The Secret Life

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘But you can say, hand on heart, I am Satoshi Nakamoto?’

  ‘I was the main part of it. Other people helped. At the end of the day, none of this would have happened without Dave Kleiman, without Hal Finney, and without those who took over – like Gavin and Mike.’

  ‘And this is going to have a huge effect on your life?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  Something changed in Wright in those few minutes. With these direct questions about Satoshi, his sense of himself – I don’t know how else to put it – had come unstuck and he became noticeably uncomfortable. He said that he wanted to make the point that people should stop looking to him for answers.

  ‘Make that point upstairs,’ Cellan-Jones said.

  ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘We’re going to film a straightforward interview upstairs, without the computer.’

  Wright muttered something and stared into the depths of his computer as if he wanted to escape into it and never come out. ‘I just want the basis to be on the computer,’ he said.

  The female producer interjected. ‘Because we haven’t actually done that bit on camera yet,’ she said.

  The PR executive came over, a little red in the face. ‘Can we do that bit upstairs?’ he asked. ‘Are we all right to do the “why now?” question upstairs? And we’ll be done?’

  ‘You know, I don’t actually watch TV,’ Wright said.

  The BBC left the room to scout out the location for the proper ‘sit-down’ interview. Wright complained to me that he was being pushed. ‘I just didn’t want a big facial shot of me,’ he said to the PR man. ‘I preferred to be behind the screen a little bit … I’m not against it, as long as I can hide behind the screen.’ The PR man said he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want.

  ‘I’m just doing the one question,’ Wright said. The PR man left the room.

  ‘Does it feel completely against the grain of your nature to be asked, “Are you Satoshi?” like that?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it a crude question to you?’

  ‘Why does it matter, other than that you need someone to attack, someone to deify. I mean, fuck’s sake. I’ll do this. That’s it. Fuck off. I can dance around saying “please believe me.” But it’s more than absurd, it’s melting clocks on a landscape.’ At that point, the door opened and the PR consultant came in.

  ‘Craig,’ he said, ‘we’ve explained to the BBC that you want to stay down here, and they’re all making the point that this is the last thing you’ll ever do …’

  Craig started shaking and pushed his chair back. ‘No! No! No!’ His face was pale. ‘You see this door,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to hear another word. It’s here, it’s my way.’ Then he walked out and slammed the door, leaving me alone in the room with the PR boss.

  ‘We’re only doing our job,’ the boss said, with a shrug. Wright came back a second later and his microphone pack was trailing behind him.

  ‘It’s my way or I don’t come back. OK? I’m not doing this for fucking PR stuff, I’m not doing this for anyone else. I don’t give a fucking shit about what people say, I’d rather not do it. One word about it and I’ll never come back. Not exaggeration. I will never enter this office again. I’ll never answer an email again, and I’ll never talk to another PR person in my life again … Got it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ the boss said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He went out and I was alone with Wright again. ‘They’ve already pushed me,’ he said. ‘I’m already beyond where I want to be: I’m already doing a TV thing. And everything is always: “Let’s take it a little bit further, a little bit further.” Which bit of “Go away” don’t they get?’

  I asked him if Kleiman would have handled it better. ‘Better than I do,’ he said. ‘He would still have told them to fuck off. But in a nicer way. Hal would have done it far better.’

  ‘What do you think they’re talking about up there?’ I asked.

  ‘The fact that I don’t want to jump through their fucking bloody crap. “This man has a big credibility gap he’s got to overcome, I’m open to being convinced he’s Satoshi but …”’

  The BBC came back downstairs to ask their ‘one question’ and, naturally, Cellan-Jones asked more than one. In the panicked and hostile mood Wright was in, he needed scapegoats, and the PR weren’t meat enough and Matthews was too much the boss. So he scapegoated the BBC, saying, as soon as they left the room, that they had broken their ‘contract’ with him, that they were liars. ‘I’ll never do any television interviews again in my life,’ he said. ‘Never.’ And as he said it, I was imagining him with Fox News or the rottweiler interviewers. ‘The whole thing was just an attempt to expose me as being something I’m not,’ he said.

