some of them did want to see the evidence, but they didn’t want to be seen responding to it and I never heard from them again. And that is the kind of attitude that pervades the not entirely adult world of new inventions in computer science.
Another thing: when such people want to make a point, they often want to destroy those they disagree with. It’s clear how paranoia-inducing it is to be constantly assaulted by people who hate you for thinking your thoughts. Geek culture in general is fantastically vitriolic: even an issue that seems pretty marginal to the rest of us – like the question of who might play Captain America’s love interest – can easily spiral into death threats. In the world of cryptography, this has been a bar to invention and progress: developers are hung, drawn and quartered every day on the internet and they have to be unusually robust to take it. The question of how to bring bitcoin forward has been riven with opposing views, and after Satoshi disappeared there was no central authority to lead the discussion or calm the waters. By increments, the task fell to Gavin Andresen, a Princeton graduate with experience in Silicon Valley. Andresen only gradually accepted the role of lead core bitcoin developer. This is not an official designation, and he appears to have got none of the thanks and all the flak, but by general consensus he is the most level-headed thinker in the bitcoin world. One insider said there was an irony in Andresen’s situation that few people realised. ‘The word is that Satoshi passed the torch to Gavin before he retired in 2011,’ he said. ‘In fact, it was more like Satoshi threw the torch at Gavin and ran away leaving him holding it.’
From time to time during those months, I wondered what if, in some brutally postmodern way, the true identity of Satoshi could never be fully ascertained? What if Wright had every single element necessary to prove himself, but somehow couldn’t? Anonymity – or at least pseudonymity – is an essential part of the cryptographic world. I had a job on my hands – as did MacGregor and Matthews, as would the core developers, as would the press – to establish the truth. Any narrative that is dependent on ‘outing’ such secretive people is at the mercy of their basic hatred of being controlled or being known, and Wright was a spectacular example of this.
*
Andresen had been in touch with Satoshi in the early days and would have records of their conversations. He would presumably be able to ask Wright questions that only Satoshi could answer. In December 2015, after Wired published the story about Wright possibly being Satoshi, Andresen told the magazine he’d never heard of Craig Wright. But he began to believe in Wright once he started corresponding with him by email in early April. At one point, Wright sent him two emails, one written in his own Craig Wright way, and another one, with essentially the same content, writ
ten as Satoshi would have written it. They discussed maths and the history of the invention and the problems it had faced. Within a week, Andresen was sufficiently convinced to get on a plane to London. He was ready to see Wright sign a message to him using the original Satoshi cryptographic keys.
At this point, I began talking to Andresen. He told me he had written an email to Wright before getting on the plane, asking for a little more of his backstory and for his thoughts on ‘the state of bitcoin in 2016’. ‘He replied with a longish email,’ Andresen told me, ‘on the state of bitcoin and why he decided to reveal his secret now, then followed up with a couple of in-progress research papers. The email “sounded like” the Satoshi I worked with, and the papers matched his academic, math-heavy voice, too.’
Andresen crossed the Atlantic overnight, arriving at the Covent Garden Hotel at 11 a.m. on 7 April. He went to his room – which had been booked, as had his flight, by nCrypt – and had two hours’ sleep, after which MacGregor and Matthews arrived. ‘They gave me a lot of the background and explained their involvement,’ Andresen told me. When Wright turned up at the hotel, Andresen found it easy to talk to him, ‘although I was so jet-lagged at one point,’ he wrote, ‘I had to stop him from diving deep into a mathematical proof he’d worked out related to how blocks are validated in bitcoin.’
Matthews had booked a conference room in the basement, and MacGregor could see that Wright was very emotional when he entered the room. I wasn’t there, but I interviewed everyone who was in the room, and I can construct what happened. ‘He knew this was it,’ MacGregor said to me. ‘It’s one thing to prove his identity to you and me, but the bitcoin community is something else. He knew that they would believe Gavin. He knew this was it – that he would have no plausible deniability after he’d talked to Gavin and shown him the keys.’ Before the meeting in the basement properly started, Andresen said to MacGregor – as he said to me – that some of the phrases Wright had used in their email exchange had been ‘familiar’ to him; he sounded like the Satoshi he had been in contact with before. Andresen asked MacGregor and Matthews a few questions about what nCrypt hoped to achieve with this in the future. They didn’t go into detail about the company’s business plans, but they spoke about the future of bitcoin and alternative projects. Wright and Andresen quickly started scribbling on pieces of paper. Wright was using his big laptop to show his access to certain addresses. It was a strange situation in all sorts of ways, and the main one, perhaps, was that Andresen, who had, once upon a time, left behind high-paying job opportunities to work on the bitcoin project for free, was possibly about to meet his hero. But he stuck to practical questions. He asked Wright about the trust and about his bitcoin holdings and what had happened to them. MacGregor later told me that his first question after Matthews told him that Wright was Satoshi was: ‘Well, why isn’t he sitting on an island surrounded by piles of gold?’
Wright became quite relaxed. He explained what it had cost him to keep his companies alive and to pay for research and development, and the supercomputer. It was about 5.30 p.m. when he finally logged on to his laptop to do for Andresen what he had done for me in his office at home, sign a message with the key and have it verified. Andresen looked on. Wright had just used Satoshi’s key. At that point, it seemed to some of those in the room that Andresen’s body language had changed; he seemed slightly awed by the situation. He reached over to his bag and took out a brand-new USB stick and removed it from its wrapping. He took out his own laptop. ‘I need to test it on my computer,’ he said. He added that he was convinced, but that if people were going to ask him, he had to be able to say that he’d checked it independently. He pointed to Wright’s laptop and said it could all have been pre-loaded on there, though he knew that was unlikely. But he had to check on his own computer and then they would be done. He said the key could be used on his laptop and saved to the memory stick and that Wright could keep it. But for his own peace of mind, and for due diligence, so that there wasn’t a chance of fraud, he had to see it work on a computer that wasn’t Wright’s own.
