Police raid Sydney house after ‘mystery of bitcoin creator is solved’

Police have raided the Sydney home of a man named as the likely creator of cryptocurrency bitcoin. About a dozen federal police officers raided the property after a locksmith broke open the door, hours after Wired magazine named Craig Wright as the man behind bitcoin. Police later said the raid was not to do with the currency, released in 2009 under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, but was linked to a tax investigation. Officers wearing white gloves could be seen from the street searching the cupboards and surfaces in the garage and were said to be “clearing the house”.

Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.

Wired magazine

The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto has long been a mystery that journalists and bitcoin enthusiasts have tried to unravel. As an early miner of bitcoins, Nakamoto is also sitting on about 1 million bitcoins, worth more than $400 million at present exchange rates. The police raids in Australia came hours after Wired magazine and technology website Gizmodo published articles saying that their investigations showed Wright, an entrepreneur and academic, was most probably the secretive bitcoin creator. Wright is the chief executive of Australian-registered DeMorgan Ltd, which he describes on his Linkedin page as “a pre-IPO Australian listed company focused on alternative currency”

Despite a massive trove of evidence, we still can’t say with absolute certainty that the mystery is solved.

Wired

Technology bitcoin