  ‘That was actually a pretty softball interview, Craig,’ I said. ‘You can’t blame them for turning up and asking for proof.’

  ‘Are you talking about proof or evidence? You’re conflating the two. They’re not the same and that’s one of the things I’m saying. I gave them proof. They want more.’

  Wright was happy to lecture you day and night about algorithms, but he wouldn’t name names, and he struggled to provide real-world evidence of Satoshi’s footprints. The more I thought about it, the more I realised something was wrong, for him, with the footprints analogy, because if Satoshi was only one man he would only have one set of prints. The Satoshi who existed online could be any number of people. But there was something revealing about his treatment of the BBC – something not very nice in his attitude to people who make it their business to ask straight questions – and the handling of the proof sessions made it clear how much of a danger he was to his own credibility. A month later, when I asked Cellan-Jones if the PR company had ever explained to him that there was a commercial company behind the outing of Satoshi, he said he had never been given that information, ‘just that they were representing the man who was Satoshi’.

  Life Rights

  At 7.51 a.m. on 2 May 2016 all was quiet on the Twitter front. Well, not quiet, but the names Satoshi Nakamoto and Craig Wright were nowhere to be seen. This was the day of reckoning, the day the embargo would lift and the media outlets could run their pieces and name Satoshi. At 7.55, Game of Thrones was trending and so was Gerry Adams, for allegedly using the word ‘nigger’. Also trending was a wildfire in Fort McMurray in Canada and a bombing in West Bengal. There’s a strange feeling of supreme calm before a storm breaks. At 8 a.m., Wright posted a blog containing the supposed hash of the Sartre speech and various postings about himself as Satoshi. At the same moment, Gavin Andresen posted a message to his blog. Title: ‘Satoshi’. ‘I believe Craig Steven Wright is the person who invented bitcoin,’ it began.

  I was flown to London to meet Dr Wright a couple of weeks ago, after an initial email conversation convinced me that there was a very good chance he was the same person I’d communicated with in 2010 and early 2011. After spending time with him I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt: Craig Wright is Satoshi.

  Part of that time was spent on a careful cryptographic verification of messages signed with keys that only Satoshi should possess. But even before I witnessed the keys signed and then verified on a clean computer that could not have been tampered with, I was reasonably certain I was sitting next to the father of bitcoin.

  During our meeting, I saw the brilliant, opinionated, focused, generous – and privacy-seeking – person that matches the Satoshi I worked with six years ago. And he cleared up a lot of mysteries, including why he disappeared when he did and what he’s been busy with since 2011. But I’m going to respect Dr Wright’s privacy, and let him decide how much of that story he shares with the world.

  We love to create heroes – but also seem to love hating them if they don’t live up to some unattainable ideal. It would be better if Satoshi Nakamoto was the codename for an NSA project, or an artificial intelligence sent from the future to advance our primitive money. He is not, he is an imperfect human be
ing just like the rest of us. I hope he manages to mostly ignore the storm that his announcement will create, and keep doing what he loves – learning and research and innovating.

  I am very happy to be able to say I shook his hand and thanked him for giving bitcoin to the world.

  Also at 8 a.m., with the embargo lifted, the first tweet appeared, from Rory Cellan-Jones: ‘Craig Wright tells BBC I am bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, publishes evidence backing his claim.’ One minute later, a tweet appeared from @CalvinAyre, naming Craig Wright as the proven Satoshi. The Economist went one minute later, with a link to Ludwig Siegele’s open-minded piece asking for more and better evidence. At 8.09 a.m. Radio 4’s Today programme broadcast Cellan-Jones’s report. ‘I’m about to demonstrate the signing of a message with a key that is associated with the first transaction ever done on bitcoin.’ The report was brief and quoted Wright once. It said Wright hoped to disappear and that that would be difficult. They played the bit of the interview where Wright said he was part of the group behind Satoshi.

  ‘He sounds plausible,’ Justin Webb, the presenter, said, laughing. Then they played part of the interview with Matonis, who said he was ‘one hundred per cent convinced’.

