Cyber experts pick holes in claims of Bitcoin 'creator' Craig Wright

Australian businessman Craig Wright's claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous inventor of cryptocurrency Bitcoin, has led to a raging debate challenging its veracity . Cryptocurrency users and experts in the field have pointed to several loopholes in the digital proofs he has offered.


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Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin foundation's chief scientist at Amherst, Massachusetts, endorsed Wright's claim in his own blog post. Those on the social news site Reddit requested Andresen to clear up the several questions this process of verification had raised -the revelation of the signature to a private audience.

“It is ridiculous that we are supposed to believe someone is Satoshi because he can sign a message and convince some people in private, but he won't publish the message or signature to the public,“ writes Redditor `gotamd'.

“Craig signed a message that I chose using the private key from block number 1. That signature was copied on to a clean USB stick I brought with me to London, and then validated on a brand-new laptop with a freshly downloaded copy of Electrum,“ Andresen clarified on Reddit. `Block Number 1' is a reference to the first Bitcoin transaction, carried out by Nakamoto. Electrum is the name of software used for Bitcoin management.

American cyber security expert Dan Kaminsky wrote a blog post rebutting every point made by Wright. “Of course the blockchain is totally public and of course has signatures from Satoshi, so Wright being able to lift a signature from here isn't surprising at all. He probably would have gotten away with it if the signature itself wasn't googlable by Redditors,“ writes Kaminsky . Jerry Brito, executive director of research organisation Coin Center, called the claims “convoluted“ while speaking to US-based publica tion The Daily Beast.

Andresen says in his blog that he was flown to London to meet Wright and verify his claims. “Part of that time was spent on a careful cryptographic verification of messages signed with keys that only Satoshi should possess. But even before I witnessed the keys signed and then verified on a clean computer that could not have been tampered with, I was reasonably certain I was sitting next to the Father of Bitcoin,“ writes Andresen.

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