Long a prime suspect and claimant to the title, Australian entrepreneur and programmer Craig Wright outed himself Monday morning as the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency. "Satoshi is dead," he writes, producing early cryptographic keys associated with Satoshi as evidence.
The BBC reports that Wright has provided it other proof to back up his claim, such as using coins known to be owned by Bitcoin's creator.
Prominent members of the Bitcoin community and its core development team have also confirmed Mr Wright's claim.
Renowned cryptographer Hal Finney was one of the engineers who helped turn Mr Wright's ideas into the Bitcoin protocol, he said.
"I was the main part of it, but other people helped me," he said.Mr Wright said he planned to release information that would allow others to cryptographically verify that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.
Soon after Mr Wright went public, Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, published a blog backing his claim."I believe Craig Steven Wright is the person who invented Bitcoin," he wrote.
Jon Matonis, an economist and one of the founding directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, said he was convinced that Mr Wright was who he claimed to be.
The Economist, however, reports that skepticism will prevail for a little while yet. And Reddit's r/BitCoin subreddit appears to be mostly unimpressed by the claim, with one rather technical post that purports to debunk the cryptographic evidence Wright offered.
Wired thought it was Wright last year, but later decided he was probably part of long con to get people to think he was the brain behind bitcoin.