  ‘Why should people be excited by this?’

  ‘I put it on the level of the Gutenberg printing press,’ Matonis said.

  ‘Quite a lot of people are saying that this is as important as the internet,’ Cellan-Jones reported, ‘and that this man – if he is the man – should be celebrated like Tim Berners-Lee.’

  ‘Craig Wright has just outed himself as the leader of the Satoshi Nakamoto team,’ the bitcoin insider Ian Grigg wrote on his blog:

  Sometime in summer of 2015 the secret started to spread, and the writing was on the wall. An extortionist and a hacker started attacking, perhaps together, perhaps apart; to add to the woes, Dr Wright and his companies were engaged in a long harsh bitter battle with the Australian Tax Office. Since then, the team has been more or less in hiding, guarded, at great expense and at some fear … Satoshi Nakamoto dies with this moment. Satoshi was more than a name, it was a concept, a secret, a team, a vision. Now Satoshi lives on in a new form – changed. Much of the secret is gone, but the vision is still there. Satoshi Nakamoto is dead, long live Satoshi. Yet, a warning to all. Satoshi was a vision, but Craig is a man. The two are not equal, not equivalent, not even close … It is true that Craig is the larger part of the genius behind the team, but he could not have done it alone.

  Over the following two hours the words ‘Craig Wright’ were typed into search engines tens of thousands of times, and the Reddit forums and the cryptocurrency community got to work. Meanwhile, I was being copied into the emails sent from the PR company to nCrypt and the Wrights. It issued a press release spreading the news to less favoured outlets. ‘Wright’s decision to go public follows a series of misleading statements that are circulating and which he seeks to set straight,’ the release said. ‘Wright has also launched a blog, with a vision to create a forum about bitcoin, which dispels myths and helps to unleash its full potential. He will create a space to provide developers and producers with the real facts about the technology so as to encourage the widespread use of bitcoin and the blockchain.’

  ‘Great start!’ the top PR man wrote to the group at 9.31 a.m.

  ‘Ta. All going well,’ Wright wrote just before ten.

  ‘All going to plan,’ the second PR man echoed a few minutes later.

  ‘Right on course so far,’ the first PR man wrote at 10.13 a.m. And that was the last of the good news to come from the world of public relations.

  By midday the blog was receiving the wrong sort of attention. A number of researchers had studied what Wright had written and noticed that the explanation was fudged – worse than fudged, it was faked. Something that he said was signed with the Satoshi key had, in fact, been cut and pasted from an old, publicly available signature associated with Nakamoto. It was astonishing and the buzz quickly grew fierce. All those hours in secret flats scrolled through my head. There had always been something missing, something he hadn’t wanted to show. But was that because he wouldn’t, or because he couldn’t? The thought that he would fake proof so publicly and so coarsely was hard to comprehend. He sent me an email. ‘They changed my blog post,’ he wrote. ‘It will be back as I wanted. But first I need to negotiate with Stefan.’ And I replied: ‘How did they change it?’

  I thought he was lying. He had lied before, but to lie so transparently and so publicly made me think he had lost his mind. There was no way to square such actions with his wish to have no publicity. He had faked his own proof, and now he was being ripped apart on the internet. I briefly wondered if he might be enjoying the cries of execration, but how could he do that to Andresen and Matonis? Suddenly his opponents seemed wiser and greater in number. It took me a few days to see that Wright’s action might be consistent with something deeper in his character. He never wanted to come out and when it came to it he flunked his own paternity test. But I had a feeling that he was too close to the invention to be a simple hoaxer.

  ‘I will explain why I think he’s probably not Satoshi,’ said Vitalik Buterin, a big wheel in the cryptocurrency scene, speaking at Consensus, a bitcoin conference in New York that day. A friend of mine was there. He said that men had started the day high-fiving and shouting ‘Satoshi, baby’, but that as the long day closed, his name became the punchline of every joke. Core developers and others were calling for him to sign something new and in public right away, using the Genesis block, which is unquestionably Nakamoto’s. One of them, Peter Todd, was quoted by Forbes: ‘All Wright needs to do, says Todd, is to provide a signature on the message “Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto” signed by a key known to be Satoshi’s. “This is really easy to do … if you’re actually Satoshi. Also, you’ll know sufficient proof has been provided when it actually happens, because cryptographers will be convinced.”’

