The Man Behind Bit-Con

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

cryptocurrency company nChain was governed by a golden rule of office politics: It was not a good idea to challenge Craig Steven Wright, the chief science officer. At nChain’s London offices, Wright, an Australian computer scientist, was treated as a sort of philosopher king. He wore three-piece suits and drove a Lamborghini. A middle manager would tape Wright’s ramblings about obscure technical matters and then share the recordings with a staff of researchers, who were instructed to turn his musings into patents. Wright’s authority rested on a claim to a kind of divine significance — that he was the mysterious creator of Bitcoin.

The original white paper

In 2008, a person using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper explaining the basics of Bitcoin. Then, as abruptly as he had emerged, he vanished. Satoshi, who’s known by his first name, controls an estimated 1.1 million Bitcoins, a $75-billion stash that has sat untouched for more than a decade. The mystery of Satoshi’s identity has long obsessed crypto experts. Wright has gone to extraordinary lengths to prove that he is Satoshi. He has presented himself as Bitcoin’s inventor in interviews and social media posts. In lawsuits tried in three countries, he has testified that he wrote the original white paper. After a small-time crypto personality challenged his claims in 2019, Wright sued for defamation. He followed that up with an aggressive suit against software developers working to improve Bitcoin’s code, accusing them of violating his