All news is rigorously fact-checked and reviewed by leading blockchain experts and seasoned industry insiders.
- One of the very first miners from the early days of Bitcoin has signed a message with 145 Bitcoin addresses and calls Craig Wright a “liar and fraud”.
- BitMEX research concludes that the probability that the addresses belong to Satoshi Nakamoto are very low.
A Reddit user has found a message signed by 145 Bitcoin addresses that were inactive since 2009. The message was issued by a miner from the “Satoshi era”, that is, one of the first people to mine Bitcoin. Addressed to Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed inventor of Bitcoin, the message denies that he is Satoshi. Wright, an Australian computer scientist, is one of the most notorious personalities in the crypto space.
Known for his lawsuits against other crypto leaders such as Blockstream’s CEO, Adam Back, and Ethereum‘s inventor, Vitalik Buterin, Wright is pursued by controversy. His most controversial claim is that he is the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. This assertion is also at the heart of a lawsuit against him that has been dragging on for years and is conducted by the brother of his former partner Dave Kleiman, Ira Kleiman.
A message from Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto?
The message is particularly intriguing because the addresses now active were sent to the court as evidence of Wright during the investigation phase of the above-mentioned trial between Kleiman and Wright. Wright claimed to be the owner of these addresses and stated that they were part of the Tulip Trust. According to the trial proceedings, the Tulip Trust is supposed to hold the nearly one million BTC that the inventor of Bitcoin had mined.
The message signed by the 145 addresses that have been inactive since 2009 now declines this assertion by Wright and reads as following:
Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud. He doesn’t have the keys used to sign this message.
Thus, the mysterious miner who wend the message denies what could be years of testimony and false evidence given to the court and the crypto community by Wright. The computer scientist has been accused lately for his lies, forgeries and for his “complete disregard for the legal system”. The rest of the message refers to Bitcoin’s second-layer payment solution and its creator:
The Lightning Network is a significant achievement. However, we need to continue work on improving on-chain capacity. Unfortunately, the solution is not to just change a constant in the code or to allow powerful participants to force out others. We are all Satoshi.
A BitMEX investigation determined that of the 145 addresses with the message attached, 143 do not belong to the “dominant miner” of 2009 and that only 2 are in the weak range in the same pattern. The dominant miner, according to BitMEX, is Satoshi Nakamoto. Therefore, the investigation rules out that Satoshi Nakamoto himself is behind the message.
We received queries as to whether these were allocated to the apparent “dominant miner” (perhaps Satoshi) based on our analysis: https://t.co/KReJ1e78yw
We reviewed 145 of the addresses:
* 143 were not allocated to the dominant miner
* 2 were in the “weak allocation” pic.twitter.com/Q2gYEXc83o— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) May 25, 2020
It therefore remains to be seen what the consequences will be in court once these addresses, to which Wright has also refused access, have become public and prove that they do not belong to Wright. The trial against the brother of his former partner is scheduled to begin on July 6.