  That was the strangest element of all: Wright must have known, having been a cryptographer all his adult life, that his fraud would be spotted immediately. But when I asked him about it he said it wasn’t a fraud, it was a mistake. ‘I cut and pasted something just for the time being but knew I would change it later,’ he said. ‘But then it went up.’ That rang hollow to me, the words of a falling man. He intentionally faked it. I believed at that point that he had misled his colleagues and tried to get out of being Satoshi, which isn’t necessarily the same thing as not being him. ‘I can’t think of a more convoluted way to go about claiming one is Satoshi than what Craig Wright has done so far,’ Jerry Brito, the executive director of Coin Center, a think tank, told the Daily Beast. ‘He’s provided no cryptographic evidence verifiable by the public, and many of his answers sound plain fishy.’ Emin Gün Sirer, a Cornell professor who had criticised Wright before, referred to Wright’s ‘meta-modernist play’.

  The next day, I turned up at MacGregor’s office and found him sitting with Matthews in a dark meeting room. They were hunched over the desk, exhausted and shellshocked. When I asked them what happened MacGregor shook his head. It was the first time in six months I’d heard him sounding incoherent. ‘Craig happened,’ he said. ‘He got cute with the math. He has been trying to get consent from the trustees to get the private keys … But he wasn’t allowed access to coin or to do anything other than that. So what he was trying to do was re-sign a message …’ Matthews butted in, saying Wright never had authorisation from the trust to use the key publicly or let anyone take it away.

  ‘Why didn’t he just say that?’ I asked.

  ‘You tell me,’ Matthews said. MacGregor went on to explain how a signed message can be used nefariously by people with enough computing power. He said the trustees didn’t want anyone analysing those blocks. I’m not sure if he was grasping at straws, but what he said didn’t explain the suddenness or the fraudulence of what Wright had done. MacGregor said that he and Matthews had since been with Wright and indicated that the encounter had be
en shouty and ugly. But he said it was OK now. ‘We have verbal consent from the trustees to move coin, and we’re just waiting on the written consent.’

  MacGregor and Matthews had been in the meeting room for hours trying to work everything out. They thought it could all still be kept on track. MacGregor was writing new blog posts for Wright. He asked for my help with one of them and I explained that I had now to distance myself from the whole thing. I had got too close. MacGregor said they were going to ‘flood the blog with evidence’ and get Wright to ‘move’ some of the Satoshi bitcoin, to transfer it to someone else in a way that only someone in possession of Satoshi’s private keys could do. Andresen had agreed to be on the other end of the coin transaction.

  ‘Craig is being mauled out there,’ I said.

  MacGregor removed his glasses. ‘The first meeting we had with him yesterday ended with: “You’re fired. Buy a ticket to Sydney. You fucked us. Good luck with the ATO.”’

  ‘He didn’t sleep last night,’ Matthews said. ‘He looks fucking terrible.’

  ‘He risks destroying his entire reputation.’

  ‘His and ours,’ MacGregor said. ‘I’ve been taking meetings with investment bankers for the last two months. I’ve pulled every string I know to get meetings with Google and Uber. If he goes down in flames, I’ll go down with him. I mean, he’s fucked me. Millions of dollars out of my pocket, nine months out of my life. But what we have now is a very pliant Craig Wright. We’re going to drag this back from the brink.’

  ‘It’s a big task, Rob,’ I said.

  ‘We finally beat him to a pulp today. No more decisions. This is what we’re going to do, because he knew the next move was pack your toothbrush and get on a plane and good luck in Australia.’ MacGregor told me he’d started Monday morning on an unbelievable high. ‘I can’t believe we kept all the puppies in the box this whole time,’ he’d thought to himself. ‘Nobody broke embargo, holy shit this is going to work. And then …’