{"id":75533,"date":"2016-05-07T11:15:10","date_gmt":"2016-05-07T15:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=75533"},"modified":"2016-05-07T11:15:10","modified_gmt":"2016-05-07T15:15:10","slug":"bitcoins-self-proclaimed-founder-backtracks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2016\/05\/07\/bitcoins-self-proclaimed-founder-backtracks\/","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin\u2019s self-proclaimed founder backtracks"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Three<\/a>
Three days after Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright came forward as \u201cSatoshi Nakamoto,\u201d the unknown creator of the digital currency bitcoin, he has backtracked in a dramatic fashion.
(Publicity shot from Craig Wright’s now-deleted website.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

LOS ANGELES \u2013 The man who claimed to be the mysterious founder of bitcoin appears to be stepping back into the shadows, leaving numerous questions in his wake.<\/p>\n

Three days after Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright came forward as \u201cSatoshi Nakamoto,\u201d the unknown creator of the digital currency bitcoin, he has backtracked in a dramatic fashion. He wrote in a blog post that he does not \u201chave the courage\u201d to publish additional proof, as he promised Wednesday, that he is the elusive creator of the Internet currency.<\/p>\n

Wright\u2019s initial claims drew widespread skepticism. He said on Wednesday that he would provide verifiable documentation and take additional steps to prove his identity. Instead, he scrubbed his blog clean of past entries and posted a short statement titled \u201cI\u2019m Sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wright didn\u2019t explicitly renounce his claim to have created bitcoin. He merely wrote Thursday that he thought he could \u201cput the years of anonymity and hiding behind me.\u201d But as this week\u2019s events unfolded, he wrote, \u201cI am not strong enough for this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI can only say I\u2019m sorry,\u201d he wrote at the end of the post. \u201cAnd goodbye.\u201d<\/p>\n

The search for Nakamoto has been a parlor game for journalists and online sleuths since he disappeared from online forums in late 2010. Wright claimed to be Nakamoto in interviews with the Economist, BBC, GQ and a few bitcoin insiders in stories published Monday. He bolstered it with technical demonstrations that two of those insiders vouched for, but failed to repeat those proofs in ways that would allow anyone else to verify them.<\/p>\n

Skeptics reacted harshly to the public proof Wright did offer. For instance, he purported to sign a passage from Jean-Paul Sartre with one of Nakamoto\u2019s private encryption keys. Experts argued he hadn\u2019t done that at all, and instead had merely republished a snippet from a historical bitcoin transaction signed by the original Nakamoto.<\/p>\n

Other posts Wright made following his revelation came under fire as well. One of his blog posts attacked a 2013 paper that described how the bitcoin system could be gamed by a group of insiders the paper called \u201cselfish miners.\u201d Some readers of the post said it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the risks.<\/p>\n

\u201cSadly, Craig did not get it,\u201d said Emin Gun Sirer, a Cornell University computer science professor who co-authored the original paper. \u201cIt seemed like he failed to understand what the whole attack was about. That completely made me doubt his veracity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some had argued the identity of the founder shouldn\u2019t matter. Bitcoin\u2019s code has been updated many times since its founding and a debate over how to cope with a looming capacity problem will be resolved by bitcoin \u201cminers\u201d who keep the currency system running, not by the opinion of one person \u2013 even Nakamoto, whoever that might be.<\/p>\n

Still, the accounts associated with Nakamoto control around 1 million bitcoin worth more than $450 million and their sale could disrupt a bitcoin market worth nearly $7 billion today.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in New York contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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