Australian police raid alleged bitcoin creator – update

Australian police on Wednesday raided the man suspected of developing bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The raid on the Australian Craig Steven Wright would have to do with tax matters.

Wired comes to the tentative conclusion after an investigation that 44-year-old Australian businessman Craig Steven Wright, under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, released the first bitcoin client on January 9, 2009 and published the white paper bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System the year before. The magazine bases its finding on, among other things, Wright’s blog. In August 2008, it allegedly stated that he was planning to release a cryptocurrency paper.

In November of that year, the Australian asked readers to contact them via encrypted mail, using a PGP key that the MIT server says is associated with the email address [email protected]. The whitepaper introducing bitcoin was sent to a cryptography mailing list at [email protected].

Finally, on January 10, 2009, the text ‘the bitcoin beta goes live tomorrow’ would have been on the blog. If this post had been published in Australia after midnight, it would still have been January 9 for the rest of the world. Wired does, however, have another blow with the announcement that it may be a carefully executed hoax.

Wired also has emails, transcripts and other documents to back up its claim. Wright also invested $23 million in bitcoins in the bitcoin-based start-up bank Hotwire in 2013. That investment represented 1.5 percent of all bitcoins in circulation at the time, while Wright was virtually unknown in the bitcoin community.

A few hours after publication, Australian police broke into Wright’s Sydney home. Police declined to respond to media inquiries into the reason for the raid, but the Sydney Morning Herald said it was an “individual tax case.” Wright’s current position is director of DeMorgan Ltd, a company focused on ‘alternative currencies, next generation banking and educational products.

Update, 09.55: Gizmodo comes to the same conclusion as Wired based on documents the site was given. These would come from a man who claims to have got his hands on it through a hack from Wright. The site includes emails from [email protected] that have Wright’s email address as a reply address.

Wright is said to have developed bitcoin together with the American Dave Kleiman. Kleiman was a forensic computer expert who died in 2013 as a result of an infection with the mrsa bacterium.