'Satoshi Nakamoto' Just Posted. WTF Is Going On?
> Few mysteries in the tech world surpass that of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin whose identity has not been discovered more than a decade after cryptocurrencies took off. So, when a Twitter account with the handle @Satoshi and calling itself “Satoshi Nakamoto” posted a tweet this week, it caused a bit of a stir.
“Bitcoin is a predicate machine. Over the following months, we shall explore different aspects that were not explicitly contained within the white paper,” the account tweeted on Monday. “These aspects are all parts of bitcoin, and are important. Some of these ideas were touched upon in the early years; now is the time to extrapolate and explain.”
The tweet was the @Satoshi account’s first since 2018—at that time, it posted the entire Bitcoin white paper—and instantly gained wide attention. At the time of writing, it has over 8,000 retweets and over 18,000 likes. But as with most things involving crypto and its pseudonymous creator, the situation is anything but clear-cut. In fact, there’s virtually no chance that the tweet came from the real Satoshi Nakamoto, and the possible identity of the person who did post it is a rabbit hole in its own right.
The @Satoshi tweet immediately picked up a community note claiming that the tweet was written by Craig Wright, an Australian man who has for years claimed to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto despite never presenting incontrovertible evidence. Motherboard has written about Wright’s debunked claims over the years and even spoken to him, including once when he sent us a photo of a luxurious-looking airplane bathroom in an effort to show he’s not bothered by people denying he’s Nakamoto. Despite a lack of concrete evidence and early supporters eventually backpedaling—including, this week, the former CEO of Wright’s blockchain company nChain—Wright maintains that he invented Bitcoin and has continued to build business ventures around the claim.