Since the founding of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 2009, its inventor — or inventors — have been shrouded in mystery. For six years, that individual or group has lurked behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto and hoarded a pile of the digital currency so large it might crash the market if sold today.

The hunt for Bitcoin’s secretive founder has taken a turn. The technology magazine Wired and the website Gizmodo both published investigative pieces this week that sorted through a trove of leaked (and possibly hacked) emails and documents that pointed to Craig Stephen Wright, a 44-year-old Australian bitcoin entrepreneur living in a posh suburb of Sydney.

While neither report was conclusive — no attempt at identification can be without the founder sending a message or moving bitcoins using Nakamoto’s own encrypted signature, known as a PGP key — both raised startling circumstantial evidence that puts a bright spotlight on Wright.

News websites continue to follow the Bitcoin founder topic very aggressively. Here’s a sampling:

  • Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto denies being Craig Wright (maybe)

The Guardian (UK)

“Email which could be from account once associated with Nakamoto denies his real identity is that of Australian academic and entrepreneur In a posting to the bitcoin-dev mailing list with the subject line “Not this again…”

  • Bitcoin’s creator might be Craig Wright, but we’ve been wrong 15 times before

The Next Web

“Earlier today, just hours after Gizmodo and Wired published reports claiming to know the identity of the infamous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, an Australian businessman by the name of Craig Wright was arrested.”

  • ​Bitcoin Creator Found? Craig Steven Wright Said To Be The Mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto

​The Inquisitr

“Yesterday, within an hour of each other, Wired and Gizmodo each presented evidence suggesting that Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of the Bitcoin creator, who owns an amount of bitcoins described as a …”

How does Bitcoin work?

(From Bitcoin.org)

This is a question that often causes confusion. Here’s a quick explanation!

The basics for a new user

As a new user, you can get started with Bitcoin without understanding the technical details. Once you have installed a Bitcoin wallet on your computer or mobile phone, it will generate your first Bitcoin address and you can create more whenever you need one. You can disclose your addresses to your friends so that they can pay you or vice versa. In fact, this is pretty similar to how email works, except that Bitcoin addresses should only be used once.

Balances – block chain

The block chain is a shared public ledger on which the entire Bitcoin network relies. All confirmed transactions are included in the block chain. This way, Bitcoin wallets can calculate their spendable balance and new transactions can be verified to be spending bitcoins that are actually owned by the spender. The integrity and the chronological order of the block chain are enforced with cryptography.

Transactions – private keys

A transaction is a transfer of value between Bitcoin wallets that gets included in the block chain. Bitcoin wallets keep a secret piece of data called a private key or seed, which is used to sign transactions, providing a mathematical proof that they have come from the owner of the wallet. The signature also prevents the transaction from being altered by anybody once it has been issued. All transactions are broadcast between users and usually begin to be confirmed by the network in the following 10 minutes, through a process called mining.

Processing – mining

Mining is a distributed consensus system that is used to confirm waiting transactions by including them in the block chain. It enforces a chronological order in the block chain, protects the neutrality of the network, and allows different computers to agree on the state of the system. To be confirmed, transactions must be packed in a block that fits very strict cryptographic rules that will be verified by the network. These rules prevent previous blocks from being modified because doing so would invalidate all following blocks. Mining also creates the equivalent of a competitive lottery that prevents any individual from easily adding new blocks consecutively in the block chain. This way, no individuals can control what is included in the block chain or replace parts of the block chain to roll back their own spends.

Watch a tutorial video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc2en3nHxA4

Attempts to reach Wright on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

The hunt for Bitcoin’s founder has become a cottage industry among some journalists. The chase has veered from a Finnish sociologist to a Japanese mathematician to a Japanese-American engineer, all of whom denied it — the latter after a car chase with reporters that ended at the offices of The Associated Press in Los Angeles in March 2014.

Why care?

Why anyone cares boils down to three key things:

  • Bitcoin is designed for secure financial transactions that require no central authority — no banks, no government regulators. That makes it attractive to off-the-grid types such as libertarians, people who want to evade tax authorities, and criminals, even though Bitcoin doesn’t guarantee anonymity, since it documents every transaction in a public forum. Still, it attracts conspiracy theorists interested in the very conspiracy that created it.

“It’s part of the mystery of Bitcoin,” said James Angel, associate professor of finance at Georgetown University. “Usually when people invent something really cool, they’re more than happy to take credit for it. Here, we have this obsessive anonymity. You kind of wonder, ‘Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?'”

  • Bitcoin is still working out kinks and problems, one of which is a dispute over an arbitrary cap on the number of bitcoins that are created each day by so-called miners who keep the system running. Some advocates would like Nakamoto to re-emerge and resolve the conflict, even though the founder hasn’t been involved for years.
  • Nakamoto’s encrypted PGP key can unlock a huge stash of bitcoins — a million or so worth more than $400 million, accounting for about 7 percent of all bitcoins in existence. No one has touched that bitcoin hoard. Should the real Nakamoto begin cashing in those bitcoins, it could destabilize the cryptocurrency.

According to Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, bitcoins are thinly traded. Only about $1.4 million in real dollars flow into the system every day to buy the roughly 3,600 bitcoins created by “miners” who run intensive computations necessary to keep track of bitcoin transactions in exchange for new bitcoins.

“The amount of bitcoin in the early Satoshi-mined blocks would totally swamp the current demand,” Weaver said, making the founder’s identity crucial to faith in the system itself. “What happens if there’s someone with a million shares who you don’t know, you don’t know where they are, you don’t know what their motives are?”

Wired, for one, couched its conclusion guardedly: “Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.”