Wright suddenly baulked. He had just signed a message to Andresen from Satoshi, he said, and had demonstrated his complete familiarity with their correspondence, but, in his mind, what Andresen was now asking for was of a different order. ‘I had vowed’, Wright told me, ‘never to show the key publicly and never to let it go. I trusted Andresen, but I couldn’t do it.’ Wright got up from the table and started pacing. He had clearly believed he would be able to get through the proof session without this. In fact, he had said in my presence several times over the preceding months that he would never hand the key over to anyone or allow it to be copied or used on someone else’s machine. ‘I do not want to categorically prove keys across machines,’ he wrote to me in an email. To him, this would be to give Satoshi away and perhaps to dilute his own proclaimed connection to him. He went to a chair in the corner of the room and looked up at Andresen. ‘Maybe you and I could get to know each other better,’ he said.
Andresen just nodded his assent. ‘Like, trade more emails,’ Wright said, ‘and I can sign more messages to you.’
At this point, Matthews’s blood ran cold. ‘It was the only time during all the years that I thought: “Jesus Christ, has he been spinning us the whole time?”’ MacGregor too felt this was a very risky moment. He glanced at Matthews. There was no way he was going to let Andresen get back on the plane with that as a punctuation mark. They all felt Wright’s behaviour was ludicrous: he’d demonstrated that he was Satoshi and only had to let this be verified on Gavin’s laptop. End of story. But Wright spoke to me later in a way that showed his old cypherpunk suspicion had reared its head: what if Gavin was a plant? What if the whole thing was a plot to rob him of Satoshi’s keys and exploit him or deny him? Wright told me he felt strong-armed and that, for some reason, he couldn’t let this thing go and remain himself.
Afterwards, Andresen was sanguine. ‘The proof session took longer than expected,’ he told me. ‘I insisted that the verification happen on a computer that I was convinced hadn’t been tampered with. And they’ – Wright, Matthews and MacGregor – ‘insisted that the signed message never touch a computer that could have been tampered with (the risk would be that the proof might leak out before the official announcement). So we waited a bit while an assistant went to a computer shop and got a brand-new laptop.’ The idea had been MacGregor’s. He said the tension in the room was unbelievably high. Wright was refusing to do the one thing that would guarantee the success of his mission. He hadn’t seen it coming, but Andresen wouldn’t blindly trust Wright’s hardware, and Wright wouldn’t blindly trust Andresen’s. The solution had to be a fresh computer straight out of the box. MacGregor called his assistant and gave her the task. ‘This is how you get your One,’ he said to her. (In his company the best score you could get in a staff appraisal was a One.) It was just before 6 p.m. on a Friday night and they needed a brand-new laptop in Covent Garden. The assistant got hold of one and rushed over from Oxford Circus to the hotel.
The new laptop was lifted out of the box. It took a while to connect it to the hotel’s wifi and to load the basic software. ‘During all that time,’ Andresen told me, ‘it was obvious Craig was still, even then, deeply hoping his secret identity could remain secret. It was emotionally difficult for him to perform that cryptographic proof.’
‘It was tense and there was a bit of shouting. There were a few drops during the day about “the evil businessman in the room”,’ MacGregor said. ‘He stopped short of accusing Gavin of having a key-logger, but he clearly wasn’t going to do it. He said he had trust issues, and he’d been attacked, and it had been so long, and he just couldn’t bring himself over the line today, but they should keep talking. And Gavin was willing to do that. But we were like: “No, no, no.” I remember what I said. I said, “Look, Craig, you’ve just been alone for way too long. Gavin has dedicated a huge chunk of his life to what you invented. I think he has the right to see this. He is th
e friend you don’t have: Stefan and I can’t fill that role for you; Ramona can’t. This is someone who really understands what you have been trying to do.”’
There were long silences. ‘He was on the edge,’ MacGregor said. Matthews was practically holding his breath. He didn’t want to say too much out loud, so he texted MacGregor. The text said: ‘He should call Ramona.’ While MacGregor was out of the room Wright phoned his wife, and she said: ‘Do it.’ Everyone waited with bated breath as Wright used the new laptop to open the Satoshi wallet and set about signing a new message to Andresen. It failed. It wouldn’t verify. He tried it again and again, until Andresen saw that Wright was failing to type ‘CSW’ at the end of the message the way he had in the original, the one he was seeking to verify. When he put ‘CSW’ at the end of his message to Gavin it said: ‘Verified’. Wright had demonstrated, on a brand-new laptop, that he held Satoshi’s private key. They stood up and shook hands and Gavin thanked him for all he had done. There were tears in Wright’s eyes. ‘His voice was breaking,’ MacGregor told me. ‘Gavin could see he was going through something.’ Both MacGregor and Matthews later said that Wright was turned inside out by the session. ‘I didn’t want to just put him in a taxi,’ MacGregor said. Andresen was wiped out, so he went to get some fish and chips, and then headed to bed. ‘Craig broke down,’ MacGregor told me. ‘He said he thought he’d never have to do this. He said he never knew how to trust people in his life.’ Wright and Matthews and MacGregor went off to find a bottle of wine. ‘He was semi-apologising for being a pain in the ass,’ MacGregor told me, ‘but I understood more than ever, at that point, how hard the whole thing was for him.’
The Secret Life Page 18
