The online crypto-currency, Bitcoin, is no doubt an impressive feat of engineering minds coming together and creating something that has the ability to change the world. However, the engineers behind it and who in fact created Bitcoin was not known. That all changed on the 2nd of May, 2016.
Craig Wright, an Australian cryptographer, says he is behind the Bitcoin currency. WIRED spoke to the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation and one of the programming engineers who worked on the early stages of Bitcoin and confirmed that Wright is definitely who was thought to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Satoshi was a fake name that Wright gave as a pseudonym while a group of engineers and cryptographers worked on the currency. Andersen wrote a blog post conceding that the man known as Satoshi Nakamoto, was in fact, Craig Wright, in a blog post. He said:
I hope he manages to mostly ignore the storm that his announcement will create, and keep doing what he loves — learning and researching and innovating.
I am very happy to be able to say I shook his hand and thanked him for giving Bitcoin to the world.
Wright did not adopt an ‘I in team’ approach to talking about how Bitcoin was set up. He said, “I was the main part of it, but other people helped me.”
Jon Matonis, an economist and founding director of the Bitcoin Foundation said: “During the London Proof sessions, I had the opportunity to review the relevant data along three district lines: Cryptographic, social and technical. It is my firm belief that Craig Wright satisfies all three categories.”
Wright praised the community that assisted and grew Bitcoin into what it is today. In a blog post, he wrote:
You have dedicated vast swathes of your time, committed your gifts, sacrificed relationships and REM sleep for years to an open source project that could have come to nothing. And yet you still fought. This incredible community’s passion and intellect and perseverance has taken my small contribution and nurtured it, enhanced it, breathed life into it. You have given the world a great gift. Thank you.
Source: BBC/Wired
